Chapter 7

They were almost at a standstill now and neither of them was noticing it at all. As Mrs. Loring moved her seat the boat lurched somewhat to one side. Mark, to steady her, placed his hand over hers as it rested on the rail, and she did not withdraw it. Then he found the other hand that lay upon her knee, and took it in his own, scarcely knowing what he did. He looked into her face and found no anger there. "I wish to tell you more about myself," he stammered, "something not altogether creditable to me; but perhaps you will understand. Perhaps even if you don't understand you will forgive."

She drew her hands gently away from his grasp. "I shall try to understand, you may rely on that!" she said.

"I'm not going to trouble you with any very dreadful confessions," he said, "only it's better to hear things directly from the people concerned, and you are sure to hear a wrong version sooner or later."--Then stopping suddenly he exclaimed, "Hullo! we're stuck, I declare! look at that!"

Robinette turned and saw that their boat was now scarcely surrounded with water at all. On every side, as if the flanks of some great whale were upheaving from below, there appeared stretches of glistening mud. Just in front of them, where there still was a channel of water, was an upstanding rock. "Shall we row quickly there?" she cried. "Then perhaps we can get out and pull the boat to the other side, where there is more water. What has happened?"

"Oh, something not unusual," said Lavendar grimly, "that I'm a fool, and the sea-tide has ebbed, as tides have been known to do before. I'm afraid a man doesn't watch tides when he has a companion like you! Now we're left high, but not at all dry, as you see, till the tide turns."

By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant. Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the boat. "It's all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!" she panted. "Now, what are we to do?" She spread out her hands in dismay, and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet, one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. "What an object I shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy's eye, when, if ever, it does light on me again! Meanwhile it seems as if we might be here for some hours. The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she couldn't bear it."

Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.

"It's perfectly hopeless," he said, "the best thing we can do is to beget some philosophy."

"Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water," she interpolated.

"We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat or on the rock?"

"I don't see much difference, do you? Except that the passing boats, if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a boat in the mud."

They landed on the rock for the second time. "For my part it's no great punishment," said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, "since the place is big enough for two and you're one of them!"

"Wouldn't this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess your faults as any?" asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as possible. "I'll even offer a return of confidence upon my own weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:--

"What have you sought you should have shunned, And into what new follies run?"

"Oh, what a bad rhyme!" said Lavendar.

"It's Pythagoras, any way," she explained.

Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. "This is not merely a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of your friends I should like you to know that--to put it plainly--my own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless jilt."

"That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story."

"In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for life when I, all too late, found out my mistake."

There passed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.

Robinette stared at the stretches of ooze, and then stole a look at Mark Lavendar. "The idea of calling that man a jilt," she thought. "Look at his eyes; look at his mouth; listen to his voice; there is truth in them all. Oh for a sight of the girl he jilted! How much it would explain! No, not altogether, because the careless making of his engagement would have to be accounted for, as well as the breaking of it. Unless he did it merely to oblige her--and men are such idiots sometimes,--then he must have fancied he was in love with her. Perhaps he is continually troubled with those fancies. Nonsense! you believe in him, and you know you do." Then aloud she said, sympathetically, "I'm afraid we are apt to make these little experimental journeys in youth, when the heart is full of _wanderlust_. We start out on them so lightly, then they lead nowhere, and the walking back alone is wearisome and depressing."

"My return journey was depressing enough at first," said Lavendar, "because the particular She was unkinder to me than I deserved even; but better counsels have prevailed and I shall soon be able to meet the reproachful gaze of stout matrons and sour spinsters more easily than I have for a year past; you see the two families were friends and each family had a large and interested connection!"

"If the opinion of a comparative stranger is of any use to you," said Robinette, standing on the rock and scraping her stockinged foot free of mud, "_I_ believe in you, personally! You don't seem a bit 'jilty' to me! I'd let you marry my sister to-morrow and no questions asked!"

"I didn't know you had a sister," cried Lavendar.

"I haven't; that's only a figure of speech; just a phrase to show my confidence."

"And isn't it ungrateful to be obliged to say I can't marry your sister, after you have given me permission to ask her!"

"Not only ungrateful but unreasonable," said Robinette saucily, turning her head to look up the river and discovering from her point of vantage a moving object around the curve that led her to make hazardous remarks, knowing rescue was not far away. "What have you against my sister, pray?"

"Very little!" he said daringly, knowing well that she held him in her hand, and could make him dumb or let him speak at any moment she desired. "Almost nothing! only that _she_ is not offering me _her_ sister as a balm to my woes."

"She _has_ no sister; she is an only child!--There! there!" cried Robinette, "the tide is coming up again, and the mud banks off in that direction are all covered with water! I see somebody in a boat, rowing towards us with superhuman energy. Oh! if I hadn't worn a white dress! It will _not_ come smooth; and my lovely French hat is ruined by the dampness! My one shoe shows how inappropriately I was shod, and whoever is coming will say it is because I am an American. He will never know you wouldn't let me go upstairs and dress properly."

"It doesn't matter anyway," rejoined Mark, "because it is only Carnaby coming. You might know he would find us even if we were at the bottom of the river."

XIII

CARNABY TO THE RESCUE

At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o'clock. Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.

"Carnaby," said his grandmother, "do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?"

"No, I don't," said Carnaby, sulkily.

"Your cousin Robinetta,"--with meaning,--"perhaps you know her whereabouts?"

"Not I!" replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. "I was ferreting with Wilson." He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.

"Call Bates," commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. "Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?"

"Mr. Lavendar, ma'am," said Bates, "Mr. Lavendar and Mrs. Loring they went out in the boat after tea. Mr. Lavendar asked William for the key, and William he went down and got out the oars and rudder, ma'am."

"Does William know where they went?" asked Mrs. de Tracy in high displeasure. "Was it to Wittisham?"

"No, ma'am, William says they went down stream. He thinks perhaps they were going to the Flag Rock, and he says the gentleman wouldn't have a hard pull, as the tide was going out. But Mr. Lavendar knows the river well, ma'am, as well as Mr. Carnaby here."

"Then I conclude there is no immediate cause for anxiety," said Mrs. de Tracy with satire. "You can serve dinner, Bates; there seems no reason why we should fast as yet! However, Carnaby," she continued, "as the men cannot be spared at this hour, you had better go at once and see what has happened to our guests."

"Right you are," cried Carnaby with the utmost alacrity. He was hungry, but the prospect of escape was better than food. He rushed away, and his boat was in mid-river before Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon had finished their tepid soup.

A very slim young moon was just rising above the woods, but her tender light cast no shadows as yet, and there were no stars in the sky, for it was daylight still. The evening air was very fresh and cool; there was no wind, and the edges of the river were motionless and smooth, although in mid-stream the now in-coming tide clucked and swirled as it met the rush. Over at Wittisham one or two lights were beginning to twinkle, and there came drifting across the water a smell of wood smoke that suggested evening fires. Carnaby handled a boat well, for he had been born a sailor, as it were, and his long, powerful strokes took him along at a fine pace. But although he was going to look for Robinette and Mark, he was rather angry with both of them, and in no hurry. He rested on his oars indifferently and let the tide carry him up as it liked, while, with infinite zest, he unearthed a cigarette case from the recesses of his person, lit a cigarette, and smoked it coolly. Under Carnaby's apparent boyishness, there was a certain somewhat dangerous quality of precocity, which was stimulated rather than checked by his grandmother's repressive system. His smoking now was less the monkey-trick of a boy, than an act of slightly cynical defiance. He was no novice in the art, and smoked slowly and daintily, throwing back his head and blowing the smoke sometimes through his lips and sometimes through his nose. He looked for the moment older than his years, and a difficult young customer at that. His present sulky expression disappeared, however, under the influence of tobacco and adventure.

"Where the dickens are they?" he began to wonder, pulling harder.

A bend in the river presently solved the mystery. On a wide stretch of mud-bank, which the tide had left bare in going out, but was now beginning to cover again, a solitary boat was stranded.

With this clue to guide him, Carnaby's bright eyes soon discovered the two dim forms in the distance.

"Ahoy!" he shouted, and received a joyous answer. Robinette and Mark were the two derelicts, and their rescuer skimmed towards them with all his strength.

He could get only within a few yards of the rock to which their boat was tied, and from that distance he surveyed them, expecting to find a dismal, ship-wrecked pair, very much ashamed of themselves and getting quite weary of each other. On the contrary the faces he could just distinguish in the uncertain light, were radiant, and Robinette's voice was as gay as ever he had heard it. He leaned upon his oars and looked at them with wonder.

"Angel cousin!" cried Robinette. "Have you a little roast mutton about you somewhere, we are so hungry!"

"You _are_ a pretty pair!" he remarked. "What have you been and done?"

"We just went for a row after tea, Middy dear," said Robinette, "and look at the result."

"You're not rowing now," observed Carnaby pointedly.

"No," said Mark, "we gave up rowing when the water left us, Carnaby. Conversation is more interesting in the mud."

"But how did you get here? I thought you were going to the Flag Rock?" demanded Carnaby.

"Is there a Flag Rock, Middy dear? I didn't know," said Robinette innocently. "It shows we shouldn't go anywhere without our first cousin once removed. We just began to talk, here in the boat, and the water went away and left us." Then she laughed, and Mark laughed too, and Carnaby's look of unutterable scorn seemed to have no effect upon them. They might almost have been laughing at him, their mirth was so senseless, viewed in any other light.

"It's nearly eight o'clock," he said solemnly. "Perhaps you can form some idea as to what grandmother's saying, and Bates."

"Well, you're going to be our rescuer, Middy darling, so it doesn't matter," said Robinette. "Look! the water's coming up."

But Carnaby seemed in no mood for waiting. He had taken off his boots, and rolled up his trousers above his knees.

"I'd let Lavendar wade ashore the best way he could!" he said, "but I s'pose I've got to save you or there'd be a howl."

"No one would howl any louder than you, dear, and you know it. Don't step in!" shrieked Robinette, "I've confided a shoe already to the river-mud! I just put my foot in a bit, to test it, and down the poor foot went and came up without its shoe. Oh, Middy dear, if your young life--"

"Blow my young life!" retorted Carnaby. He was performing gymnastics on the edge of his boat, letting himself down and heaving himself up, by the strength of his arms. His legs were covered with mud.

"No go!" he said. "It's as deep as the pit here; sometimes you can find a rock or a hard bit. We must just wait."

They had not long to wait after all, for presently a rush of the tide sent the water swirling round the stranded boat, and carried Carnaby's craft to it.

"Now it'll be all right," said he. "You push with the boat-hook, Mark, and I'll pull"; but it took a quarter of an hour's pushing and pulling to get the boat free of the mud.

Except for the moon it would have been quite dark when the party reached the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby's arm. He was sulking still. There was something he felt, but could not understand, in the subtle atmosphere of happiness by which the truant couple seemed to be surrounded; a something through which he could not reach; that seemed to put Robinette at a distance from him, although her shoulder touched his and her hand was on his arm. Growing pangs of his manhood assailed him, the male's jealousy of the other male. For the moment he hated Mark; Mark talking joyous nonsense in a way rather unlike himself, as if the night air had gone to his head.

"I am glad you had the ferrets to amuse you this afternoon," said Robinette, in a propitiatory tone. "Ferrets are such darlings, aren't they, with their pink eyes?"

"O! _darlings_," assented Carnaby derisively. "One of the darlings bit my finger to the bone, not that that's anything to you."

"Oh! Middy dear, I am sorry!" cried Robinette. "I'd kiss the place to make it well, if we weren't in such a hurry!"

Carnaby began to find that a dignified reserve of manner was very difficult to keep up. His grandmother could manage it, he reflected, but he would need some practice. When they came to a place where there were sharp stones strewn on the road, he became a mere boy again quite suddenly, and proposed a "queen's chair" for Robinette. And so he and Lavendar crossed hands, and one arm of Robinette encircled the boy's head, while the other just touched Lavendar's neck enough to be steadied by it. Their laughter frightened the sleepy birds that night. The demoralized remnant of a Bank Holiday party would have been, Lavendar observed, respectability itself in comparison with them; and certainly no such group had ever approached Stoke Revel before. They were to enter by a back door, and Carnaby was to introduce them to the housekeeper's room, where he undertook that Bates would feed them. Lavendar alone was to be ambassador to the drawing room.

"The only one of us with a boot on each foot, of course we appoint him by a unanimous vote," said Robinette.

But the chief thing that Carnaby remembered, after all, of that evening's adventure, was Robinette's sudden impulsive kiss as she bade him good-night, Lavendar standing by. She had never kissed him before, for all her cousinliness, but she just brushed his cool, round cheek to-night as if with a swan's-down puff.

"That's a shabby thing to call a kiss!" said the embarrassed but exhilarated youth.

"Stop growling, you young cub, and be grateful; half a loaf is better than no bread," was Lavendar's comment as he watched the draggled and muddy but still charming Robinette up the stairway.

XIV

THE EMPTY SHRINE

Lavendar had discovered, much to his dismay, that he must return to London upon important business; it was even a matter of uncertainty whether his father could spare him again or would consent to his returning to Stoke Revel to conclude Mrs. de Tracy's arrangements about the sale of the land.

Affairs of the heart are like thunderstorms; the atmosphere may sometimes seem charged with electricity, and yet circumstances, like a sudden wind that sweeps the clouds away before they break, may cause the lovers to drift apart. Or all in a moment may come thunder, lightning, and rain from a clear sky, and there is nothing that is apt to precipitate matters like an unexpected parting.

When Lavendar announced that he had to leave Stoke Revel, two pairs of eyes, Miss Smeardon's and Carnaby's, instantly looked at Robinette to see how she received the news, but she only smiled at the moment. She was just beginning her breakfast, and like the famous Charlotte, "went on cutting bread and butter," without any sign of emotion.

"Hurrah!" thought the boy. "Now we can have some fun, and I'll perhaps make her see that old Lavendar isn't the only companion in the world."

"She minds," thought Miss Smeardon, "for she buttered that piece of bread on the one side a minute ago, and now she's just done it on the other--and eaten it too."

"She doesn't care a bit," thought Lavendar. "She's not even changed colour; my going or staying is nothing to her; I needn't come back."

He had made up his mind to return just the same, if it were at all possible, and he told Mrs. de Tracy so. She remarked graciously that he was a welcome guest at any time, and Carnaby, hearing this, pinched Lord Roberts till he howled like a fiend, and fled for comfort to his mistress's lap.

"You little coward," said Carnaby, "you should be ashamed to bear the name of a hero."

"I've mentioned to you before, Carnaby, I think, that I dislike that jest," said his grandmother, and Carnaby advancing to the injured beast said, "Yes, ma'am, and so does Bobs, doesn't he, Bobs?" reducing the lap-dog to paroxysms of fury. "Would it be any better if I called him _Kitchener_?" hissing the word into the animal's face. "Jealous, Bobs? Eh? _Kitchener_." This last word had a rasping sound that irritated the little creature more than ever; his teeth jibbered with anger, and Miss Smeardon had to offer him a saucer of cream before he could be calmed down enough for the rest of the party to hear themselves speak.

"Had you nice letters this morning? Mine were very uninteresting," Robinette remarked to Lavendar as they stood together at the doorway in the sunshine, while Carnaby chased the lap-dog round and round the lawn.

"I had only two letters; one was from my sister Amy, the candid one! her letters are not generally exhilarating."

"Oh, I know, home letters are usually enough to send one straight to bed with a headache! They never sound a note of hope from first to last; although if you had no home, but only a house, like me, with no one but a caretaker in it, you'd be very thankful to get them, doleful or not."

"I doubt it," Mark answered, for Amy's letter seemed to be burning a hole in his pocket at that moment. He had skimmed it hurriedly through, but parts of it were already only too plain.

When the others had gone into the house, he went off by himself, and jumping the low fence that divided the lawn from the fields beyond, he flung himself down under a tree to read it over again. Carnaby, spying him there, came rushing from the house, and was soon pouring out a tale of something that had happened somewhere, and throwing stones as he talked, at the birds circling about the ivied tower of the little church.

The field was full of buttercups up to the very churchyard walls. "I must get away by myself for a bit," Lavendar thought. "That boy's chatter will drive me mad." At this point Carnaby's volatile attention was diverted by the sight of a gardener mounting a ladder to clear the sparrows' nests from the water chutes, and he jumped up in a twinkling to take his part in this new joy. Lavendar rose, and strolled off with his hands in his pockets and his bare head bent. The grass he walked in was a very Field of the Cloth of Gold. His shoes were gilded by the pollen from the buttercups, his eyes dazzled by their colour; it was a relief to pass through the stone archway that led into the little churchyard. To his spirit at that moment the chill was refreshing. He loitered about for a few minutes, and then seeing that the door was open, he entered the church, closing the door gently behind him.

It was very quiet in there and even the chirping of the sparrows was softened into a faint twitter. Here at last was a place set apart, a moment of stillness when he might think things out by himself.

He took out Amy's letter, smoothing it flat on the prayer books before him, and forced himself to read it through. The early paragraphs dealt with some small item of family news which in his present state of mind mattered to Lavendar no more than the distant chirruping of the birds, out there in the sunshine. "You seem determined to stay for some time at Stoke Revel," his sister wrote. "No doubt the pretty American is the attraction. She sounds charming from your description, but my dear man, that's all froth! How many times have I heard this sort of thing from you before! Remember I know everything about your former loves."