Part 17

"It's this terrible inaction," his father went on. "I don't know how you can tolerate the ignominious position in which you find yourself. To me it would be unendurable."

Mr. Hazlewood sighed with the satisfaction of unburdening himself, and waited for his son to reply, who with a tremendous effort not to spoil the force of his argument by losing his temper began calmly enough:

"I have never contended that I should earn my living by poetry. What I have hoped is that when my first book appears it would be sufficiently remarkable to restore your confidence in me."

"In other words," his father interrupted, "to tempt me to support you--or rather, as it now turns out, to help you to get married."

"Well, why not?" said Guy. "I'm your only son. You can spare the money. Why shouldn't you help me? I'm not asking you to do anything before I've justified myself. I'm only asking you to wait a year. If my book is a failure, it will be I who pay the penalty, not you. My confidence will be severely damaged, whereas in your case only your conceit will be faintly ruffled."

"Were I really a conceited man I should resent your last remark," said his father. "But let it pass, and finish what you were going to say."

Guy got up and went to the window, seeking to find from the moonlight a coolness that would keep his temper in hand.

"Would you have preferred that I did not ask Pauline to marry, that I made love to her without any intention of marriage?"

"Not at all," his father replied. "I imagine that you still possess some self-restraint, that when you began to feel attracted to her you could have wrestled with yourself against what in the circumstances was a purely selfish emotion."

"But why, why? What really good reason can you bring forward against my behavior, except reasons based on a cowardly fear of not being prosperous? You have always impressed on me so deeply the identity of your youthful ambitions with mine that I don't suppose I'm assuming too much when I ask what you would have done if you had met Mother when you were not in a position to marry her immediately? Would you have said nothing?"

"I hope I should have had sufficient restraint not to want to marry anybody until I was able to offer material support as well as a higher devotion."

"But if ... oh, love is not a matter of the will."

"Excuse me," his father contradicted, obstinately. "Everything is a matter of will. That is precisely the point I am trying to make."

Guy marched over to the fireplace and, balancing himself on the fender, proclaimed the attainment of a dead-lock.

"You and I, my dear Father, differ in fundamentals. Supposing I admit for a moment that I may be wrong, aren't you just as wrong in not trying to see my point of view? Supposing, for instance, Tennyson had paid attention to criticism--I don't mean of his work, but of his manner of life--what would have happened?"

"I can't afford to run the risk of being considered the fond parent by announcing you to the world as a second Tennyson. Thirty-five years of a schoolmaster's life have at least taught me that parents as parents have a natural propensity towards the worst excesses of human folly."

"Then in other words," Guy responded, "I'm to mess up my life to preserve your dignity. That's what it amounts to. I tell you I believe in myself. I'm convinced that beside will, there is destiny."

Mr. Hazlewood sniffed.

"Destiny is the weak man's canonization of his own vices.

"Well, then I _will_ succeed," retorted Guy. "Moreover, I will succeed in my own way. It seems a pity that we should argue acrimoniously. I shall say no more. I accept the responsibility. For what you've done for me I'm very much obliged. Would you care for a hand at piquet?"

"Oh, certainly," said his father.

Guy hugged himself with another minor triumph. At least it was he who had determined when the discussion should be closed.

The next day, as Guy stood on the Shipcot platform and watched the slow train puffing away into the unadventurous country, he had a brief sentiment of regret for the failure of his father's visit, and made up his mind to write to him a letter to-morrow, which would sweeten a little of the bitterness between them. The bees buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again audible; and close at hand was the hum of a reaper-and-binder. But as he drove back to Wychford his father passed from his mind, and mostly Guy thought of walking with Pauline under the pale and ardent blue of this September sky that was reflected in the chicory flowers along the sparse and dusty hedgerow.

OCTOBER

"My dears, he frightened me to death," Pauline declared to her family when Mr. Hazlewood had left the Rectory. "Only I expect, you know, that really he's rather sweet."

"I don't think he approved of us very much," said Margaret.

"I didn't approve of him very much," said Monica.

"And where was Francis?" asked Mrs. Grey.

"Francis was a naughty boy," said Pauline.

Since they were sitting in the nursery, her mother allowed the christian name to pass without reproof.

"He was so exactly like Guy," said Margaret.

"Like Guy?" Pauline echoed, incredulously.

"Yes, of course. Didn't you notice that?" Margaret laughed.

"You're quite right, Margaret," said Mrs. Grey. "How clever of you to see. Now, of course, I realize how much alike they were ... how clever you are!"

"Without Pauline," Margaret went on, "Guy might easily become his father all over again."

"But, my dears," said Pauline, "that would be terrible. I remember how frightened I was of Guy the first day he came to the Rectory, and if he grows more like his father, I don't think I shall ever be anything else but frightened of him, even if we live for ever. For, though I'm sure he's really very sweet, I don't believe one would ever get _quite_ used to Mr. Hazlewood."

Yet when Pauline was alone and had an opportunity to look back upon the visit, its effect was rather encouraging than otherwise. For one thing, it curiously made Guy more actual, because until the personality of his father projected itself upon the scene of their love he had always possessed for Pauline a kind of romantic unreality. In the Spring days and Summer days which had seemed to dedicate themselves to the service of intimacy, Guy had talked a great deal of his life before they met, but the more he had told her, the more was she in the state of being unable to realize that the central figure of these old tales was not a dream. When he was with her, she was often in a daze of wonder at the credibility of being loved like this; and there was never an occasion of seeing him even after the briefest absence that did not hold in the heart of its pleasure a surprise at his return. The appearance of Mr. Hazlewood was a phenomenon that gave the pledge of prosaic authority to her love, like a statement in print that, however absurd or uncomfortable, has a value so far beyond mere talk. She had often been made rather miserable by Guy's tales of the ladies he had loved with airy heedlessness, but these heroines had all faded out in the unreality of his life apart from her, and they took their place with days of adventure described in Macedonia or with the old diversions of Oxford. The visit of Mr. Hazlewood with the chilly disapproval it had shed was more authentic than, for instance, the idea of Guy's dark-eyed mother, who had seemed in his narrations almost to threaten Pauline with her son's fairy ancestry, as if from the grave she might at any moment summon him away. Mr. Hazlewood had carried with him a wonderful assurance of ordinariness. The merely external resemblance between him and his son proved that Guy could grow old; and the sense of his opposition was a trifling discomfort in comparison with the assurance he offered of an imaginable future. She remembered that her first idea of Guy had been that of some one dry and cynical; and no doubt this first impression of his father was equally wrong. She who had been so shy and speechless was no doubt much to blame, and the family had done nothing to help out the situation. It had been unkind of her father to hide himself, since to Mr. Hazlewood, who could not have understood that it was the sort of thing her father would be sure to do, such behavior must have presented itself very oddly.

The Rector, on Pauline's remonstrating with him, was not at all penitent.

"When your marriage, my dear, comes on the horizon--I don't mind how faint a horizon--of the probable, then it will be time to discuss matters in the practical way I suppose Mr. Hazlewood would like them to be discussed. Moreover, in any case, I forgot that the worthy gentleman was coming."

Pauline was anxious to make excuses for the Rector to Guy, but Guy, when he came round next day, was only apologetic for his own father's behavior; and he and she came to a conclusion in the end that parents must be forgiven on account of their age.

"At the same time," Guy added, "I blame my father for his conventional outlook. He doesn't seem able to realize the extraordinary help that you are to my work. In fact, he doesn't realize that my work is work. He's been teaching for so many years that now he can no longer learn anything. Your father's behavior is reasonable. He doesn't take us quite seriously, but he leaves the situation to our disentanglement. Well, we shall convince him that nothing in the world is so simple as a love like ours; but the worst of my father is that even if he were convinced he would be more annoying than ever."

"You must make allowances, Guy. For one thing, how few people, even when they're young, understand about love. Besides, he's anxious about your career."

"What right has he to be anxious?" Guy burst out. "If I fail, I pay the penalty, not he."

"But he would be so hurt if you failed," she urged.

"Pauline, if you can say that, you can imagine that I will fail. Even you are beginning to have doubts."

"I haven't any doubts," she whispered. "I know you will be famous. And yet I have doubts of another sort. I sometimes wonder if I shall be enough when you are famous?"

The question she had raised launched Guy upon a sea of eloquence. He worried no more about his father, but only protested his dependence upon Pauline's love for everything that he would ever have accomplished.

"Yes, but I think I shall seem dull one day," she persisted, with a shake of the head.

"No, no. How could you seem dull to me?"

"But I'm not clever...."

"Avoid that wretched word," he cried. "It can only be applied to thieves, politicians, and lawyers. I have told you a thousand times what you are to me, and I will not tell you again because I don't want to be an egotist. I don't want to represent you to myself as a creature that exists _for_ me. You are a being to whom I aspire. If we live for ever I shall have still to aspire to you and never be nearer than the hope of deserving you."

"But your poetry, Guy, are you sure I appreciate it? Are you sure I'm not just a silly little thing lost in admiration of whatever you do?"

Guy brushed her doubts aside.

"Poetry is life trembling on the edge of human expression," he declared. "You are my life, and my poor verse faints in its powerlessness to say so. I always must be alone to blame if the treasure that you are is not proved to the world."

How was she to convince him of her unworthiness, how was she to persuade this lover of hers that she was too simple a creature for his splendid enthronement? Suddenly one day he would see her in all her dullness and ordinariness, and, turning from her in disillusion, he would hold her culpable for anything in his work that might seem to have betrayed his ambition.

"Guy," she called into the future, "you will always love me?"

"Will there ever be another Pauline?"

"Oh, there might be so easily."

"Never! Never! Every hour, every moment cries 'never!'"

In her heart she told herself that at least none but she could ever love him so well; and in the strange confidence his father's visit had given to her she told him in her turn how every hour and every moment made her more dependent upon his love.

"I want nothing but you, nothing, nothing. I've given up everything for you."

"What have you given up?" he demanded, at once, jealously and triumphantly regarding her.

"Oh, nothing really; but all the foolish little interests. Nothing, my dearest, only pigeons and music and working woolen birds and visiting poor people. Such foolish little things ... and yet things that were once upon a time frightfully important."

"You mustn't give up your music and your pigeons."

They both laughed at the absurd conjunction.

"How can I play when I'm thinking of you always, every second? Why, when I do anything but think of you, every object and every word floats away as it does when I'm tired and trying to keep awake in a big room."

"You can play to me," he argued, "even when I'm not there."

"Guy darling, I do, I do; but you've no idea how hopelessly playing to an absent lover destroys the time."

The memory of Mr. Hazlewood's visit was soon lost in the celebration of their anniversary month. As they had promised themselves in Summer, they went on moonlit expeditions to gather mushrooms; and at the waning of the moon they rose early on many milk-white dawns instead, when the mushrooms at such an hour were veritably the spoil of dew, gleaming in their baskets under veils of gossamer. On these serene mornings the sound of autumnal bird-song came to them out of misted trees, so that they used to talk of the woods in the next Spring-time, themselves moving about the wan vapors with that very air of people who scarcely live in the present. There was in this plaintive music of robins and thrushes a regret for the days of Summer spent together that were now passed away, and yet a more robust melody might have affronted the wistful air of these milk-white dawns. The frail notes of the birds hinted at silence beyond, and through the opalescent and transuming landscape Guy and Pauline floated in fancy once more down the young Thames from Ladingford. The sad stillness of the year's surrender to decline admonished them to garner these hours, making a ghost even of the sun, as if to warn them of the fleeting world, the covetous and furtive world. They wonderfully enjoyed these hours, but Pauline, when at breakfast the mushrooms came fizzling to the table, could never believe that she had been with Guy, and she used often to be discontented on being reminded by her mother of how much of the day she had already spent in his company. Looking back at these immaterial mornings of autumnal mist, she saw them upon the confines of sleep: silvery spaces they seemed that were not robbed from any familiar time.

There was during all this month a certain amount of congratulation which had to be endured, and Margaret was angry one day because Mr. and Mrs. Ford came over from Little Fairfield and alluded at tea to their hope of Richard and her soon being engaged. Pauline was naturally subject to the inquisitiveness of everybody, but as she could not without being absent-minded talk about anything except Guy, she found the general curiosity not very troublesome. Guy, however, resented this atmosphere of inquiry and was always more and more anxious to carry her out of reach of Wychford gossip.

One day in mid-October they had set out together with the intention of taking a long walk to the open upland country on the other side of the town, when, as they were going up High Street, they saw two of the local chatter-boxes.

"I will not stop and talk to Mrs. Brydone and Mrs. Willsher," Guy grumbled. "Let's cut up Abbey Lane."

They turned aside and were making their way to the path that led under the Abbey wall to the highroad, when they saw Dr. Brydone and his son coming from that direction.

"Really, there's a conspiracy of Brydones to waylay us this afternoon," Guy exclaimed, petulantly. "We shall have to go through the Abbey grounds."

Pauline had passed the wicket, which he had impulsively flung open, before she realized the violation of one of her age-long rules.

"It's really rather jolly in here to-day," said Guy. "I think we're duffers not to come more often, you know."

The Autumn wind was booming round the plantation and sweeping up the broad path down the hillside with a skelter of leaves that gave a wild gaiety to the usually tristful scene.

"Why shouldn't we explore inside?" suggested Guy. "There's something so exhilarating about this great west wind. Almost one could fancy it might blow away that ghost of a house."

Pauline hesitated; since earliest childhood the Abbey had oppressed her with ill omen, and she could not overcome her prejudice in a moment.

"You're not really afraid when you're with me?" he persisted.

Pauline surrendered, and they went across the etiolated lawn towards the entrance. The wind was roaring through every crevice, and the ivy was scratching restlessly at the panes or shivering where through the gaps it had crept in with furry tendrils.

"It's rather fun to be walking up this staircase as if this were our own house," said Guy.

Pauline had an impulse to go back, and she made a quick step to descend.

"Where are you going?"

"Guy, I think I feel afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Oh, not of anything. Just afraid."

"Come, foolish one," he whispered, gently.

And she, though it was against her will, followed him up the echoing empty stairs.

They went into every room, and Guy declared how they with their love were restoring to each of them the life it had known in the past. Here was a pleasant fancy, and Pauline hoped it might be true. In the thought that their presence was in a way the bestowal of charity on these maltreated halls she lost much of her alarm and began to enjoy the solitude spent with Guy. Whether they looked out at the wilderness that once was a garden or at the rank lawn in front, the thunderous wind surging round the house brought them closer together in the consciousness of their own shelter and their own peace in this deserted habitation.

"Now confess," said Guy, "haven't we been rather stupid to neglect such a refuge?"

"But, Guy, we haven't needed a refuge very often," objected Pauline, who, for all that she was losing some of her dread of the Abbey, was by no means inclined to set up a precedent for going there too often.

"Not yet," he admitted. "But with Winter coming on and the wet days that will either keep us indoors or else prevent us from doing anything but walk perpetually along splashy roads, we sha'n't be sorry to have a place like this to which we can retreat in comparative comfort."

"Oh, Guy," Pauline asked, anxiously, "I suppose we ought not to come here?"

"Why on earth not?"

"Don't be angry. But the idea just flashed through my mind that perhaps Mother wouldn't like us to come here very often."

He sighed deeply.

"Really, sometimes I wonder what is the good of being engaged. Are we for ever to be hemmed in by the conventions of a place like Wychford?"

"Oh, but I expect Mother wouldn't mind, really," said Pauline, reassuring herself and him. "I'm always liable to these fits of doubt. Sometimes I feel quite weighed down by the responsibility of being grown up."

She laughed at herself, and the laughter ringing through the hollow house seemed to return and mock her with a mirthless echo.

"Oh, Guy!" she exclaimed. "Oh, Guy, I wish I hadn't laughed then! Did you hear how strangely it seemed as if the house laughed back at me?"

She had gripped his arm, and Guy, startled by her gesture, exclaimed rather irritably that she ought to control her nerves.

"Well, don't let's stay in this room. I don't like the green light that the ivy is giving your face."

"What next?" he grumbled. "Well, let's go out on the balcony."

They went half-way down-stairs to the door that opened on a large balustraded terrace with steps leading from either end into the ruined garden. The wind beat against them with such force here that very soon they went back into the house, and Guy found a small room looking out on the terrace, in which he persuaded Pauline to come and sit for a while. All the other rooms in the house had been so dreadfully decayed, so much battered by every humiliation time could inflict upon them, that this small parlor was in contrast positively habitable. It gave the impression of being perhaps the last place to which the long-vanished owners had desperately held. There was a rusty hob-grate, and in the window a deep wooden seat; while the walls were still painted with courtly scenes, and the inlaid wooden floor gave a decency which everywhere else had been destroyed by the mouldering boards.

"I say, it would be fun to light a fire some time," said Guy. "This is just the room for us."

"It's rather a frightening room," said Pauline, doubtfully.

"Dearest, you insist on being frightened by everything this afternoon," he answered.

"No, but this room is frightening, Guy," she persisted. "This seems so near to being lived in by dead people."

"And what can dead people do to you and me?" he asked, with that sidelong mocking smile which she half disliked, half loved.

Pauline looked back over her shoulder once; then she came across to where he invited her to sit in the window-bay.

"I ought to have brought my diamond pencil," he said. "This is such a window for mottoes. Why, I declare! Somebody has scrawled one. Look, Pauline. Pauline, look! _1770. R. G. P. F._ inside a heart. Oh, what a pity it wasn't _P. G._ for Pauline Grey. Still, the _G_ can stand for Guy. Oh, really, I think it's an extraordinary coincidence! _P. F.?_ We can find out which of the Fentons that was. We'll look up in the history of the family. Darling, I am so glad we came to this little room. Think of those lovers who sat here once like us. Pauline, it makes me cherish you so."

She sat upon his knees, because the window-seat was dusty, and because in this place of fled lovers she wanted to be held closely to his heart.

The wind boomed and moaned, and the sun breaking through the clouds lit up the walls with a wild yellow light.

Suddenly Pauline drew away from his arms.

"Shadows went by the window," she cried. "Guy, I feel afraid. I feel afraid. There's a footstep."

She was lily-white whose cheeks had but now been burning so fiercely.

"Nonsense," he replied, half roughly. "It was that burst of sunshine."

"Guy, there were shadows. Hark!"

She nearly screamed, because footsteps were going down the stairs of the empty house.

"It must have been the caretaker," said Guy.

"I saw a white person. Guy, never, never let us come here again."

"You don't seriously think you saw a ghost?" he asked.

"Guy, how do I know? Come away into the air. We should never have come here. Oh, this room! I feel as if I should faint."

"I'll see who it was," said Guy, springing up.

"No, don't leave me. Wait for me. I'll come with you."

They hurried down the stairs, and when they reached the pallid lawn they saw Margaret and Monica in their white coats disappearing among the yew-trees by the entrance.

"There are your ghosts," said Guy, laughing.

Yet, though Guy scoffed at her fears, Pauline was not sure that she would not have preferred a ghost to that disquieting passage of her sisters without hail or comment. Yet perhaps, after all, they had not seen her and Guy in that sinister small parlor.

"Shall we catch them up?" he asked.