Part 9

Wilbraham called out for them. They went in, and Harry said good-night at once and went upstairs. He was no longer sent to bed before the rest, but no objection was ever made if he went.

When he was alone in his room he breathed relief. His mother, perhaps, would come in on her way to bed, but otherwise he would be alone for the hours of the night, and yet so much not alone. He thought that to-night his mother would certainly come, and he undressed quickly so that when he should hear her he could get into bed and pretend to be asleep. This small piece of deception did not trouble him, since it would not trouble her. He had never given her what he owed her. Now he wanted to think uninterruptedly of Viola.

He leaned out of the window with his chin on his hands and gazed at the dark masses of trees in front of him and at the starry roof of the sky above them, which was above her, too. His window was on the same side of the house as that of the room in which Grant had slept the year before, but the trees were nearer to it. He gazed more at the sky than at the trees. Yes, in that direction, almost directly in front of him, lay the cottage in which she was--now at this very minute. It was a moving thought. Perhaps she was asleep, perhaps she was looking at the same stars as he was. Perhaps she was thinking of him, as he was thinking of her. That was a very stirring thought, and led him to shift his position. He wanted to be in motion as he thought of her. Later on, when the house was all asleep, he would dress and go out. For the present he could only walk about his room, when the waves of emotion that came to him stirred him from his place at the window.

But he could not think like that. He did not know what to think about. His impatience grew for the time to come when he should be alone and undisturbed. Then he would be able to think, out there under the stars. The trees oppressed him, as they had never done before. He got into bed. He would lie and think there until his mother had come and gone. But the moment he got into bed he fell asleep, and did not awake when she came in softly, shielding the light of her candle from his eyes.

How beautiful he looked as he lay there, his head slightly turned on the pillow and one arm and hand along his side on the counterpane--and how innocent! How she loved him for that beauty and innocence! She felt it as uplifting her from the lower plane of unrest and petulance upon which she was apt to move. She blessed him for the calming, purifying thoughts which he brought to her, and took comfort to herself in the thoughts that there must be something good in herself since it was partly owing to her influence that he was so free from evil. Yes, he was hers; her own dear child whom she loved, and who loved her. She had set herself aside and allowed another to direct his life and hers. Soon he would be free from that tutelage, but not from the bonds that her love had woven around him. She would reap her reward. Oh, it was a blessed thing to bear children, and after long years to have them as a prop and stay, as well as a solace. Not for many years would he leave her, in spirit, though in body they would sometimes be parted. She must be more to him now than she had ever been, and when the time came to give him up to another she would not complain, since she would have had him so perfectly for a time.

It was nearly two o'clock when Harry awoke, suddenly, and in complete possession of himself. He might have thought that he had not slept at all, but that the moon shining in at his window told him the hour as plainly as if it had been called in his ear.

He sprang out of bed and began to put on his clothes, but paused for a moment, asking himself why he was in such a hurry to do so.

As happens so often in sleep, the perplexities with which he had lain down seemed to have resolved themselves without conscious process. He had wanted to ask himself what had happened to him, but it seemed now as if some romantic mist had cleared away from his brain and nothing in particular had happened to him--nothing, at least, that needed any careful process of self-examination. He had met a very charming and friendly girl, and he was going to meet her again in the day that was already moving towards dawn. That would be very agreeable, but what was there in it to have put him into the state in which he had lived through the evening?

But, as the thought of meeting her again with half the hours of darkness already gone--presented itself to him, he felt again the glow of pleasure and anticipation. Yes, he wanted to think about her, and he could think best about her out in the open.

He dressed quickly and dropped from his window onto the grass, which was not more than ten feet or so below him. And now he seemed to be more master of himself, as he passed across a strip of moonlit green and into the dimness of the wood. He was reminded of the night in which the vision of the fairies dancing had come to him. Now it was full summer and then spring had only been on its way; his long-trained sense marked the difference in a thousand little signs. But that had been a night of silver moonshine, as this was. The contact with nature was clear on such quiet, illumined nights as this.

Viola!

She grew slowly upon him as he trod the soft grass or the dry crackling beech-mast. Her face, somewhat to his surprise, he could not call up before him, though he tried to see it with his inward eye. But he dwelt upon the slight supple figure that had moved beside him so freely and so gracefully. It gave him pleasure to recall her slender hand, which had lain in his, and he remembered her feet and ankles in their neat brown shoes and stockings, and the fall of her skirt over them, and the little hat of soft white straw with its twisted ribbon.

Again he was a little puzzled at the effect these memories had upon him. He had an eye for beauty of animate form. He loved the grace of certain animals; he and Wilbraham together had taken delight in pictures of Greek statuary and vase painting, with special reference to that beauty; he had admired the quick, clean limbs of the two children with whom he had been so much, and of other children of the village, older or younger. But it had been purely an aesthetic pleasure, and had brought with it none of the emotion with which the thought of Viola moved him.

He was a little frightened of this emotion and inclined to resist it; but something out of the soft night whispered to him that its current was one with all the emotions upon which he had fed, and grown in feeding. It was part of the secret which he had only half divined at the end of that vigil which seemed to have marked a stage in his life.

His joy in the thought of her increased. He recalled the tones of her voice, and the ring of her happy laughter, and dwelt upon things that she had said. They were nothing; they might have been said by anybody; none of them at which he smiled to himself were so worth remembering as the things that little Jane often said and he had remembered afterwards, smiling at them too, but not with that tenderness of feeling towards them.

He came to the park wall, where there was a door to which he kept the key. He seldom went outside the park on his night roamings. The woods continued here for some distance before the open ground was reached, though by the ride he had taken in the afternoon they ended with the wall, in which there was another locked gate. If he wanted to go on to the moor at night, and stand beneath the open sky, with nothing about him but space, it was by that path that he reached it. But he seemed to have had a purpose, unknown to him, in making for this door, and when he reached it he had no thought but for passing beyond the bounds of the park. It was by that path that the cottage in which Viola was could be reached most directly. He knew when he came to the door, but not before, that he meant to go to it.

He had left the key behind, but scaled the wall, not without some difficulty, and went on through the wood. By and by he came to a garden fence, and there beyond it, across the fruit bushes and the untidy tangle of late summer, was the cottage, low and thatched and whitewashed, in which she was sleeping.

He stood still and drew his breath.

Viola!

There was a little dormer window in the thatch, open. It might be that of the room in which she was sleeping. A cottager would not sleep in a room with the window open. He tried to remember what the cottage was like inside, and what rooms would be most likely to be given up to visitors. It seemed to him of the utmost importance to have it settled which was Viola's room.

He moved round to the front of the cottage, treading softly on the turf lest a sound should reveal his presence. Perhaps she was awake. It was not part of their secret that he should come out at night to gaze at her window. He must not reveal himself.

The wood extended a little way on to the moor by the side of the cottage. It was the point that had hidden it from them in the afternoon. But it faced open ground across a narrow fenced-in strip of garden. The whole of its front could be seen obliquely from the wood.

He stood in the shadow of a giant holly--and saw her.

She was sitting at a window, her chin resting on her hand, looking out across the moor to where the sea lay gleaming in the radiance of the moon. She was in white; her dusky hair lay about her shoulders and framed her young face, in which the dark eyes were set.

It was only a glimpse that he had of her, for he stole silently away, abashed at having surprised a revelation not meant for his eyes.

But it was like the glimpse that he had had of the fairies dancing. It thrilled and calmed him at the same time. He knew now that the fairies had not revealed all the secret to him. Viola was the secret, towards which all his life and all that he had learned of nature had been leading him. Viola lay at the warm, sweet heart of it all. Everything was changed by that vision he had had of her, and soon he would see her and tell her so.

*CHAPTER XI*

*THE WOODLAND POOL*

They met in the woodland path which Harry had taken in the night. He was there before the time appointed and threw himself down on the grass to await her coming. He could see some distance along the path from where he had stationed himself. It was narrow just here and the thick overhanging branches of the trees made a green shady tunnel flecked with quivering points of light.

He waited in a state of patient expectation, not greatly moved or stirred, but happy and contented. The time did not seem very long, though he waited for half an hour.

At last she came. She was dressed all in white. It seemed that it must have been so as she appeared, in the glooming green, which had been like an empty frame waiting for just that picture of maiden whiteness.

He sprang up to meet her, and she waved her hand when she saw him and hurried her steps a little. That frank greeting took them back to the point at which they had parted the day before. An ocean of feeling and experience had washed over Harry in the intervening hours, but it was lifted from him as they met and smiled their greetings. His was as frank and untroubled as hers.

They chattered gaily together like happy children as they turned aside from the path and went up through the wood. Harry felt an immeasurable content at being with her, laughed at nothing, and sometimes broke into snatches of song, which interrupted the conversation and made her laugh in turn. He had a fresh, clear voice, which Wilbraham had done something to train. It was a happy little song about June that was running in his head. She knew it, too, and after a time she took it up with him. "That's the way of June." Once when they had come to a place a little more open, they stood and sang it together in unison, and then laughed and went on again.

Her father had gone out painting on the common, she told him. He had asked her to go with him, but she had said it was too hot in the sun. She would wander in the woods. "I didn't say I should wander in the woods alone," she said.

"They never want to know where I'm going," said Harry. "I go out after breakfast and come back to lunch, and sometimes I tell them where I've been and sometimes I don't."

It seemed natural that their elders should go their way, and they should go theirs, in which elders had no concern. It was their secret, to which no one had a right but themselves. But it gave Harry great pleasure to hear from her in that way that it was to be their secret. "That's the way of June," he caroled again, in no very obvious connection.

They came to the still waters of the hidden pool. It would not have been surprising if no eye but Harry's had seen it since the trees had grown up around it. They had to make their way to it through thick bushes, which even in winter time could have concealed it. He had been careful in his visits not to go in and out of the thicket by the same way, and so leave a break. It was as if he had kept it secret for himself and her.

When they had pushed their way through they were in a little grassy fern-fringed space open to the sky, though it was flanked by big trees. There were one or two more of these tiny lawns sloping to the edge of the water, but that on to which they came was the largest. An age-old oak stood sentinel in the middle of it and it was flanked on one side by a yew that must have been older still, so vast was its dark circumference and so thick its red ravelled trunk.

Viola exclaimed with delight. The pool stretched in front of them, its surface unruffled, mirroring the blue sky and the green depths of the trees and the tall ferns that grew round it. There was no vegetation on it anywhere. Harry told her that it must be very deep, with a spring somewhere, or it would have been covered with weed. "It's much nicer like this," she said, laughing at him. When he asked her why she laughed, she said: "You're so proud of it." It did not seem much of a reason, but he liked her to laugh at him like that, looking at him and showing her pleasure in everything that he said that revealed a little of him.

For one moment as they stood by the edge of the water he had a slight sense of anti-climax. He had brought her, not without difficulty, to the pool, as if in some way it was to be the end of things, and in some way also the beginning. But without some lead on her part there was nothing much to stay there for. It must be either the accepted scene, or nothing but a point of interest from which they would presently move on, with nothing more that he had yet thought of in front of them.

The feeling disappeared as she turned towards the mossed roots of the oak, which made a seat for her. He threw himself among the fern at her feet with a sensation of desire accomplished. She had accepted it. The little lawn by the still water, hidden from all human eyes but theirs, was now consecrated by the simple fact of her taking her seat under the oak. She was queen of the pool and the deep summer woods.

So far in their intercourse little points had arisen in which it had been for one or the other of them to take a step further, if it were to continue. She had stood waiting as Harry rode up to her, he had stopped, and she had spoken; he had walked with her; he had asked her to meet him again; he had brought her to the pool, and she had seated herself there to await what should come. The initiative had been more his than hers, and now it was his again. The fact of her taking her seat there, under the tree, was an invitation, though she may not have meant it as such. They might talk there through the long morning hours, but their talk could not be only of externals. It must be on a more intimate note, or they might just as well roam the woods together lightly. This green nook by the water, hidden and secret, was a shrine in which they would worship together, as yet they knew not what, but it would be something sacred and beautiful that was calling to both of them.

There was silence between them for a moment--the silence of recollection which comes before an act of devotion. Then Harry looked up at her and said, with his voice trembling a little: "I've never told any one of this place before. I think I kept it for you."

She smiled down at him, with the light soft in her eyes. "I'm glad you did that," she said. "I shall never forget it. It is so quiet and green and beautiful," she added, a little hurriedly, as if the meaning of her words might be mistaken.

"I might have shown it to the children," he said, reflectively. "I don't quite know why I didn't. But I'm glad I didn't, too."

She asked him who the children were, and he told her about Jane and Pobbles, and the things that they had done together. She asked him a good many questions and was a little particular in fixing the exact date of Jane's birth, and of her arrival at Royd.

Harry answered all her questions and told her of the map that he had begun to draw for them the afternoon before. "It seems such ages ago," he said. "I was missing them both, but I don't think I've given them a thought since, until just now."

She allowed herself to soften towards Jane; for at one point she had suggested that she seemed rather precocious for so young a child. "Poor little things!" she said. "I'm sure they must miss you, too. You have been so good to them. And they are the only young friends you have had, aren't they?"

Talking of the children had a little lowered the note of intimacy. Her last words restored it. "Until I knew you," he answered.

"And that's such a very short time."

"No; it's a very long time. It's all the time that matters."

She smiled at him, and he went on. "Think of it, that only yesterday--yesterday, much later than this--I was feeling dull and unhappy. Then I rode out to the sea, and felt much better, but I didn't know anything about you. Fancy--only yesterday I had never seen you."

She listened with her eyes fixed upon him and her lips a little apart. "What did you think when you first saw me?" she asked, softly.

He hesitated, and then laughed. "I don't think I thought anything in particular," he said. "That's what is so extraordinary. What did you think when you saw me?"

It was the children's pretty game. "I like you. When did you begin to like me?" But she was not ready to tell him that yet. Or perhaps she might have told him, if he had acknowledged to some emotion at the first sight of her. "I was very glad to see somebody who could tell me where I was," she said. "I had heard of you, you know, from Mrs. Ivimey; but somehow I didn't think of you as you till you told me your name."

What had she heard of him? She wouldn't tell him that, either, or at least not all that she had heard about him; but he was so unaware of the estimation in which he was held by the people about him that he did not divine that she was keeping something back.

What Mrs. Ivimey had said of "the folks at the Castle," generally gave them something to talk about. She wanted to hear all about his life and those among whom he spent it; and he talked about himself as he had never talked to anybody before. His desire was to bring her into it all. He told her a great deal about his happy childhood, and some of the secrets that he had cherished. He told her about the stories he had made up for himself, and, with a little hesitation, the one about the garden and the flowers, and the end of it. "I was terribly ashamed," he said, "oh, for years afterwards. I'm not sure I haven't been ashamed of it right up till now. Now I've made a clean breast of it--to you--I don't mind so much. I must have been a horribly vain little boy. It used to distress me that my hair wasn't very black and very smooth. I used to pray that it might be made so."

Her eyes rested upon his fair close-cropped head. He was looking down and did not see the look in them. "I'm glad your prayer wasn't answered," she said. "But I think you must have been a very dear little boy. I wish I had known you then. What were the violas like in your story about the flowers? Or didn't they come in?"

"Yes, they did," he said, looking up at her. "They were different from the pansies--gentler and rather shy. They were never naughty."

"How old were they? Grownup?"

"No; children--with dark eyes and a lot of dark hair all about their faces."

"Were they like any little girls you had seen?"

"I don't think so. I think they must have been rather like you were then."

"My eyes were dark, and my hair was loose on my shoulders. Perhaps something put it into your head that you would know a Viola some day."

"Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes Wood-brown pools of Paradise."

He said it gently, looking into her eyes. She was startled for a moment. "You know it, then?" she said.

"Yes, I thought of it when you told me you had been named from a beautiful poem. But I couldn't say it then. I didn't know you well enough."

"Have you said it since? Do you know it all?"

"I read it when I got home yesterday. I know it all now."

"Say it to me."

He said it right through, slowly, and softly, dwelling on the name Viola--Viola--with many gradations of his flexible voice, and she thought she had never heard anything more beautiful than the way he uttered it. Sometimes her eyes rested on the waters of the pool, but more often on him, but his were on her all the time:

THE MAKING OF VIOLA

I

_The Father of Heaven_

Spin, daughter Mary, spin, Twirl your wheel with silver din; Spin, daughter Mary, spin, Spin a tress for Viola.

_Angels_

Spin, Queen Mary, a Brown tress for Viola!

II

_The Father of Heaven_

Weave, hands angelical, Weave a woof of flesh to pall-- Weave, hands angelical-- Flesh to pall our Viola.

_Angels_

Weave, singing brothers, a Velvet flesh for Viola!

III

_The Father of Heaven_

Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes, Wood-brown pools of Paradise-- Young Jesus, for the eyes, For the eyes of Viola.

_Angels_

Tint, Prince Jesus, a Dusked eye for Viola!

IV

_The Father of Heaven_

Cast a star therein to drown, Like a torch in cavern brown, Sink a burning star to drown Whelmed in eyes of Viola.

_Angels_

Lave, Prince Jesus, a Star in eyes of Viola!

V

_The Father of Heaven_

Breathe, Lord Paraclete, To a bubbled crystal meet-- Breathe, Lord Paraclete-- Crystal soul for Viola.

_Angels_

Breathe, Regal Spirit, a Flashing soul for Viola!

VI

_The Father of Heaven_

Child-angels, from your wings Fall the roseal hoverings, Child-angels, from your wings On the cheeks of Viola.

_Angels_

Linger, rosy reflex, a Quenchless stain, on Viola!

VII

_All things being accomplished, saith the Father of Heaven:_

Bear her down, and bearing, sing, Bear her down on spyless wing, Bear her down, and bearing, sing, With a sound of Viola.

_Angels_

Music as her name is, a Sweet sound of Viola!

VIII

Wheeling angels, past espial, Danced her down with sound of viol; Wheeling angels, past espial, Descanting on "Viola."

_Angels_

Sing, in our footing, a Lovely lilt of "Viola."

IX

Baby smiled, mother wailed, Eastward while the sweetling sailed; Mother smiled, baby wailed, When to earth came Viola.

_And her elders shall say:_

So soon have we taught you a Way to weep, poor Viola!

X

Smile, sweet baby, smile, For you will have weeping-while; Native in your Heaven is smile,-- But your weeping, Viola?

Whence your smiles, we know, but ah! When your weeping, Viola? Our first gift to you is a Gift of tears, my Viola!