Part 3

When the papers were settling down, Janet, the maid, came in to say there was a gentleman in the drawing-room, and in the confusion of the new whirlwind her entrance raised Janet was gone before any one knew who the gentleman was.

"Ugh!" Margaret grumbled. "I never can be allowed to read in peace."

"I was practising the Mendelssohn trio, Mother," said Monica, reproachfully.

"Let us all practise. Let us all practise," Mrs. Grey proposed, beaming enthusiastically upon her daughters. "That would be charming."

"Father is so sweet," said Pauline. "He's simply covered with mud."

"Has he got his kneeler?" asked Mrs. Grey.

Pauline rushed to the window again.

"Mother says 'have you got your kneeler?'"

The Rector paused vaguely, and Birdwood tried to indicate by kicking himself that he had the kneeler.

"Ah, thoughtful Birdwood," said Mrs. Grey in a satisfied voice.

"And now do you think we might have the window shut?" asked Margaret, resignedly.

Monica was quite deliberately thumping at the piano part she was practising. Mrs. Grey sat down and began to tell a long story in which three poor people of Wychford got curiously blended somehow into one, so that Pauline, who was the only daughter that ever listened, became very sympathetic over a fourth poor person who had nothing to do with the tale.

"And surely Janet came in to say something about the drawing-room," said Mrs. Grey, as she finished.

"She said a gentleman," Pauline declared.

"Oh, how vague you all are!" exclaimed Margaret, jumping up.

"Well, Margaret, you were here," Pauline said. "And so was Monica."

"But I was practising," said Monica, primly. "And I didn't hear a word Janet said."

There was always this preliminary confusion at the Rectory when a stranger was announced, and it always ended in the same way by Mrs. Grey and Monica going down first, by Pauline rushing after them and banging the door as they were greeting the visitor, and by Margaret strolling in when the stage of comparative ease had been attained. So it fell out on this occasion, for Monica's skirt was just disappearing round the drawing-room door when Pauline, horrified at the idea of having to come in by herself, cleared the last three stairs of the billowy flight with a leap and sent Monica spinning forward as the door propelled her into the room.

"Monica, I am so sorry."

"Pauline! Pauline!" said Mrs. Grey, reprovingly. "So like an avalanche always."

Guy, who had by now been waiting nearly a quarter of an hour, came forward a little shyly.

"How d'ye do, how d'ye do," said Mrs. Grey, quickly and nervously. "We're so delighted to see you. So good of you ... charming really. Pauline is always impetuous. You've come to study farming at Wychford, haven't you? Most interesting. Don't tug at me, Pauline. Monica, do ring for tea. Are you fond of music?"

Pauline withdrew from the conversation after the whispered attempt to correct her mother about Mr. Hazlewood's having taken Plashers Mead in order to be a farmer. She wanted to contemplate the visitor without being made to involve herself in the confusions of politeness. "Was he dangerous to Richard?" she asked herself, and alas, she had to tell herself that indeed it seemed probable he might be. Of course he was inevitably on the way to falling in love with Margaret, and as she looked at him with his clear-cut, pale face, his tumbled hair and large brown eyes which changed what seemed at first a slightly cynical personality to one that was almost a little wistful, Pauline began to speculate if Margaret might not herself be rather attracted to him. This was an unforeseen complication, for Margaret so far had only accepted homage. Pauline definitely began to be jealous for Richard, whose homage had been the most prodigal of any; and as Guy drawled on about his first adventure of housekeeping she told herself he was affected. The impression, too, of listening to some one more than usually self-possessed and cynical revived in her mind; and those maliciously drooping lids were obliterating the effect of the brown eyes. Sitting by herself in the oriel window, Pauline was nearly sure she did not like him. He had no business to be at the Rectory when Richard was building a bridge out in India; and now here was Margaret strolling graciously in, and almost at once obviously knowing so well how to get on with this idler. Oh, positively she disliked him. So cold and so cruel was that mouth, and so vain he was, as he sat there bending forward over hand-clasped, long, stupid, crossed legs. What right had he to laugh with Margaret about their father's visit? This stranger had assuredly never appreciated him. He was come here to spoil the happiness of Wychford, to destroy the immemorial perfection of life at the Rectory. And why would he keep looking up at herself? Margaret could be pleasant to anybody, but this intruder would soon find that she herself was loyal to the absent. Pauline wished that, when he met them all on that night of the moon, she had been so horridly rude as to make him avoid the family for ever. How could Margaret sit there talking so unconcernedly, when Richard might be dying of sunstroke at this very moment? Margaret was heartless, and this stranger with his drawl and his undergraduate affectation would encourage her to sneer at everything.

"What's the matter, Pauline dearest?" her mother turned round to ask.

"Nothing," answered Pauline, biting her lips to keep back surely the most unreasonable tears she had ever felt were springing.

"You're not cross with me for calling you a landslide?" persisted Mrs. Grey, smiling at her from the midst of a glory momentarily shed by a stormy ray of sunshine.

"Oh, Mother," said Pauline, now fairly in the midway between laughter and tears. "It was an avalanche you called me."

"Why do you always sit near a window?" asked Monica.

"She always rushes into a corner," said Margaret.

Pauline jumped up from her chair and would have run out of the room forthwith; but in passing the first table she knocked from it a silver bowl of potpourri and scattered the contents over the carpet. Down she knelt to hide her confusion and repair the damage, and at the same moment Guy plunged down beside her to help. She caught his eyes so tenderly humorous that she too laughed.

"I think it must be my fault," he said. "Don't you remember how, last time we met, your sister upset the mushrooms?"

Pauline knew she was blushing, and when the rose-leaves were all gathered up, tea came in. Her attention was now entirely occupied by preventing her mother from doing the most ridiculous things with cakes and sugar and milk, and when tea was over Guy got up to go.

There was a brief discussion after his departure, in which Margaret was so critical of his dress and of his absurdities that Pauline was reassured, and presently, indeed, found herself taking their visitor's part against her sisters.

"Quite right, quite right, Pauline," said Mrs. Grey. "He's charming ... charming ... charming! Margaret and Monica so critical. Always so critical."

Presently the family hurried out into the drive to protest against the Rector's planting any more bulbs, to tell him how unkind he had been not to come up to tea, and to warn him that the bell would sound for Evensong in two minutes. He was dragged out of the shrubbery where he had been superintending a clearance of aucubas, preparatory to planting a drift of new and very deep yellow primroses.

"Really, my dears, I have never seen _Primula vulgaris_ so fine in texture or color. My friend Gilmour has spent ten years working up the stock. As large as florins."

So he boasted of new wonders next Spring in the Rectory garden, while his wife and daughters brushed him and dusted him and helped to button up his cassock.

"Doesn't Father look a darling?" demanded Pauline, as they watched the tall, handsome dreamer striding along the drive towards the sound of the bell, that was clanging loud and soft in its battle with the wind.

"Oh, Pauline, run after him," said Mrs. Grey, "and remind him it's the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. He started wrong last Sunday, and to-day's Wednesday, and it so offends some of the congregation."

Pauline overtook her father in the church porch, and he promised he would be careful to read the right collect. She had not stayed to get a hat, and therefore must wait for him outside.

"Very well, my dear child; I sha'n't be long. Do go and see if those sternbergias I planted against the south porch are in flower. Dear me, they should be, you know, after this not altogether intolerably overcast summer. Sun, though, sun! they want sun, poor dears!"

"But, Father, I can't remember what sternbergias look like."

"Oh yes, you can," said the Rector. "_Sternbergia lutea._ Amaryllidaceae. A perfectly ordinary creature." And he vanished in the gloom of the priest's door.

As Pauline came round the corner the wind was full in her face, and under the rose-edged wrack of driving clouds the churchyard looked desolate and savage. There were no flowers to be seen but beaten-down Michaelmas daisies and bedabbled phlox. The bell had stopped immediately when the Rector arrived; and the wind seemed now much louder as it went howling round the great church or rasping through the yews and junipers. The churchyard was bounded on the northerly side by the mill-stream, along which ran a wide path between a double row of willows now hissing and whistling as they were whipped by the blasts. Pauline walked slowly down this unquiet ambulatory, gazing curiously over to the other bank of the stream, where the orchard of Plashers Mead was strewn with red apples. There in the corner by the house that was just visible stood the owner, playing with a dog, a bobtail, too, which was the kind Pauline liked best. She wanted very much to wave, but, of course, it was impossible for the Rector's daughter to do anything like that in the churchyard. Yet if he did chance to walk in her direction, she would, whatever happened, shout to him across the stream to bring the dog next time he came to the Rectory. Pauline walked four times up and down the path, but first the dog disappeared and then the owner followed him, and presently Pauline discovered that the path beside the abandoned stream was very dreary. The crooked tombstones stood up starkly; the wind sighed across the green graves of the unknown; the fiery roses were fallen from the clouds. Pauline turned away from the path and went to take shelter behind the east end of the church. From here, as she fronted the invading night, she could see the gray wall of the Rectory garden and the paddock sloping down to the river. How sad it was to think of the months that must pass before that small meadow would be speckled with fritillaries or with irises blow white and purple. The wind shrieked with a sudden gust that seemed more violent, because where she was standing not a blade of grass twitched. Pauline looked up to reassure herself that the steeple was not toppling from the tower; as she did so a gargoyle grinned down at her. The grotesque was frightening in the dusk, and she hurried round to the priest's door. The Rector came out as she reached it, and accepted vaguely the information that there were no flowers to be seen but Michaelmas daisies and phlox.

"Ah, I told Birdwood to confiscate those abominable dahlias which wretched Mrs. Godbold will plant every year. I gave her some of that new saxifrage I raised. What more does the woman want?"

Pauline hung upon his arm while they walked back to the Rectory through the darkling plantation.

"Isn't it a perfect place?" she murmured, hugging his arm closer when they came to the end of the mossy path and saw the twinkling of the drawing-room's oriel on the narrow south side, and the eleven steep gables that cleft the now scarcely luminous sky, one after another all the length of the house.

"I doubt if anything but this confounded cotoneaster would do well against this wall," replied the Rector.

He never failed to make this observation when he reached his front door; and his family knew that one day the cotoneaster would be torn down for a succession of camellias to struggle with the east winds of unkind Oxfordshire. In the hall Mrs. Grey and Margaret were bending over a table.

"Guy has left his card," said Margaret.

"Is that the man who came to see me about the rats?" asked the Rector.

"No, no, Francis," said Mrs. Grey. "Guy is the young man at Plashers Mead."

"Isn't Francis sweet?" cried Pauline, reaching up to kiss him.

"Hush, Pauline. Pauline, you must not call your father Francis in the hall," said Mrs. Grey.

"How touching of Guy to leave a card," Pauline murmured, looking at the oblong of pasteboard shimmering in the gloom.

"Now we've just time to practise the Mendelssohn trio before dinner," declared Mrs. Grey. "And that will make you warm."

The Rector wandered off to his library. Margaret and Pauline went with their mother up shadowy staircases and through shadowy corridors to the great music-room that ran half the length of the roof. Monica was already seated at the piano, all white and golden herself in the candle-light. Languidly Margaret unpacked her violoncello; Pauline tuned her violin. Soon the house was full of music, and the wind in the night was scarcely audible.

NOVEMBER

When Guy left the Rectory that October afternoon, he felt as if he had put back upon its shelf a book the inside of which, thus briefly glanced at, held for him, whenever he should be privileged to open it again, a new, indeed an almost magical, representation of life. On his fancy the Greys had impressed themselves with a kind of abundant naturalness; but however deeply he tried to think he was already plunged into the heart of their life, he realized that it was only in such a way as he might have dipped into the heart of a book. The intimacy revealed was not revealed by any inclusion of himself within the charm; and he was a little sad to think how completely he must have seemed outside the picture. Hence his first aspiration with regard to the family was somehow to become no longer a spectator, but actually a happy player in their representation of existence. Ordinarily, so far as experience had hitherto carried him, it had been easy enough to find himself on terms of intimacy with any group of human beings whose company was sufficiently attractive. For him, perhaps, it had even been particularly easy, so that he had never known the mortification of a repulse. No doubt now by contriving to be himself and relying upon the interest that was sure to be roused by his isolation and poetic ambitions, he would very soon be accorded the freedom of the Rectory. Yet such a prospect, however pleasant to contemplate, did not satisfy him, and he was already troubled by a faint jealousy of the many unknown friends of the Greys, to whom in the past the privilege of that freedom must have been frequently accorded. Guy wanted more than that; in the excess of his appreciation he wanted them to marvel at a time when they had not been aware of his existence; in fact, he was anxious to make himself necessary to their own sense of their own completeness. As he entered his solitary hall he was depressed by the extravagance of such a desire, saying to himself that he might as well sigh to become an integral figure of a pastoral by Giorgione, or of any work of art the life of which seems but momentarily stilled for the pleasure of whomsoever is observing it.

Guy was for a while almost impatient even of his own room, for he felt it was lacking in any atmosphere except the false charm of novelty. He had been here three weeks now, he and deaf Miss Peasey; and were the two of them swept away to-morrow Plashers Mead would adapt itself to new-comers. There was nothing wrong with the house; such breeding would survive any occupation it might be called upon to tolerate. On the other hand, were chance to sweep the Greys from Wychford, so essentially did the Rectory seem their creation that already it was unimaginable to Guy apart from them. And as yet he had only dipped into the volume. Who could say what exquisite and intimate paragraphs did not await a more leisurely perusal? Really, thought Guy, he might almost suppose himself in love with the family, so much did the vision of them in that shadowy drawing-room haunt his memory. Indeed, they were become a picture that positively ached in his mind with longing for the moment of its repetition. For some days he spent all his time in the orchard, throwing sticks for his new bobtail; denying himself with an absurd self-consciousness the pleasure of walking so far along the mill-stream even as the bank opposite to the Rectory paddock; denying himself a fortuitous meeting with any of the family in Wychford High Street; and on Sunday denying himself the pleasure of seeing them in church, because he felt it might appear an excuse to be noticed. The vision of the Rectory obsessed him, but so elusively that when in verse he tried to state the emotion merely for his own satisfaction, he failed, and he took refuge from his disappointment by nearly always being late for meals. Often he would see Miss Peasey walking about the orchard with desolate tinkle of a Swiss sheep-bell, the only instrument of summons that the house possessed. Miss Peasey herself looked not unlike a battered old bellwether as she wandered searching for him in the wind; and Guy used to watch her from behind a tree-trunk, laughing to himself until Bob the dog trotted from one to another, describing anxious circles round their separation.

"Your dinner's been waiting ten minutes, Mr. Hazlewood!"

"Doesn't matter," Guy would shout.

"Mutton to-day," Miss Peasey would say, and, "a little variety," she always added.

Miss Peasey's religion was variety, and her tragedy was an invention that never kept pace with aspiration. For three weeks Guy had been given on Sunday roast beef which lasted till Wednesday; while on Thursday he was given roast mutton, which as a depressing cold bone always went out from the dining-room on Saturday night. Every morning he was asked what he would like for dinner, to which he always replied that he left it to her. Once, indeed, in a fertile moment he had suggested a curry, and Miss Peasey, brightening wonderfully, had chirped:

"Ah yes, a little variety."

But in the evening the taste of hot tin that represented Miss Peasey's curry made him for ever afterwards leave the variety to her own fancy, thereby preserving henceforth that immutable alternation of roast beef and roast mutton which was the horizon of her housekeeping.

These solitary meals were lightened by the thought of the Rectory. Neither beef nor mutton seemed of much importance when his mind's eye could hold that shadowy drawing-room. There was Monica with her pale-gold hair in the stormy sunlight, cold and shy, but of such a marble purity of line that but to sit beside her was to admire a statue whose coldness made her the more admirable. There was Margaret, carved slimly out of ivory, very tall, with weight of dusky hair, and slow, fastidious voice that spoke dreamily of the things Guy loved best. There was Pauline sitting away from the others in the window-seat, away in her shyness and wildness. Was not the magic of her almost more difficult to recapture than any? A brier rose she was whose petals seemed to fall at the touch of definition, a brier rose that was waving out of reach, even of thought. Guy wished he could visualize the Rector in his own drawing-room; but instead he had to set him in Plashers Mead, of which no doubt he had thought the owner a young ass; and Guy blushed to remember the nervous idiocy which had let him take the Rector solemnly into the kitchen to look at dish-covers in a row, and deaf Miss Peasey sitting by as much fire as the table would yield to her chair. But if the Rector were missing from the picture, at any rate he could picture Mrs. Grey, shy like her daughters and with a delicious vagueness all her own. She was most like Pauline, and indeed in Pauline Guy could see her mother, as the young moon holds in her lap the wraith of the old moon....

"Why, you haven't eaten anything," remonstrated Miss Peasey, breaking in upon his vision. "And I've made you a rice pudding for a little variety."

The shadowy drawing-room faded with the old chintz curtains and fragile, almost immaterial silver; the china bowls of Lowestoft; the dull, white paneling and faintly aromatic sweetness. Instead remained a rice pudding that smelled and looked as solid as a pie.

However, that very afternoon Guy was greatly encouraged to get an invitation to dinner at the Rectory from the hands of the gardener. Birdwood was one of those servants who seem to have accepted with the obligations of service the extreme responsibilities of paternity; and Guy hastened to take advantage of the chance to establish himself on good terms with one who might prove a most powerful ally.

"Not much of a garden, I'm afraid," he said, deprecatingly, to Birdwood, as they stood in colloquy outside. The gardener shook his head.

"It wouldn't do for the Rector to see them cabbages and winter greens. 'I won't have the nasty things in my garden,' he says to me, and he'll rush at them regular ferocious with a fork. 'I won't have them,' he says. 'I can't abear the sight of them,' he says. Well, of course I knows better than go for to contradict him when he gets a downer on any plant, don't matter whether it's cabbage or calceolaria. But last time, when he'd done with his massacring of them, I popped round to Mrs. Grey, and I says, winking at her very hard, but of course not meaning any disrespectfulness, winking at her very hard, I says, 'Please, mum, I want one of these new allotments from the glebe.' 'Good Heavings, Birdwood,' she says, 'whatever on earth can you want with for an allotment?' With that I winks very hard again and says in a low voice right into her ear as you might say, 'To keep the wolf from the door, mum, with a few winter greens.' That's the way we grow our vegetables for the Rectory, out of an allotment, though we have got five acres of garden. Now you see what comes of being a connosher. You take my advice, Mr. Hazlenut, and clear all them cabbages out of sight before the Rector comes round here again."

"I will certainly," Guy promised. "But you know it's a bit difficult for me to spend much money on flowers."

"_We_ don't spend money over at the Rectory," said Birdwood, smiling in a superior way.

"No?"

"_We_ don't spend a penny. _We_ has every mortal plant and seed and cutting given to us. And not only that, but we gives in our turn. Look here, Mr. Hazlenut, I'm going to hand you out a bit of advice. The first time as you go round our garden with the Rector, when you turn into the second wall-garden, and see a border on your right, you catch hold of his arm and say, 'Why, good Heavings, if that isn't a new berberis.'"

"Yes, but I don't know what an old berberis looks like," said Guy, hopelessly, "let alone a new one."

"Never mind what the old ones look like. It's the new I'm telling you of. Don't you understand that everyone who comes down, from Kew even, says, 'That's a nice healthy little lot of _Berberis Knightii_ as you've got a hold of.' 'Ha,' says the Rector. 'I thought as you'd go for to say that. But it ain't Knightii,' he chuckles, 'and what's more, it ain't got a name yet, only a number, being a new importation from China,' he says. You go and call out what I told you, and he'll be so pleased, why, I wouldn't say he won't shovel half of the garden into your hands straight off."

"Do the young ladies take an interest in flowers?" Guy asked.