Part 6

In the middle of the wall confronting the street two columns surmounted with huge round finials showed where there had once been a gate wide enough to admit a coach. Above the wall a belt of high trees obscured the view and gave a dank shadow to the road beneath. At one corner a small wooden wicket with a half-obliterated proclamation of privacy enabled any one to pass through the wall and enter the grounds of Wychford Abbey. This wicket opened directly on a path that wound through a plantation of yews interspersed with tall beeches and elms, whose overarching tops intensified even in Wintry leaflessness the prevalent gloom. The silence of this plantation made Wychford High Street seem in remembrance a noisy, cheerful place, and the mere crackling of twigs and beech-mast induced the visitor to walk more quietly, fearful of profaning the mysteriousness even by so slight an indication of human presence. The plantation continued in tiers of trees down the hill to the Greenrush, which had been deepened by a dam to support this gloom of overhanging branches with slow and solemn stream. The path, however, kept to the level ground and emerged presently upon a large square of pallescent grass the farther side of which was bounded by a deserted house.

There were no ruins of the ecclesiastical foundation to fret a Gothic moonlight, but Wychford Abbey did not require these to justify the foreboding approach; and the great Jacobean pile, whose stones the encroaching trees had robbed of warmth and vitality, brooded in the silence with a monstrous ghostliness that was scarcely heightened by the signs of material decay. Nevertheless, the casements whose glass was filmy like the eyes of blind men or sometimes diced with sinister gaps; the cracks and fissures in the external fabric; the headless supporters of the family coat; and the roof slowly being torn tile from tile by ivy--did consummate the initial impression. Within, the desolation was more marked. A few rotten planks had been nailed across the front door, but these had been kicked down by inquisitive explorers, and the hall remained perpetually open to the weather. In some of the rooms the floors had jagged pits, and there was not one which was not defiled by jackdaws, owls, and bats. Strands of sickly ivy, which had forced an entrance through the windows, clawed the dusty air. A leprosy had infected the plaster ceilings so that the original splendor of their moldings had become meaningless and scarcely any longer discernible; and the marble of the florid mantelpieces was streaked with abominable damp. The back of the house seemed to go beyond the rest in the expression of utter abandonment. Crumbling walls with manes of ivy inclosed a series of gardens rank with docks and nettles and almost impenetrable on account of the matted briers. As if to add the final touch of melancholy the caretaker (for somewhere in the depths of the house existed ironically a caretaker) had cultivated in this wilderness some dreary patches of potatoes. Beyond the forsaken parterres stretched a great unkempt shrubbery where laurels, peterswort, and hollies struggled in disorderly and overgrown profusion for the pleasure of numberless birds, and where a wide path still maintained its slow diagonal down the hillside to the river's edge.

Such were the surroundings Guy chose to embower the doubts and hesitations that followed close upon the morning when on Wychford down he had been so nearly telling Pauline he loved her. Perhaps the almost savage gloom of this place helped to confirm his profound hopelessness. A black frost had succeeded the sparkle of Christmastide. The banks of the river in such weather were impossible, for the wind came biting across the water-meadows and piped in the withered reeds and rushes with an intolerable melancholy. Here in the grounds of Wychford Abbey there was comparative warmth, and the desolation suited the unfortunate end he was predicting for his hopes. To begin with, it was extremely improbable that Pauline cared about him. His assay with regard to Richard had not been encouraging, and his worst fears of being too late for real inclusion within the charm of the Rectory were surely justified. He had known all along how much exaggerated were his ambitions, and he wished now that in the first moment of their springing he had ruthlessly strangled them. Moreover, even if Pauline did ultimately come to care for him, how much farther was he advanced upon the road of a happy issue? It were presumptuous and absurd with only L150 a year to propose marriage, and if he gave up living here and became a schoolmaster at home, he knew that the post would be made conditional upon a willingness to wait as many years for marriage as the wisdom of age decreed. Besides, he could not take Pauline from Wychford and imprison her at Fox Hall to dose little boys with Gregory's Powder or check the schedule of their underclothing. The only justification for taking Pauline away from the Rectory would be to make her immortal in poetry. Yet encouraging as lately one or two epithets had certainly been, he was still far from having written enough to fill even a very thin book; and really as he came to review the past three months he could not say that he had done much more or much better than in the days when Plashers Mead was undiscovered. Time had lately gone by very fast, not merely on account of the jolly days at the Rectory, but also because weeks that were terminated by weekly bills seemed to be endowed with a double swiftness.

"I really must eat less meat," said Guy to himself. "It's ridiculous to spend eleven shillings and sixpence every week on meat ... that's roughly L30 a year. Why, it's absurd! And I don't eat it. Bother Miss Peasey! What an appetite she has got."

He wondered if he could break through the barrier of his housekeeper's deafness so far as to impress upon her the fact that she ate too much meat. She spent too much, also, on small things like pepper and salt. This reckless buying of pepper and salt made the grocer's bill an eternal irritation, for it really seemed absurd to be spending all one's money on pepper and salt. Yet people did live on L150 a year. Coleridge had married with less than that and apparently had got on perfectly well, or would have if he had not been foolish in other ways. How on earth was it done? He really must try and find out how much, for instance, Birdwood spent every week on the necessities of life. That was the worst of Oxford ... one came down without the slightest idea of the elementary facts of domestic economy. There had been a lot of soda bought last week. He remembered seeing it in one of those horrid little slippery tradesmen's books. Soda? What was it for? Vaguely Guy thought it was used to soften water, but there were plenty of rain-tubs at Plashers Mead, and soda must be an unjustifiable extravagance. Then Miss Peasey herself was getting L18 a year. It seemed very little--so little, indeed, that when he paid her every month he felt inclined to apologize for the smallness of the amount, but little as it was it only left him with L132. Knock off L30 for meat and he had L102; L18 must go in rent, and there was left L84. Then there was milk and bread and taxes and the subscription to the cricket-club and the subscription to all the other vice-presidencies to which the town had elected him. There was also Graves, his deaf-and-dumb gardener, and a new bucket for the well. Books and clothes, of course, could be obtained on credit, but even so some time or other bills came in. Guy made a number of mental calculations, but by no device was he able to make the amount required come to less than L82. That left L2 for Pauline, and then, by the way, there was the dog-license which he had forgotten. Thirty-two and sixpence for Pauline! Guy roamed through the sad arbors of Wychford Abbey in the depths of depression, and watched with a cynical amusement the birds searching for grubs in the iron ground. He began to feel a positive sense of injury against love which had descended with proverbial wantonness to complicate mortal affairs. He tried to imagine the Rectory without Pauline, and when he did so all the attraction was gone. Yet distinctly when he had first met the Greys he had not thought more often of Pauline than of her sisters. What perversity of circumstance had introduced love?

"It's being alone," said Guy. "I feed myself upon dreams. Michael was perfectly right. Wychford is a place of dreams."

He would cure this love-sickness. That was an idea for a sonnet. Damn! "_I attempt from love's sickness to fly._" It need not be said again. At the same time, poem or not, he would avoid the Rectory and shut himself close in that green room which Margaret and Monica had thought so crude with undergraduate taste. If this cold went on, there would be skating; and he began to picture Pauline upon the ice. The vision flashed like a diamond through these gloomy groves, and with the soughing of the skates in his ears and the thought of Pauline's hands crisscross in his own, Guy's first attack on love ended in complete surrender. Skating meant long talks with never a curious eye to cast dismay; and in long talks and rhythmic motion possibly she might come to love him. Guy's footsteps began to ring out upon the iron-bound walk, and of all the sad ghosts that should have haunted his path there was not one who walked now beside him; for, as he dreamed upon the vision of Pauline, the melancholy of that forsaken place was lightened with a sort of April exultation and the promise of new life to gladden the once populous gardens where lovers might have been merry in the past.

However, when he was back in his house, Guy's earlier mood returned, and he made up his mind anew not to go to the Rectory. Nothing would do for him but the metaphysics and passion of Dr. John Donne; and on the dreary evening when the frost yielded to rain before there had been one day's skating, Guy was as near as any one may ever have been to conversing with that old lover's ghost who died before the god of Love was born. All his plans wore mourning, and the bills that week rose two-and-sixpence-halfpenny higher than their highest total so far. Guy moped in his green library and, as he read through the manuscripts of poetry that with the progress of the night seemed to him worse and worse, he wished he could recapture some of that self-confidence which had carried him so serenely through Oxford; and he asked himself if Pauline's love would endow him once more with that conviction of ultimate fame, to the former safe tenure of which he now looked back as from a disillusioned old age.

Another week passed, and Guy wondered what they were thinking of him at the Rectory for his neglect of all they might justly suppose had been offered him. Absence from Pauline did not seem to have effected much so far except a complete paralysis of his power to work with that diligence he had always preached as the true threshold of art. Perhaps he had been always a little too insistent upon the merit of academic industry, too conscious of a deliberate embarkation upon a well-built career, too careful of mere equipment in his exploration of Parnassus. So long as he had been exercising his technical accomplishment, everything had seemed to be advancing securely towards the moment when inspiration should vitalize the promise of his craftsmanship. Now inspiration was at hand, and accomplishment had betrayed him. These effusions of restless love which he had lately produced were surely the most wretched cripples ever sent to climb the Heliconian slope. Guy looked at his note-book and marked how many apostrophes, the impulses to declaim which had seemed to scorch his imagination with bright ardors, had, alas, failed to kindle his uninflammable pencil. He derived a transient consolation from Browning's "Pauline," which was surely as inadequate as his own verse to celebrate the name. "_Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me._" That opening half-line was the only one which moved him. But, after all, Browning did not esteem his own Pauline, and had written it when he was twenty. Himself was twenty-two, and could not declare his passion in one lyric. A graceful sonnet for his father's birthday would not compensate for this dismaying failure. Moreover, in rhymes, thought Guy, Pauline was no niggard; and with a flicker of sardonic humor he recalled how many Swinburne had found for Faustine.

It was Godbold who fed the vexations and torments of untried love with the bitterest medicine of all. He had come down to see Guy about an old chair that had to be fetched from a neighboring village, and, when his business was over, seemed inclined to chat for a while.

"Have you ever noticed, Mr. Hazlewood," he began, "as there's a lot of people in this world who know more than a man knows himself?"

Guy indicated that the fact had struck him.

"Well, now, just because I happen to see you with Miss Pauline the other morning, there's half a dozen wise gabies in Wychford who've almost married you to her out of hand."

Guy tried not to look annoyed.

"Oh, you may well frown, Mr. Hazlewood, for, as I said to them, it's nothing more than nonsense to tie up a young man and a young woman just because they happen to take a walk together on a fine morning."

"I hope this sort of intolerable gossip isn't still going on," said Guy, savagely.

"Oh, well, you see, sir, Wychford is a middling place for gossip. And if it wasn't one of the Miss Greys it would be some other young miss roundhereabouts. Human nature, like pigeons, is set on mating."

"I hope you'll contradict this ridiculous rumor," said Guy.

"Oh, I have done already. In fact, I may say that one of my principles, Mr. Hazlewood, is to contradict everything. As I said to them, when they was talking about it in the post-office the other night, and that post-office is a rare place of gossip! Perhaps you've noticed that the nosiest man in a town always gets made postmaster? Where had I got to?--ah, yes, I said to them, 'You know a great lot about other people's business,' I said, 'but when I tell you that old Mrs. Mathers who lives in the last cottage but one in Rectory Lane says she's taken particular note as Mr. Hazlewood has never been near the Rectory for the last fortnight unless it was once when she heard footsteps and hadn't time to get to the window to see who it was on account of the kettle being on the boil at that moment, where's your Holy Matrimony?' I said. With that up speaks Miss Burge from the back of The shop whose father used to keep the King's Head before he dropped dead of the apoplexy on Shipcot platform. 'That doesn't say he hasn't gone round by the field the same as Mr. Burrows's servant used to when she was being courted by We'll-mention-no-names.' 'No, and that he hasn't, either,' said I, smacking the counter, for I was feeling a bit angry by now at all this poking about in other people's business, 'that he hasn't,' I said, 'because the Rectory cook asked me most particular if there was anything the matter down at Plashers Mead, seeing as Mr. Hazlewood hadn't been near the Rectory for a fortnight. That doesn't look like Holy Matrimony,' I said, and with that I walked out of the post-office. Mr. Hazlewood," Godbold concluded, very earnestly, "the gossip of Wychford is something as no one would believe, if they hadn't heard it, as I have, every mortal day of my life."

Guy could have laughed on his own account, but the notion of Pauline's being dragged into the chatter made him furious. Yet what could he do? If he went frequently to the Greys' house he must be engaged, according to Wychford. And if he did not go....

"I suppose they'll be saying next that the engagement has been broken off," he inquired, with cold sarcasm.

"Oh, they have said it. Depend upon it, Mr. Hazlewood, it undoubtedly has been said."

It began to appeal to Guy as extremely undignified--the way in which he had let Godbold chatter on like this.

"I'm afraid I must be getting back to my work," he said, curtly.

"That's right. Work's the best answer to talk. Did you feel it much here in that rainy spell?"

"The meadows were a bit splashy, of course, but the water never got anywhere near the house."

"But it will. Don't you make any mistake. It will. Only, of course, we've had a dry Autumn. Why, last June year Miss Peasey could have been fishing for minnows in her kitchen. Now that seems a nice upstanding sort of woman. A Wesleen, they tell me? I haven't seen her in church that I can remember, and which would account for it. But I never talk to the chapel folk, they being that uncivilized. She's rather deaf, isn't she?"

"Yes, and therefore cannot gossip," Guy snapped.

"Well, I don't know," said Godbold, doubtfully. "Some of the most unnatural scandals I ever heard were made by deaf women. Though that doesn't mean I'm saying Miss Peasey is a talker."

"I'm sure she isn't," Guy agreed. "Good night, Mr. Godbold."

"Good night, Mr. Hazlewood. Don't you be discouraged by the gossip in Wychford. I always say, if you believe nothing you hear, next to nothing of what you read, and only half of what you see, no one can touch you. Good night once more, sir. And don't you fret over what people say. I remember they once said I tried to work a horse which had the blind staggers, and Mrs. Godbold was that aggravated she went and washed a shirt of mine twice over, worrying herself. Good night, Mr. Hazlewood."

This time the red-bearded carrier of Wychford (not an inappropriate profession for him) really departed, leaving Guy in a state of considerable resentment at the thought of the Wychford commentary.

That night the raw drizzle turned to snow; and when he looked out of his window next morning it was lying thick over the country and was making his bedroom seem as gray as the loaded clouds above. That exhilaration of a new landscape which comes with snow drove away some of Guy's depression, and after breakfast he went out, curious to contemplate its effect upon the Abbey. In the black frost the great pile had seemed to possess scarcely more substance than a shredded leaf; and when it lay sodden beneath the dripping trees, a manifest decay had made extinction infamous with the ooze of a rotting fungus. The weather now had brought a strange restoration to the abandoned house, and so completely had the covering of snow hidden most of the signs of dissolution that Wychford Abbey seemed no longer dead, but asleep in the quiet of a Winter morning. The lawn in front stretched before it in decent whiteness, and the veiling of the ragged, unhealthy grass took away from the front of the house that air of wan caducity, endowing the stones by contrast with tinted warmth and richness. The decrepit roof was hidden, and Wychford Abbey dreamed under its weight of snow with all the placid romance of a house on a Christmas card. The dark plantation was deprived of its gloom, and what was usually a kind of haunted stillness was now aspectful peace. Guy went over the crinching ground and strolled down the broad walk through the shrubbery. Everywhere the snow glistened with the footprints of many birds, but not a single call broke a silence which was cold and absolute except for the powdery whisper of the snow where it was sliding from the holly leaves.

When Guy reached the bottom of the shrubbery he sat down on a fallen trunk by a backwater, which dried up here in the drift of dead leaves; and he watched the surface of it glazing perceptibly, yet not so fast but that the faint motion of the freezing air could write upon the smoothness a tremulous reticulation. He had not been resting long when he saw Margaret coming towards him down the walk, and with so light a tread that in her white coat she might have been a figment created for his fancy by the snow. He wondered if a sense of the added beauty her presence gave the scene were in her mind. Probably it was, for Margaret had a discreet vanity that would never gratify itself so well as when she was alone; and plainly she must suppose herself alone, since here on this snowy morning she would not have expected to meet anybody. Guy thought it would be considerate to draw aside without spoiling her dream, whatever the subject of the meditation. However, as he rose from the log to take the narrow path along the backwater and so turn homeward across the fields by the river, Margaret saw him and waved with a feathery gesture. As Guy went up the path to greet her he was thinking how much her hair was like a dark leaf that had shaken off the snow, so easily might her blanched attire have fallen upon her from the clouds; then, as he came close, every charming fancy was suddenly spoiled by a remembrance of Wychford gossip, and he turned hastily round to see if there were prying glances in the laurels.

"What are you looking at?" she asked.

"A squirrel," said Guy, quickly. He would not have had his absence from the Rectory ascribed to any fear of gossip; moreover, since a meeting with Margaret did not make his conscience the thrall of public opinion, he would not have her discreet vanity at all impaired. Therefore it was a squirrel he saw.

"We've been wondering what has become of you," she said.

"Well, I've been working rather hard; and as a matter of fact I was going to the Rectory this afternoon. Isn't the snow jolly after the rain? Especially here, don't you think?"

She nodded.

"I've got to go and visit an old woman who lives almost in Little Fairfield, and I thought I'd avoid as much as I could of the highroad."

"Shall I come with you?" asked Guy, but in so doubtful a voice that Margaret laughingly declared she was sure he was in a state of being offended with the Rectory.

"Oh, Margaret, don't be absurd. Offended?"

"Over the curtains?" she asked.

"Why, if it wouldn't betray a gross insensibility to your opinion, I should tell you I thought no more about what you said. Besides, we've had reconciling Christmas since then."

"Ah, but you see, Pauline is always impressing on Monica and me our cruelty to you, and by this time Mother has been talked into believing in our hard and impenitent hearts."

"Pauline is...." Guy broke off and saw another squirrel. He could not trust himself to speak of Pauline, for in this stillness of snow he felt that the lightest remark would reveal his love; and there was in nature this morning a sort of suspense that seemed to rebuke unuttered secrets.

"Well, as you're walking with me to Fairfield--or nearly to Fairfield--your neglect of us shall be forgiven," Margaret promised. "Here we are out of the warm trees already. I'm glad I came this way, though I think it was rather foolish. Look how deep the snow seems on that field we've got to cross."

"It isn't really," said Guy, vaulting over the fence that ran round the confines of the Abbey wood.

"Ah, now you've spoiled it," she exclaimed. But Margaret did not pause a moment to regret the ruffling of that sheeted expanse, and they walked on silently, watching the toes of their boots juggle with the snow.

"It generally is a pity," said Guy, after a while.

"What?"

"Impressing one's existence on so lovely and inviolate a thing as this." He indicated the untrodden field in front of them.

"But look behind you," said Margaret. "Don't you think our footprints look very interesting?"

"Interesting, perhaps," Guy admitted. "Yet footprints in snow never seem to be going anywhere."

"Now I know quite well what you're doing," Margaret protested. "You're making that poor little wabbly track of ours try to bear all sorts of mysterious and symbolic intensities of meaning. Just because you're feeling annoyed with a sonnet, footprints in the snow mustn't lead anywhere. Why, Guy, if I told you what sentimental import my 'cello sometimes gives to a simple walk before lunch.... I mean, of course, when I've been playing badly."