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Plashers Mead: A Novel

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #33206 · 653,863 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Plashers Mead: A Novel

Author: Compton MacKenzie

Illustrator: Alfred James Dewey


        
Release date: July 20, 2010 [eBook #33206]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33206

Credits: Produced by Annie McGuire. This book was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLASHERS MEAD: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Annie McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Google
Print archive.









_Plashers Mead_

Compton Mackenzie




PLASHERS MEAD




[Illustration: GUY AND PAULINE]




PLASHERS MEAD


BY
COMPTON MACKENZIE

AUTHOR OF _CARNIVAL_


[Illustration]


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK & LONDON


Copyright, 1915, by Harper & Brothers


TO
GENERAL
SIR IAN HAMILTON
G.C.B., D.S.O.
AND THE GENERAL STAFF OF THE
MEDITERRANEAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                             PAGE

     I.  AUTUMN
         SEPTEMBER: OCTOBER: NOVEMBER                                  3

    II.  WINTER
         DECEMBER: JANUARY: FEBRUARY                                  55

   III.  SPRING
         MARCH: APRIL: MAY                                            99

    IV.  SUMMER
         JUNE: JULY: AUGUST                                          155

     V.  ANOTHER AUTUMN
         SEPTEMBER: OCTOBER: NOVEMBER                                205

    VI.  ANOTHER WINTER
         DECEMBER: JANUARY: FEBRUARY                                 253

   VII.  ANOTHER SPRING
         MARCH: APRIL: MAY                                           297

  VIII.  ANOTHER SUMMER
         JUNE: JULY: AUGUST                                          339

    IX.  EPIGRAPH
         GUY: PAULINE                                                371




AUTUMN




SEPTEMBER


The slow train puffed away into the unadventurous country; and the bees
buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again
audible. The last farewell that Guy Hazlewood flung over his shoulder to
a parting friend was more casual than it would have been had he not at
the same moment been turning to ask the solitary porter how many cases
of books awaited his disposition. They were very heavy, it seemed; and
the porter, as he led the way towards the small and obscure purgatory
through which every package for Shipcot must pass, declared he was
surprised to hear these cases contained merely books. He would not go so
far as to suggest that hitherto he had never faced the existence of
books in such quantity, for the admission might have impugned official
omniscience; yet there was in his attitude just as much incredulity
mingled with disdain of useless learning as would preserve his dignity
without jeopardizing the financial compliment his services were owed.

"Ah, well," he decided, as if he were trying to smooth over Guy's
embarrassment at the sight of these large packing-cases in the
parcel-office. "You'll want something as'll keep you busy this
winter--for you'll be the gentleman who've come to live down Wychford
way?"

Guy nodded.

"And Wychford is mortal dead in winter. Time walks very lame there, as
they say. And all these books, I suppose, were better to come along of
the 'bus to-night?"

Guy looked doubtful. It was seeming a pity to waste this afternoon
without unpacking a single case. "The trap...." he began.

But the porter interrupted him firmly; he did not think Mr. Godbold
would relish the notion of one of these packing-cases in his new trap.

"I could give you a hand...." Guy began again.

The porter stiffened himself against the slight upon his strength.

"It's not the heffort," he asserted. "Heffort is what I must look for
every day of my life. It's Mr. Godbold's trap."

The discussion was given another turn by the entrance of Mr. Godbold
himself. He was not at all concerned for his trap, and indeed by an
asseverated indifference to its welfare he conveyed the impression that,
new though it were, it was so much firewood, if the gentleman wanted
firewood. No, the trap did not matter, but what about Mr. Hazlewood's
knees?

"Ah, there you are," said the porter, and he and Mr. Godbold both stood
dumb in the presence of the finally insuperable.

"I suppose it must be the 'bus," said Guy. On such a sleepy afternoon he
could argue no longer. The books must be unpacked to-morrow; and the
word lulled like an opiate the faint irritation of his disappointment.
The porter's reiterated altruism was rewarded with a fee so absurdly in
excess of anything he had done, that he began to speak of a possibility
if, after all, the smallest case might not be squeezed ... but Mr.
Godbold flicked the pony, and the trap rattled up the station road at a
pace quite out of accord with the warmth of the afternoon. Presently he
turned to his fare:

"Mrs. Godbold said to me only this morning, she said, 'You ought to have
had a luggage-flap behind and that I shall always say,' And she was
right. Women is often right, what's more," the husband postulated.

Guy nodded absently; he was thinking about the books.

"Very often right," Mr. Godbold murmured.

Still Guy paid no attention.

"Very often," he repeated, but as Guy would neither contradict nor agree
with him, Mr. Godbold relapsed into meditation upon the justice of his
observation. The pony had settled down to his wonted pace and jogged on
through the golden haze of fine September weather. Soon the village of
Shipcot was left behind, and before them lay the long road winding
upward over the wold to Wychford. Guy thought of the friend who had left
him that afternoon and wished that Michael Fane were still with him to
enjoy this illimitable sweep of country. He had been the very person to
share in the excitement of arranging a new house. Guy could not remember
that he had ever made a suggestion for which he had not been asked; nor
could he call to mind a single occasion when his appreciation had
failed. And now to-night, when for the first time he was going to sleep
in his own house, his friend was gone. There had been no hint of
departure during the six weeks of preparation they had spent together at
the Stag Inn, and it was really perverse of Michael to rush back to
London now. Guy jumped down from the trap, which was climbing the hill
very slowly, and stretched his long legs. He was rather bored by his
loneliness, but as soon as he had stated so much to himself, he was
shocked at the disloyalty to his ambition. After all, he reassured
himself, he was not going back to a dull inn-parlor; to-night he was
going to sleep in an hermitage for the right to enjoy the seclusion of
which he had been compelled to fight very hard. It was weak to imagine
he was lonely already, and to fortify himself against this mood he
pulled out of his pocket his father's last letter and read it again
while he walked up the hill behind the trap.

  FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS,
  _September 10th_.

     DEAR GUY,--I agree with some of what you say, but I disagree with
     a good deal more, and I am entirely opposed to your method of
     procedure, which is to put it very mildly rather casual. Your
     degree was not so good as it ought to have been, but I did not
     reproach you, because in the Consular Service you had chosen a
     career which did not call specially for a first. At the same time
     you could, if you had worked, have got a first quite easily. Your
     six months with the Macedonian Relief people seems to have knocked
     all your consular ambitions on the head rather too easily, I
     confess, to make me feel very happy about your future. And now
     without consulting me you take a house in the country for the
     purpose of writing poetry! You imply in answer to my remonstrances
     that I am unable to appreciate the "necessity" for your step. That
     may be, but I cannot help asking where you would be now if I at
     your age, instead of helping my father with his school, had gone
     off to Oxfordshire to write poetry. Perhaps I had ambitions to
     make a name for myself with the pen. If I had, I quenched them in
     order to devote myself to what I considered my duty. I do not
     reproach you for refusing to carry on the school at Fox Hall. Your
     dear mother's last request was that I should not urge you to be a
     schoolmaster, unless you were drawn to the vocation. Her wishes I
     have respected, and I repeat that I am not hurt at your refusal.
     At the same time I cannot encourage what can only be described as
     this whim of yours to bury yourself in a remote village where,
     having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you
     announce your intention of living by poetry! I am the last person
     to underestimate the value of poetry, but as a livelihood it seems
     to me as little to be relied upon as the weather. However, you are
     of age. You have L150 a year of your own. You are with the
     exercise of the strictest economy independent. And this brings me
     to the point of your last letter in which you ask me to supplement
     your own income with an allowance of L150 a year from me. This
     inclination to depend upon your father is not what I conceive to
     be the artist's spirit of independence. This overdrawing upon your
     achievement fills me with dismay for the future. However, since I
     do not wish you to begin hampered by debt and as you assure me
     that you have spent all your own money on this idiotic house, I
     will give you L150, to be paid in quarterly instalments of L37
     10_s_, as from the 21st of this month for one year. Furthermore,
     at the end of next year if you find that poetry is less profitable
     than even you expect, I will offer you a place at Fox Hall,
     thereby securing for you the certainty of a life moderately free
     from financial worries. After all, even a schoolmaster has some
     spare time, and I dare say our greatest poets did much of their
     best work in their spare time. The idea of writing poetry all day
     and every day appeals to me as enervating and ostentatious.

  Your affectionate father,
  JOHN HAZLEWOOD.

Guy stood still when he had finished the letter, and execrated mutely
the damnable dependence that compelled him to accept gratefully and
humbly this gift of L150. Yet with no money of his own coming in till
December, with actually a housekeeper on her way from Cardiff and his
house already furnished, he must accept the offer. In a year's time he
would have proved the reasonableness of his request; and he began to
compose a scene between them, in which his father would almost on bended
knees beg him to accept an allowance of L300 a year in consideration of
the magnificent proof he had afforded to the world of being in the
direct line of English poets.

"And I mustn't forget to send him a sonnet on his birthday," said Guy to
himself.

This notion restored his dignity, and he hurried on to overtake the trap
which was waiting on the brow of the hill.

"You were saying something about women being right," he reminded Mr.
Godbold, as he sat down again beside him. "Has it ever struck you that
fathers are nearly always wrong?"

"That wouldn't do for me at all," said Mr. Godbold, shaking his head.
"You see I'm the father of nine, and if I wasn't always right, sir, I
shouldn't be no better than a bull in a china-shop where I live. I've
_got_ to be right, Mr. Hazlewood."

"I suppose that's what the Pope felt," Guy murmured.

"Now do you reckon this here Pope they speak of really exists in a
manner of speaking?" Mr. Godbold asked, as the trap bowled along the
level stretch of upland road. "You know there's some of these
narrow-minded mortals at Wychford as will have it that Mr. Grey, our
parson, is in with the Pope, and I said to one or two of them the other
night while we were arguing in the post-office, I said, 'Have any of you
wise men of Gotham ever seen this Pope as you're so knowing about?'"

"And had they?" asked Guy, encouragingly.

"Not one of them," said Mr. Godbold. "And I thought to myself as I was
walking up home, I thought now what if there wasn't no such thing as a
Pope any more than there's women with fish-tails and all this rubbish
you read of in books. If you ask my opinion of books, Mr. Hazlewood, I
tell you that I think books is as bad for some people as wireworms is
for carnations. They seem to regular eat into them."

Guy laughed. Misgivings about the wisdom of his choice vanished, and he
was being conscious of a very intimate pleasure in thus driving back to
Wychford from the station. The country tossed for miles to right and
left in great stretches of pasturage, and when Mr. Godbold pulled up for
a moment to look at a trace, the air, brilliantly dusted with autumnal
gold, seemed to endow him with the richness of its silence; along the
sparse hedgerow chicory flowers burned with the pale intense blue of the
September sky above, and Guy felt like them, worshipful of the cloudless
scene. The road ran along the upland for half a mile before it dipped
suddenly down into the valley of the Greenrush, from which the spire of
Wychford church came delicately up into the air, like a coil of smoke
ascending from the opalescent corona that hung over the small town
clustered against the farther hillside. Down in that valley close to the
church was Plashers Mead, and Guy watched eagerly for the first sight of
his long, low house. Already the sparkle of the more distant curves of
the Greenrush was visible; but Plashers Mead was still hidden by the
slope of the bank. Presently this broke away to a ragged hedge, and the
house displayed itself as much an integral part of the landscape as an
outcrop of stone.

"Tasty little place," commented Mr. Godbold while the trap jolted
cautiously down the last twist of the hilly road. "But I reckon old
Burrows was glad to let it. You're young, though, and I dare say you
won't mind being flooded out in winter. Two years ago Burrows's son's
wife's nephew was floating paper boats in the front hall. But you're
young, and I dare say you'll enjoy it."

The pony swept round the corner and pulled up with a jerk at the wooden
gateway in the gray wall overhung by lime-trees that concealed from the
highroad the moist fields and garden of Plashers Mead.

"I'm sleeping here to-night, you know, for the first time," said Guy. He
had tried all the way back not to make this announcement, but the sight
of his own gateway destroyed his reserve.

"Well, you'll have a fine night, that's one good job," Mr. Godbold
predicted.

"And the moon only just past the full," said Guy.

"That's right," Mr. Godbold agreed; and the tenant passed through the
gateway into the garden, where every path had its own melody of running
water. He examined with proprietary solicitude the espaliers of
apple-trees, and admired for the twentieth time the pledge they offered
by their fantastic forms of his garden's antiquity. He pinched several
pippins that seemed ripe, but they were still hard; and he could find
nothing over which to exert his lordship until he saw by the edge of
the path a piece of groundsel. Having solemnly exterminated the weed,
Guy felt that the garden must henceforth recognize him as master, and he
walked on through a mass of dropsical cabbages and early kale until he
came face to face with the house, the sudden view of which like this
never failed to give him a peculiar pleasure. The tangled garden, long
and narrow, was bounded on the right, as one entered, by the Greenrush,
over which hung a thicket of yews that completely shut out the first
straggling houses of Wychford. On the left the massed espaliers ended
abruptly in a large water-meadow reaching to the foot of the hill along
which the highroad climbed in a slow diagonal. By the corner of the
house the garden had narrowed to the apex of a thin triangle, so that
the windows looked out over the water-meadow and, beyond, up the wide
valley of the Greenrush to where the mighty western sky rested on
rounded hills. At this apex the Greenrush flung a tributary stream to
wash the back of the house and one side of the orchard, whence it wound
in extravagant curves towards the easterly valley. The main branch,
damned up to form a deep and sluggish mill-stream, flowed straight on,
dividing Guy's domain from the churchyard. At the end of the orchard on
this side was a lock-gate through which a certain amount of water
continuously escaped from the mill-stream, enough, indeed, to make the
orchard an island, as it trickled in diamonded shallows to reinforce the
idle tributary. Somewhere in the farther depths of the eastern valley
all vagrant waters were united, and somewhere still more remote they
came to a confluence with their father the Thames.

Guy sat upon the parapet of the well under the shade of a sycamore-tree
and regarded with admiration and satisfaction the exterior of his house.
He looked at the semicircular porch of stone over the front door and
venerated the supporting cherubs who with puffed-out cheeks had blown
defiance at wind and rain since the days of Elizabeth. He counted the
nine windows, five above and four below, populating with the shapes of
many friends the rooms they lightened. He looked at the steep roof of
gray-stone tiles rich with the warm golden green of mossy patterns. He
looked at the four pear-trees against the walls of the house barren now
for many years. He looked at himself in silhouette against the silver
sky of the well-water; and then he went indoors.

The big stone-paved hall was very cool, and the sound of the stream at
the back came babbling through lattices open to the light of a green
world. Guy could not make up his mind whether the inside of the house
smelled very dry or very damp, for there clung about it that odor
peculiar to rustic age, which may be found equally in dry old barns and
in damp potting-sheds. He wished he could furnish the hall worthily. At
present it contained only a high-back chair, an alleged contemporary of
Cromwell, which was doddering beside the hooded fireplace; a
warming-pan; and an oak chest which remained a chest only so long as
nobody either sat upon it or lifted the lid. There was also a
grandfather-clock which had suffered an abrupt resurrection of four
minutes' duration when it was recently lifted out of the furniture-van,
but had now relapsed into the silence of years. Leading out of the hall
was a small, empty room which had been dedicated to the possession of
his friend Michael Fane; together they had planned to paper it with gold
and paint the ceiling black. Michael, however, had still another year at
Oxford, and the room with an obelisk of lining-paper standing upright on
the bare floor was now a little desolate. On the other side of the hall
was the dining-room, which Guy, by taxing his resources, had managed to
furnish very successfully. It was a square room painted emerald-green
above the white wainscot. Two inset cupboards were filled with glass and
china: there were four Chippendale chairs and an oval Sheraton table,
curtains of purple silk, some old English water-colors, and two
candlesticks of Sheffield plate. Beyond the dining-room was the kitchen,
the corridor to which was endowed with a swinging baize door considered
by the landlord to be the finest feature of the house. The problem of
equipping the kitchen had seemed insoluble until Guy heard of a sale in
the neighborhood. He had bicycled over to this and bought the contents
of the large kitchen at auction. The result was that the dresser
encroached upon the table, that the table had one leg in the fender, and
that a row of graduated dish-covers, the largest of which would have
sheltered two turkeys, occupied whatever space was left. All that
remained of Guy's own money had been invested in his kitchen, and he
accounted for the large size of everything by the fact of the auction's
having been held in the open air, where everything had looked so much
smaller. Now, as he contemplated dubiously the result, he wondered what
Miss Peasey would say to it. She and the books would arrive together at
half past nine to-night. He hoped his unknown housekeeper would not be
irritated by these dish-covers, and as a precautionary measure he
unhooked the largest, carried it up-stairs, and deposited it on the
floor of an unfurnished bedroom. The staircase ran steep and straight up
from the hall into a long corridor with more casements opening on the
orchard behind. The bedroom at one end was dedicated to the hope of
Michael Fane's occupation and was always referred to in letters as his:
"_By the way I put the largest dish-cover in your bedroom._" The next
two bedrooms were also empty and belonged in spirit to the friends with
whom Guy had lived during his last year at Oxford. The fourth was his
own, very simply and sparsely furnished in comparison with the bedroom
up in the roof which was intended for Miss Peasey. The preparation of
that for an elderly unmarried woman had involved a certain
voluptuousness of rep and fumed oak and heavily decorated china, the
fruit of the second-best bedroom in the house of the dish-covers. As
Guy went up the crooked stairs and knocked his head on three successive
beams, he hoped Miss Peasey would not be as disproportionately large as
the kitchen dresser. Her handwriting had been spidery enough, and he
pictured her hopefully as small and wizened. Miss Peasey's bower with
the big dormer window surveying the tree-tops of the orchard was
certainly a success, and Guy saw that Michael had with happy intuition
of female aspiration hung on the wall opposite her bed a large
steel-engraving of Dore's Martyrs, which had been included with two
hammocks and a fishing-rod in one of the odd lots lightly bid for at the
auction. There did not seem anything else she could want; so, having
killed a bluebottle with a tartan pincushion, he came down-stairs.

Guy had left his own room to the last, partly because he regretted so
much the delay in the arrival of those books and partly because, however
inadequately equipped was the rest of the house, this room was always
the final justification of his tenancy. It was a larger room than any of
the others, for the corridor did not cut off its share of the back. It
possessed, in addition to the usual window looking out over the western
side of the valley, a very large bay which hung right over the stream,
with a view of the orchard, of the church steeple, of the water-meadows
beyond, and of the wold rolling across the horizon. This morning Michael
and he had pushed the furniture into place, had set in order the great
wicker chairs and nailed against the wall the frames of green canvas.
The floor was covered with a sweet-smelling mat of Abingdon rushes; and
the curtains of his old rooms in Balliol were hung in place, dim green
curtains sown with golden fleurs-de-lys. The ivory image of an emaciated
saint standing on the mantelshelf between candlesticks of old wrought
iron was probably a Spanish Virgin, but Guy preferred to say she was
Saint Rose of Lima because "_O Rose of Lima_" seemed a wonderful
apostrophe to begin a poem. Nothing indeed remained for the room's
perfection but to fill the new bookshelves on either side of the
fireplace. Why had he not hired a cart in Shipcot? They would have been
here by now, and he would actually have been able to begin work
to-night, setting thus a noble period to these last six weeks of
preparation.

Guy dragged a chair into the bay window and, balancing his long legs on
the sill, he made numerous calculations in which Miss Peasey's wages,
the weekly bills for food, and the number of times he would have to go
up to London were set against L150 a year. When he woke up, the
lime-trees that bordered the highroad had flung their shadows half-way
across the meadow, and the air was a fume of golden gnats against the
dipping sun. Within ten minutes the sun vanished, and the mists began to
rise. Guy, feeling rather chilly and ashamed of himself for falling
asleep, rose hurriedly and went up into the town. He interviewed the
driver of the omnibus and told him to look out for his books, and as an
afterthought he mentioned the arrival of Miss Peasey. He wished now he
had written and told his housekeeper to spend the night in Oxford; and
he hoped she would not be prejudiced against Plashers Mead by a
five-mile drive in a cold omnibus after her tiring journey from Cardiff.
He dawdled about the steep village street for a while, gossiping with
tradesmen at their doors and watching the warmth fade out of the gray
houses in the falling dusk. Then he went to eat his last meal in the
Stag Inn.

After supper Guy returned to Plashers Mead, wandering round the house,
dropping a great deal of candle-grease everywhere, and working himself
up into a state of anxiety over Miss Peasey's advent. It would be
terrible if she demanded her fare back to Wales the moment she arrived;
and to propitiate her he put the best lamp in the kitchen, whence (as
with such illumination it looked more than ever protuberant) he took
another dish-cover up to Michael's bedroom. Since it was still but a
few minutes after eight and the omnibus would not come for another hour
and a half, he lit all the wax candles in his own room and wondered what
to do. The tall shadows wavering in the draught were seeming cold and
uncomfortable without a fire, so he restlessly threw back the curtains
of the bay window to watch the rising of the moon. At that instant her
rim appeared above the black hills, and presently a great moon of
dislustered gold swam along the edge of the earth. Although she appeared
to shed no light, the valley responded to her presence, and Guy was
lured from his room to walk for a while in the dews.

Out in the orchard a heavy mist wrapped him in wet folds of silver; yet
overhead there was clear starlight, and he could watch the slow
burnishing of the moon's face in her voyage up the sky. It was a queer
country in which he found himself, where all the tree-tops seemed to be
floating away from invisible trunks, and where for a while no sound was
audible but his own footsteps making a music almost of violins in the
saturated grass. The moon wrought upon the vapors a shifting damascene;
and far behind, as it seemed, a rufous stain showed where the candles in
his room were still alight. Gradually a variety of sounds began to play
upon the silence. He could hear the dry squeak of a bat and cows
munching in the meadows on the other side of the stream. The stream
itself babbled and was still, babbled and was still; while along the
bank voles were taking the water with splashes that went up and down a
scale like the deep notes of a dulcimer. Far off, an owl hooted, an
otter barked; and then as he crossed the middle of the orchard he was
hearing nothing but apples fall with solemn thud, until the noise of the
lock-gate swallowed all lighter sounds. Here the mist had temporarily
dissolved, and in the moonlight he could see water gushing forth like an
arch of lace and the long bramble-sprays combing the shallows below.
Soon the orchard was left behind and he was in the mist of a wide
meadow, where all was silent again except for the faint sobbing of the
grass to his footsteps. He walked straight into the moon's face,
stumbling from time to time over molehills with an eery fragrance of
fresh-turned soil, and wishing he could ever say in verse a little of
the magic this autumnal night was shedding upon his fancy.

"By gad! if I can't write here, I ought to be shot," he declared.

The church clock struck the half-hour as appositely as if his own father
had said something about the need for hurrying up and showing what he
could do.

"Ah, but I'm not going to be hurried," said Guy, aloud. And since the
clock could not answer him again, it was as good as having the best of
an argument.

Guy walked on, and after a while could hear once more the purling of the
stream. He thought there was something strangely human about this river
in the way it wandered so careless of direction. When he had left these
banks, they had been going away from him: now here they were coming back
like himself towards the moon, so that presently he was able without
changing his course to walk under their border of willows. The mist had
drifted away from the stream, leaving the spires of loosestrife plainly
visible, and more dimly on the other side the forms of huge cattle at
pasture. There was, too, a smell of meadowsweet softening with a summer
languor the sharp September night. The willows gave way to overhanging
thickets of hawthorn, as the river suddenly swept round to make a noose
that was completed but a few yards ahead of where he was standing. He
could not see on account of the bushes the size of the peninsula so
formed, and when suddenly he heard from the depths a sound of laughter,
so full was his brain of moonshine that if he had come face to face with
a legendary queen of fairies, he would hardly have been surprised. It
was with the deliberate encouragement of a vision surpassing all the
fantasies of moon and mist that Guy stopped; and, indeed, on a sensuous
impulse to pamper his imagination with an unsolved mystery he had almost
turned round to go back. Curiosity, however, was too strong; for, as he
paused irresolute, the fairy mirth tinkling again from the recesses of
that bewitched inclosure died away upon the murmur of a conversation,
and he could not leave any longer inviolate that screen of hawthorns.

In the apogee of the river's noose two girls, clearly seen against the
silver glooms beyond, were bending over a basket. Their heads were close
together, and it was not until Guy was almost on top of them that he
realized how impertinent his intrusion might seem. He drew back,
blushing, just as one of the girls became aware of his presence and
jumped up with an "oh" that floated away from her as lightly as a moth
upon the moonshine. Her sister (Guy decided at once they were sisters)
jumped up also and, luckily for him, since it offered the opportunity of
a natural apology, overturned the basket. For a moment the three of them
gazed at one another over the mushrooms that were tumbled upon the grass
to be an elfin city of the East, so white and cold were their cupolas
under the moon.

"Can't I help to pick them up?" Guy asked, wondering to himself why on
this night of nights that was the real beginning of Plashers Mead he
should be blessed by this fortunate encounter. The two girls were
wearing big white coats of some rough tweed or frieze on which the mist
lay like gossamer; and, as neither of them had a hat, Guy could see that
one was very dark and the other fair.

"We wondered who you were," said the dark one.

"I live at Plashers Mead," said Guy.

"I know; I've seen you often," she answered.

"And Father says every day, 'My dears, I really must call upon that
young man.'"

It was the fair one who spoke, and Guy recognized that it was her
laughter he had first heard.

"My other sister is somewhere close by," said the dark one.

Guy was kneeling down to gather up the mushrooms, and he looked round to
see another white figure coming towards them.

"Oh, Margaret, do let's introduce him to Monica. It will be such fun,"
cried the fair sister.

Guy saw that Margaret was shaking her head, but nevertheless when the
third sister came near enough she did introduce him. Monica was more
like Margaret, but much fairer than the first fair sister; and with her
reserve and her pale-gold hair she seemed, as she greeted him, to be
indeed a wraith of the moon.

"Shall I carry the mushrooms back for you?" Guy offered.

"Oh no, thanks," said Monica, quickly. "The Rectory is quite out of your
way."

He felt the implication of an eldest sister's disapproval, and not
wishing to spoil the omens of romance, he left the three sisters by the
banks of the Greenrush and was soon on his way home through the webs of
mist.

How extraordinary that he and Michael should have spent six weeks at
Wychford without realizing that the Rector had three such daughters.
Godbold had gossiped about him only this afternoon, reporting that he
was held by some of his parishioners to be in with the Pope: they might
more justly suspect him of being in with Titania. Monica, Margaret ...
he had not heard the name of the third. Monica had seemed a little
frigid, but Margaret and ... really when the omnibus arrived he must
find out the name of the Rector's third daughter, of that one so
obviously the youngest, with her light-brown hair and her laugh of which
even now, as he paused, he fancied he could still hear the melodious
echo. Monica, Margaret, and ... Rose, perhaps, for there had been
something of a dewy eglantine about her. Surely that was indeed the echo
of their voices; but, as upon distance the wayward sound eluded him,
the belfry clock with whir and buzz and groan made preparation to strike
the hour. Nine strokes boomed, leaving behind them a stillness absolute.
The poet thought of time before him, of the three sisters by the river,
of fame to come, and of his own fortune in finding Plashers Mead. Four
months ago he had been in Macedonia, full of pro-consular romance, and
now he was in England with a much keener sense of every moment's
potentiality than he had ever known in the dreams of Oriental dominion.
This sublunary adventure indicated how great a richness of pastoral life
lay behind the slumber of a forgotten town; and it was seeming more than
ever a pity Michael had not waited until to-night, so that he also might
have met Monica and Margaret and that smallest innominate sister with
the light-brown hair. Guy could not help arranging with himself for his
friend to fall in love with one of them; and since he at once allotted
Monica to Michael, he knew that he himself preferred one of the others.
But which? Oh, it was ridiculous to ask such questions after seeing
three girls for three minutes of moonlight. Perhaps it really had been
sorcery, and in the morning, when he met them in Wychford High Street,
they would appear dull and ordinary. They could not be so beautiful as
he thought they were, he decided, since if they were he must have heard
of their beauty. Nevertheless, it was in a mood of almost elated
self-congratulation that Guy found himself hurrying through the orchard
towards the candle-light of his room.

The arrival of Miss Peasey, now that it was upon him, banished
everything else; and instead of dreaming deliciously of that encounter
in the water-meadows, he stood meditating on the failure of the kitchen.
As he regarded the enormous dresser, the table trampling upon the
fender, the seven dish-covers mocking his poor crockery, Guy had little
hope that Miss Peasey would stay a week; and then suddenly, worse than
any failure of equipment, he remembered that she might be hungry. He
looked at his watch. A quarter past nine. Of course she would be hungry.
She probably had eaten nothing but a banana since breakfast in Cardiff.
Guy rushed out and surprised the landlord of the Stag by begging him to
send the hostler down at once with cold beef and stout and cheese.

"There's the 'bus," he cried. "Don't forget. At once. My new
housekeeper. Long journey. And salad. Forgot she'd be hungry. Salt and
mustard. I've got plates."

The omnibus went rumbling past, and Guy followed at a jog-trot down the
street, saw it cross the bridge, and, making a spurt, caught it up just
as a woman alighted by the gate of Plashers Mead.

"Ah, Miss Peasey," said Guy, breathlessly. "I went up the street to see
if the 'bus was coming. Have you had a comfortable journey?"

"Mr. Hazlewood?" asked the new housekeeper, blinking at him.

The guard of the omnibus at this moment informed Guy that he had some
cases for Plashers Mead.

"Where is Mr. Hazlewood, then?" asked Miss Peasey, turning sharply.

Over her shoulder Guy saw that the guard was apparently punching the
side of his head, and he said, more loudly:

"I'm Mr. Hazlewood."

"I thought you were. I'm a little bit deaf after traveling, so you'll
kindly speak slightly above the usual, Mr. Hazlewood."

"I hope you've had a comfortable journey," Guy shouted.

"Oh yes, I think I shall," she said with what Guy fancied was meant to
be an encouraging smile. "I hope you haven't lost any of my parcels,
young man," she continued, with a severe glance at the guard.

"Four and a string-bag. Is that right, mum?" he bellowed. "She's as deaf
as an adder, Mr. Hazlewood," he explained, confidentially. "We had a
regular time getting of her into the 'bus before we found out she
couldn't hear what was being said to her. Oh, very obstinate she was."

"This is the garden," Guy shouted, as they passed in through the gate.

"Yes, I dare say," Miss Peasey replied, ambiguously.

Guy wondered how she would ever be got up-stairs to her room.

"This is the hall," he shouted. "Rather unfurnished I'm afraid."

"Oh yes, I'm quite used to the country," said Miss Peasey.

Guy was now in a state of nervous indecision. Just as he was going to
shout to Miss Peasey that the kitchen was through the baize door the
hostler from the Stag came up to know whether mutton would do instead of
beef, and just as he said pork would be better than nothing the guard
arrived with Miss Peasey's tin box and wanted to know where he should
put it. The hall seemed to be thronged with people.

"You'd like your boxes up-stairs, wouldn't you?" he shouted to the
housekeeper.

"Oh, do you want to come up-stairs?" she said, cheerfully.

"No, your boxes. The kitchen's in here."

He really hustled her into the kitchen and, having got her at last in a
well-lighted room, he begged her to sit down and expect her supper. By
this time two men who had been summoned by the driver of the omnibus to
bring in Guy's books were staggering and sweating into the hall.
However, the confusion relaxed in time; and before the clock struck ten
Guy was alone with Miss Peasey and without an audience was managing to
make her understand most of what he was saying.

"I'll come down in about half an hour," he told her, "and show you your
room."

"It's a long way," said Miss Peasey, when the moment was arrived to
conduct her up the winding staircase to her bower in the roof. Guy had
calculated that she would miss all the beams, and so from a desire to
make the best of the staircase he had not mentioned them. He sighed with
relief when she passed into her bedroom, unbumped.

"Oh, quite nice," she pronounced, looking round her.

"In the morning we'll talk over everything," said Guy, and with a
hurried good-night he rushed away.

In the hall he attacked with a chisel the first packing-case. One by one
familiar volumes winked at him with their gold lettering in the
candle-light. He chose Keats to take up-stairs, and, having read "St.
Agnes' Eve," stood by the window of his bedroom poring upon the moonlit
valley.

In bed his mind skipped the stress of Miss Peasey's arrival and fled
back to the meadows where he had been walking.

"Monica, Margaret...." he began, dreamily. It was a pity he had
forgotten to find out the name of that sister who was so like a wild
rose. Never mind; he would find out to-morrow. And for the second time
that day the word lulled him like an opiate.




OCTOBER


It was a blowy afternoon early in October, and Pauline was sitting by
the window of what at Wychford Rectory was still called the nursery. The
persistence of the old name might almost be taken as symbolic of the way
in which time had glided by that house unrecognized, for here were
Monica, Margaret, and Pauline grown up before any one had thought of
changing its name even to school-room. And with the old name it had
preserved the character childhood had lent it. There was not a chair
that did not appear now like the veteran survivor of childish wars and
misappropriations, nor any table nor cupboard that did not testify to an
affectionate ill-treatment prolonged over many years. On the walls the
paper which had once been vivid in its expression of primitive gaiety
was now faded; but the pattern of berries, birds, and daisies still
displayed that eternally unexplored tangle as freshly as once it was
displayed for childish fancies of adventure. Pauline had always loved
the window-seat, and from here she had always seen before any one else
at the Rectory the first flash of Spring's azure eyes, the first graying
of Winter's locks. So now on this afternoon she could see the bullying
southwest wind thunderous against whatever laggards of Summer still
tried to shelter themselves in the Rectory garden. Occasionally a few
raindrops seemed to effect a frantic escape from the fierce assault and
cling desperately to the window-panes, but since nobody could call it a
really wet day Pauline had been protesting all the afternoon against
her sisters' unwillingness to go out. Staying indoors was such a
surrender to the season.

"We ought to practise that Mendelssohn trio," Monica argued.

"I hate Mendelssohn," Pauline retorted.

"Well, I shall practise the piano part."

"Oh, Monica, it will sound so dreadfully empty," cried Pauline. "Won't
it, Margaret?"

"I'm reading _Mansfield Park_. Don't talk," Margaret murmured. "If I
could write like Jane Austen," she went on, dreamily, "I should be the
happiest person in the world."

"Oh, but you are the happiest person already," said Pauline. "At least
you ought to be, if you'd only...."

"You know I hate you to talk about him," Margaret interrupted.

Pauline was silent. It was always a little alarming when Margaret was
angry. With Monica one took for granted the disapproval of a fastidious
nature, and it was fun to tease her; but Margaret with her sudden
alternations of hardness and sympathy, of being great fun and
frightfully intolerant, it was always wiser to propitiate. So Pauline
stayed in the window-seat, pondering mournfully the lawn mottled with
leaves, and the lily-pond that was being seamed and crinkled by every
gust of the wind that skated across the surface. The very high gray wall
against which the Japanese quinces spread their peacock-tails of foliage
was shutting her out from the world to-day, and Pauline wished it were
Summer again so that she could hurry through the little door in the wall
and across the paddock to the banks of the Greenbush. In the Rectory
punt she would not have had to bother with sisters who would not come
out for a walk when they were invited.

The tall trees on either side of the lawn roared in the wind and
showered more leaves upon the angry air. What a long time it was to
Summer, and for no reason that she could have given herself Pauline
began to think about the man who had taken Plashers Mead. Of course it
was obvious he would fall in love either with Monica or with Margaret,
and really it must be managed somehow that he should choose Monica.
Everybody fell in love with Margaret, which was so hard on poor Richard
out in India, who was much the nicest person in the world, and whom
Margaret must never give up. Pauline looked at her sister and felt
afraid the new tenant of Plashers Mead would fall in love with her, for
Margaret was so very adorable with her slim hands and her somber hair.

"Really almost more like a lily than a girl," thought Pauline. Somehow
the comparison reassured her, since it was impossible to think of any
one's rushing to gather a lily without a great deal of hesitation.

"I wish poor Richard would write and tell her she is like a lily,
instead of always writing such a lot about the bridge he is building,
though I expect it's a very wonderful bridge."

After all, Monica with her glinting evanescence was just as beautiful as
Margaret, and even more mysterious; and if she only would not be so
frightening to young men, who would not fall in love with her! Pauline
wondered vaguely if she could not persuade Margaret to go away for a
month, so that the new tenant of Plashers Mead might have had time to
fall irremediably in love with Monica before she came back. Richard
would certainly be dreadfully worried out in India when he heard of a
young man at Plashers Mead, and certainly rather ... yes, certainly in
church on Sunday he had appeared rather charming. It was only last
Spring that poor Richard had wished he could be living in Plashers Mead
himself, and they had had several long discussions which never shed any
light upon the problem of how such an ambition would be gratified.

"I expect Monica will be like ice, and Margaret will seem so much easier
to talk to, and if I dared to suggest that Monica should unbend a
little she would freeze me as well. Oh, it's all very difficult," sighed
Pauline to herself, "and perhaps I'd better not try to influence things.
Only, if he does seem to like Margaret much better than Monica, I shall
have to bring poor Richard into the conversation, which always makes
Margaret cross for days."

As she came to this resolution Pauline looked half apprehensively at her
sister reading in the tumble-down arm-chair by the fire. How angry
Margaret would be if she guessed what was being plotted, and Pauline
actually jumped when she suddenly declared that _Mansfield Park_ was
almost the best book Jane Austen ever wrote.

"Is it, darling Margaret?" said Pauline, with a disarming willingness to
be told again that it certainly was.

"Or perhaps _Emma_," Margaret murmured, and Pauline hid herself behind
the curtains. How droll Father had been about the "new young creature"
at Plashers Mead! It had been so difficult to persuade him to interrupt
one precious afternoon of planting bulbs to do his duty either as a
neighbor or as Rector of the parish. And when he came back all he would
say of the visit was:

"Very pleasant, my dears. Oh yes, he showed me everything, and he really
has a most remarkable collection of dish-covers--quite remarkable. But I
ought not to have deserted those irises that Garstin sent me from the
Taurus. Now perhaps we shall manage that obstinate little plum-colored
brute which likes the outskirts of a pine forest, so they tell me."

Just as Pauline was laughing to herself at the memory of her father's
visit, the Rector himself appeared on the lawn. He was in his
shirt-sleeves; his knees were muddy with kneeling; and Birdwood, the
gardener, all blown about by the wind, was close behind him, carrying an
armful of roots.

Pauline threw up the window with a crash and called out:

"Father, Father, what a darling you look, and your hair will be swept
right away, if you aren't careful."

The Rector waved his trowel remotely, and Pauline blew him kisses until
she was made aware of protests in the room behind her.

"Really," exclaimed Monica. "You are so noisy. You're almost vulgar."

"Oh no, Monica," cried Pauline, dancing round the room. "Not vulgar. Not
a horrid little vulgar person!"

"And what a noise you do make," Margaret joined in. "Please, Pauline,
shut the window."

At this moment Mrs. Grey opened the door and loosed a whirlwind of
papers upon the nursery.

"Who's vulgar? Who's vulgar?" asked Mrs. Grey, laughing absurdly. "Why,
what a tremendous draught!"

"Mother, shut the door--the door," expostulated Margaret and Monica,
simultaneously. "And do tell Pauline to control herself sometimes."

"Pauline, control yourself," said Mrs. Grey.

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.

"Of course they try," said Birdwood, condescendingly. "But neither them
nor their mother don't seem to learn nothing. They think more of a good
clump of dellyphiniums than half a dozen meconopises as some one's gone
mad to discover, with a lot of murderous Lammers from Tibbet ready to
knife him the moment his back's turned."

"Really?"

"Oh, I was like that myself once. I can remember the time when I was as
fond of a good dahlia as anything. Now I goes sniffing the ground to see
if there's any _Mentha requieni_ left over from the frost."

"Sniffing the ground?"

"That's right. It's so small that if it wasn't for the smell any one
wouldn't see it. That's _worth_ growing, that is. Only, if you'll
understand me, it takes any one who's used to looking at peonies and
such like a few years to find out the object of a plant that isn't any
bigger than a pimple on an elephant."

Guy was reluctant to let Birdwood go without bringing him to talk more
directly of the family and less of the flowers. At the same time he felt
it would be wiser not to rouse in the gardener any suspicion of how much
he was interested in the Rectory; he was inclined to think he might
resent it, and he wanted him as a friend.

"Who is working in your garden?" asked Birdwood, as he turned to go.

"Well, nobody just at present," said Guy, apologetically.

"All right," Birdwood announced. "I'll get hold of some one for you in
less than half a pig's whisper."

"But not all the time," Guy explained, quickly. He was worried by the
prospect of a gardener's wages coming out of his small income.

"Once a week he'll come in," said Birdwood.

Guy nodded.

"What's his name?"

"Graves he's called, but, being deaf and dumb, his name's not of much
account."

"Deaf and dumb?" repeated Guy. "But how shall I explain what I want
done?"

"I'll show you," said Birdwood. "I'll come round and put you in the way
of managing him. Work? I reckon that boy would work any other mortal in
Wychford to the bone. Work? Well, he can't hear nothing, and he can't
say nothing, so what else can he do? And he does it. Good afternoon, Mr.
Hazlenut."

And Birdwood retired, whistling very shrilly as he went down the path to
the gate.

Two nights later Guy, with lighted lantern in his hand, set out to the
Rectory. He did not venture to go by the orchard and the fields and so,
crossing the narrow bridge over the stream, enter by way of the garden.
Such an approach seemed too familiar for the present stage of his
friendship, and he took the more formal route through an alley of
medieval cottages that branched off Wychford High Street. Mysterious
lattices blinked at him, and presently he felt the wind coming fresh in
his face as he skirted the churchyard. The road continued past the back
of a long row of almshouses, and when he saw the pillared gate of the
Rectory drive, over which high trees were moaning darkly, Guy wondered
if he were going to a large dinner-party. No word had been said of any
one else's coming, but with Mrs. Grey's vagueness that portended
nothing. He hoped that he would be the only guest, and, swinging his
lantern with a pleased expectancy, he passed down the drive. Suddenly a
figure materialized from the illumination he was casting and hailed him
with a questioning "hullo?"

"Hullo," Guy responded.

"Oh, beg your pardon," exclaimed the other. "I thought it was Willsher."

"My name's Hazlewood," said Guy, a little stiffly.

"Mine's Brydone. We may as well hop in together."

Guy rather resented the implication of this birdlike intrusion in
company with the doctor's son, a lanky youth whom he had often noticed
slouching about Wychford in a cap ostensibly alive with artificial
flies. Apparently Willsher must also be expected, against whom Guy had
already conceived a violent prejudice dating from the time he called at
his father's office to sign the agreement for the tenancy of Plashers
Mead. It was of ill augury that the Greys should apparently be supposing
that he would make a trio with Brydone and Willsher.

"Brought a lantern, eh?" said Brydone.

"Yes, this is a lantern," Guy answered, coldly.

"You'll never see me with a lantern," Brydone declared.

Guy would have liked to retort that he hoped he would never even see
Brydone without one. But he contented himself by saying, with all that
Balliol could bring to his aid of crushing indifference:

"Oh, really?"

Somebody behind them was running down the drive and shouting, "Hoo-oo,"
in what Guy considered a very objectionable voice. It probably was
Willsher.

"Hullo, Charlie," said Brydone.

"Hullo, Percy," said Willsher, for it was he.

"Know this gentleman? Mr. Hazlewood?"

"Only officially. Pleased to meet you," said the new-comer.

"Not at all," answered Guy. He felt furious to think that the Greys
would suppose he had arranged to arrive with these two fellows.

"Done any fishing yet?" asked Brydone.

"No, not yet," said Guy.

"Well, your bit of river has been spoilt. Old Burrows let every one go
there. But when you want some good fishing, Willsher and I rent about a
mile of stream further up and we'll always be glad to give you a day.
Eh, Charlie?"

Charlie replied with much cordiality that Percy had taken the very words
of invitation out of his mouth; and Guy, unable any longer to be frigid,
said that he had some books at which they might possibly care to come
and look one afternoon. Mr. Brydone and Mr. Willsher both declared they
would be delighted, and the latter added in the friendliest way that he
knew an old woman in Wychford who was very anxious to sell a Milton
warranted to be a hundred years old at least. Was that anything in Mr.
Hazlewood's way? Guy explained that a Milton of so recent a date was not
likely to be much in his way, and Mr. Brydone remarked that no doubt if
it had been a Stilton it would have been another matter. His friend
laughed very heartily indeed at this joke, and in an atmosphere of
almost hilarious good-fellowship, that was to Guy still a little
mortifying, they rang the Rectory bell.

None of the family had reached the drawing-room when they were shown in,
and Guy was afraid they were rather early.

"Always like this," said Brydone. "Absolutely no notion of time.
Shouldn't be surprised if we had to wait another quarter of an hour.
Known them for years, and they've always been like this. Eh, Charlie?"

The solicitor's son shook his head gravely. He seemed to feel that as a
man of business he should display a slight disapproval of such a casual
family.

"Ever since I was a kid I can remember it," he said.

Guy tried to tell himself that all this talk of intimacy was merely due
to the accidental associations of country life over many years. But it
was with something very like apprehension that he waited for the Greys
to come down. It would be dreadful to find that Brydone and Willsher had
a status in the Rectory. When, however, their hosts appeared, Guy
realized with a tremendous relief that Brydone and Willsher obviously
existed outside his picture of the Rectory. To be sure, they were
Charlie and Percy to Monica, Margaret, and Pauline; but galling as this
was, Guy told himself that after a lifelong acquaintance nothing else
could be expected.

It pleased Guy really that the dinner was not a great success, for he
was able to fancy that the Greys were encumbered by the presence of
Brydone and Willsher. Monica was silent; Margaret was deliberately
talking about things that could not possibly interest either of the
young men; and Pauline was trying to save the situation by wild
enthusiasms which were continually being repressed by her sisters. Mrs.
Grey alternated between helping to check Pauline and behaving in exactly
the same way herself. As for the Rector, he sat silent with a twinkle in
his eye. Guy wished regretfully, when the time came to depart, that he
could have stayed another few minutes to mark his superiority to the
other guests; but alas, he was still far from that position, and no
doubt he would never attain to it.

"Oh, have you brought a lantern?" asked Pauline, excitedly, in the hall.
"Oh, I wish I could walk back with you. I love lantern-light."

"Pauline! Pauline! Do think what you're saying," Mrs. Grey protested.

"I like lantern-light, too," Margaret proclaimed.

"When you come to see us again," said Pauline, "will you bring your
dog?"

"Oh, I say, shall I?" asked Guy, flushing with pleasure.

"Such a lamb, Margaret," said Pauline, kissing her sister impulsively
and being straightly reproved for doing so.

The good-nights were all said, and Guy walked up the drive with Brydone
and Willsher.

"Queer family, aren't they?" commented the doctor's son.

"Extraordinarily charming," said Guy.

"I've known them all my life," said Willsher, a little querulously. "And
yet I never seem to know them any better."

Guy was so much elated by this admission that he repeated more warmly
his invitation to come and see him and his books, and parted from the
two friends very pleasantly.

Two or three days later Guy thought he might fairly make his dinner
call, and with much forethought did not take Bob with him, so that soon
there might be an excuse to come again to effect that introduction. Mrs.
Grey and Monica were out; and Guy was invited to have tea in the nursery
with Margaret and Pauline. He was conscious that an honor had been paid
to him, partly by intuition, partly because neither of the girls said a
conventional word about not going into the drawing-room. He felt, as he
sat in that room fragrant with the memories of what must have been an
idyllic childhood, the thrill that, as a child, he used to feel when he
read, "_The Queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey._" This was
such another parlor infinitely secluded from the world; and he thought
he had never experienced a more breathless minute of anticipation than
when he followed the girls along the corridor to their nursery. The
matting worn silky with age seemed so eternally unprofaned, and on the
wall outside the door the cuckoo calling five o'clock was like a
confident bird in some paradise where neither time nor humanity was of
much importance. Janet, the elderly parlor-maid, came stumping in behind
them with the nursery tea-things; and, as Guy sat by the small hob-grate
and saw the moist autumnal sun etherealize with wan gold the tattered
volumes of childhood, the very plum cake on the tea-table was endowed
with the romantic perfection of a cake in a picture-book. When the sun
dipped behind the elms Guy half expected that Margaret and Pauline would
vanish too, so exactly seemed they the figures that, were this room a
mirage, he would expect to find within as guardians of the rare
seclusion. Guy never could say what was talked about that afternoon; for
when he found himself outside once again in the air of earth, he was
bemused with the whole experience, as if suddenly released from
enchantment. Out of a multitude of impressions, which had seemed at the
time most delicately strange and potent, only a few incidents quite
commonplace haunted his memory tangibly enough to be seized and
cherished. Tea-cups floating on laughter against that wall-paper of
berries, birds, and daisies; a pair of sugar-tongs clicking to the
pressure of long, white fingers (so much could he recapture of
Margaret); crumpets in a rosy mist (so much was Pauline); a copper
kettle singing; the lisp of the wind; a disarray of tambour-frames and
music, these were all that kept him company on his way back to Plashers
Mead through the colorless twilight.

Chance favored Guy next day by throwing him into the arms of the Rector,
who asked if he were fond enough of flowers to look round the garden at
a dull season of the year. Guy was so much elated that, if love of
flowers meant more frequent opportunities of going to the Rectory, he
would have given up poetry to become a professional gardener. Of course
there was nothing to see, according to the Rector--a few nerines of
his own crossing in the greenhouse; a _Buddleia auriculata_
honeycomb-scented in the angle of two walls; the double Michaelmas
daisy, an ugly brute already condemned to extermination; a white
red-hot-poker, evidently a favorite of the Rector's by the way he gazed
upon it and said so casually _Kniphofia multiflora_, as if it were not
indeed a treasure blooming in Oxfordshire's dreary Autumn.

"Tulips to go in next week," said the Rector, rolling the prospect upon
his tongue with meditative enjoyment. "A friend of mine has just sent me
some nice fellows from Bokhara and Turkestan. I ought to get them in
this week, but Birdwood must finish with these roses. And I've got a lot
of clusiana too that ought to be in. I am going to try her in
competition with shrubbery roots and see if _they'll_ make her behave
herself."

"Could I come in and help?" offered Guy.

"Well, now that would certainly be most kind," said the Rector; and his
thin, handsome face lit up with the excitement of infecting Guy with his
own passion. "But aren't you busy?"

"Oh no. I usually work at night."

So Guy came to plant tulips, and from planting tulips to being asked to
lunch was not far, and from finishing off a few left over to being asked
to tea was not far, either. Moreover, when the tulips were all planted
there were gladioli to be sorted and put away. Incidentally, too, the
punt had to be calked and the boat-house had to be strengthened, so that
in the end it was half-way into November before Guy realized he had been
coming to the Rectory almost every day. The more he came, however, the
more he was fascinated by the family. They still eluded him, and he was
always aware, particularly between Margaret and Pauline, of a life in
which as yet he hardly shared. At the same time, so familiar now were
the inner places of the house and most of all the nursery, he felt as if
happily there would come a day when to none of the sisters would he seem
more noticeable than one of their tumble-down arm-chairs.

Once or twice he stayed to dinner, and the long dining-room with the
sea-gray wall-paper and curtains of the strawberry-thief design was
always entered with a particular contentment of spirit. The table was
very large, for somebody always forgot to take out the extra leaf put in
for a dinner sometime last summer, or perhaps two summers ago. The
result was that the Rector was far away in the shadows at one end; Mrs.
Grey equally remote at the other; while Guy would in turn be near to
Margaret or Pauline or even Monica in the middle. Old-fashioned glasses
with spirals of green and white blown in their stems; silver that was
nearly diaphanous with use and age; candlesticks solid as the Ionic
columns they counterfeited, or tapering and fluted with branches that
carried the candle-flames like flowers, everything seemed as if it had
been created for this room alone. From the wall a lacquered clock as
round and big and benign as the setting sun wavered in the coppery
shadows of the fire, and with scarcely the sound of a tick showed forth
time. Guy had never appreciated the sacredness of eating in good company
until he dined casually like this at the Rectory. He never knew what he
ate and always accepted what was put before him like manna; yet he was
always conscious of having enjoyed the meal, and next morning he used to
face, unabashed, Miss Peasey's tale of ruined tapioca which had waited
for him too long.

The seal of perfection was generally set on these unexpected dinners by
chamber-music afterwards, when under the arched roof of the big
music-room for an hour or more of trios and quartets Guy contemplated
that family. The Greys could not have revealed the design of their life
with anything but chamber-music, and setting aside any expression of
inward things, thought Guy, how would it be possible to imagine them
more externally decorative than seated so at this formal industry of
art? He liked best perhaps the trios, when he and Mrs. Grey, each in a
Caroline chair with tall wicker back, remained outside, and yet withal
as much in the picture as two donors painted by an old Florentine.
Monica in a white dress sat straight and stiff, with pale-gold hair that
seemed the very color of the refined, the almost rarefied accompaniment
upon which her fingers quivered and rippled. Something of her own
coldness and remoteness and crystalline severity she brought to her
instrument, as if upon a windless day a fountain played forth its
pattern. Margaret's amber dress deepened from the shade of Monica's
hair, and Margaret's eyes glowed deep and solemn as the solemn depths of
the violoncello over which she hung with a thought of motherhood in the
way she cherished it. Was it she, wondered Guy, who was the ultimate
lure of this house, or was it Pauline? Of her, as she swayed to the
violin, nothing could be said but that from a rose-bloomed radiance
issued a sound of music. And how clearly in the united effect of the
three sisters was written the beauty of their lives. Guy could almost
see every hour of their girlhood passing in orderly pattern as the
divine Houris dance along a Grecian frieze. There was neither passion
nor sentiment in the music; there was neither sorrow nor regret. It was
heartless in its limpid beauty; it was remote as a cloud against the
sunrise; cold as water was it, and incommunicable as a dream; yet in
solitude when Guy reconjured the sound afterwards, it returned to his
memory like fire.

A great occasion for Guy was the afternoon when first the Greys came to
tea with him at Plashers Mead. Himself went into Wychford and bought
the cakes, so many that Miss Peasey held up her hands with that
ridiculously conventional gesture of surprise she used, exclaiming:

"Oh, dear, this _is_ a variety!"

Guy led them solemnly round the house and furnished the empty rooms with
such vivid descriptions that their emptiness was scarcely any longer
perceptible. In his own room he waited anxiously for judgment. Margaret
was, of course, the first to declare an opinion. She did not like his
curtains nor his green canvas, and she was by no means willing to accept
his excuse that they were relics of undergraduate taste.

"If you don't like them now, why do you have them? Why not plain white
for the walls and no curtains at all, until you can get ones you really
do like?"

Pauline was afraid his feelings would be hurt and declared with such
transparent dishonesty how greatly she loved everything in the room that
Guy, grateful though he was to her intended sweetness, was more
discouraged than ever. Monica objected to his having Our Lady on the
mantelshelf, and would not admit her as Saint Rose of Lima; but Guy was
enough in awe of Monica not to justify the identification with Saint
Rose by his desire for a poetic apostrophe. As for Mrs. Grey, she
behaved as she always did when Monica and Margaret were being
critical--that is, by firing off "charmings!" in a sort of benevolent
musketry; but if Guy was not convinced by her "charmings!" he could not
resist her when she said:

"I think Guy's room is charming ... charming!"

He felt his room could be an absolute failure if from the ashes of its
reputation he were alluded to actually for the first time as "Guy." Gone
then was Mr. Hazlewood; fled were those odious "misses." He turned to
Pauline and said, momentously, boldly:

"I say, Pauline, you haven't seen my new kitten."

She blushed, and Guy stood breathless with the attainment of the first
peak. Then triumphantly he turned to Mrs. Grey:

"Monica and Margaret are very severe, aren't they?"

How easy it was, after all, and he wished he had addressed them directly
by their christian names instead of taking refuge in a timid reference.
Now all that was wanting for his pleasure was that Monica, Margaret, or
Pauline should call him Guy. He wondered which would be the first. And
vaguely he asked himself which he wanted to be the first.

Pauline was talking to Margaret in the bay window.

"Do you remember," she was saying, "when Richard came to look at
Plashers Mead and we pretended he was going to take it?"

Margaret frowned at her for answer; but for Guy the afternoon so lately
perfected was spoiled again; and when they were gone, all the evening he
glowered at phantom Richards who, whether Adonises or Calibans, were all
equally obnoxious and more than obnoxious, positively minatory. Next day
he felt he had no heart to make an excuse to visit the Rectory; and he
was drearily eating some of the cakes of the tea-party when Mr. Brydone
and Mr. Willsher paid him their first call. Guy did not think they would
appreciate the empty rooms, however eloquently he narrated their future
glories; so he led his visitors forthwith to the cakes, listening to the
talk of trout and jack. After a while he asked with an elaborate
indifference if either of them had lately been round to the Rectory.

"Too clever for me," said Brydone, shaking his head. "Besides, Pauline
kicked up a fuss a fortnight ago because we asked if we could have the
otter-meet in their paddock."

"They were never sporting, those Rectory kids," said Willsher, gloomily.

"Never," his friend agreed, shaking his head. "Do you remember when
Margaret egged on young Richard Ford to punch your head because your
old terrier chivied the Greys' cat round the churchyard?"

"I punched _his_ head, I remember," said Willsher in wrathful
reminiscence.

"Does Richard Ford live here?" Guy asked.

"His father's the Vicar of Little Fairfield, the next parish, you know.
Richard's gone to India. He's an engineer, awfully nice chap and head
over heels in love with the fair Margaret. I believe there's a sort of
engagement."

In that moment by the lightening of his heart Guy knew that he was in
love with Pauline.

Outside the November night hung humid and oppressive.

"I thought we should get it soon," said Willsher, and as the two friends
vanished in the mazy garden Guy, looking up, felt rain falling softly
yet with gathering intensity. He stood for a while in his doorway, held
by the whispering blackness. Then suddenly in a rapture of realization
he slammed the door and, singing at the top of his voice, marched about
the hall. Once upon a time "to-morrow" had been wont to drowse him; now
the word sounded upon his imagination like a golden trumpet.




WINTER




DECEMBER


The rain which began the day after the Greys' visit to Plashers Mead
went on almost without a break for a whole week. December with what it
could bring of deadness, gloom, and moisture came drearily down on
Wychford, and Pauline, as she sat high in her window-seat, lamented the
interminable soak.

"I can't think why Guy hasn't been near the Rectory lately," she
grumbled.

"I expect he's tired of us," said Margaret.

"You don't really think so," Pauline contradicted. "You're much, much,
_much_ too conceited to think so really."

Margaret laughed.

"You don't mind a bit when I call you conceited," Pauline went on,
challenging her sister. "I believe you're so conceited that you're proud
even of being conceited. Why doesn't Guy come and see us, I wonder?"

"Why should he come?" Monica asked, rather severely. "Perhaps he's doing
some work for a change."

"I believe he's hurt," Pauline declared.

"Hurt?" repeated her sisters.

"Yes, because you were both so frightfully critical of his room. Oh, I
_am_ glad that Mother and I aren't critical."

"Well, if he's hurt because I said he oughtn't to have an image of Our
Lady on his mantelshelf," said Monica, "I really don't think we need
bother any more about him. Was I to encourage him in such stupid little
Gothic affectations?"

"Oh, oh!" cried Pauline. "I think he's frightened of you, Monica dear,
and of your long sentences, for I'm sure I am."

"He wasn't at all frightened of me," Monica asserted. "Didn't you hear
him call me Monica?"

"And surely," Margaret put in, "you didn't really like those stupid mock
medieval curtains. No design, just a lot of meaningless fleurs-de-lys
looking like spots. It's because I think Guy has got a glimmering of
taste that I gave him my honest opinion. Otherwise I shouldn't have
bothered."

"No, I didn't like the curtains," Pauline admitted. "But I thought they
were rather touching. And, oh, my dears, I can't tell you how touching I
think the whole house is, with that poor woman squeezing her way about
that enormous kitchen furniture!"

Pauline looked out of the window as she spoke, and there at last was
Guy, standing on the lawn with her father, who was explaining something
about a root which he held in his hand. On the two of them the rain
poured steadily down. Pauline threw up the sash and called out that they
were to come in at once.

"I am glad he's.... Why, what's the matter, Margaret?" she asked, as she
saw her sister looking at her with an expression of rather emphatic
surprise.

"Really," commented Margaret. "I shouldn't have thought it was necessary
to soothe his ruffled feelings by giving him the idea that you've been
watching at the window all the week for his visit."

"Oh, Margaret, you are unkind," and, since words would all too soon have
melted into tears, Pauline rushed from the nursery away to her own white
fastness at the top of the house. She did not pause in her headlong
flight to greet her mother in the passage; nor even when she entangled
herself in Janet's apron could she say a word.

"Good gracious, Miss Pauline!" gasped Janet. "And only just now the cat
went and run between my legs in the hall."

Pauline's bedroom was immediately over the nursery; but so roundabout
was the construction of the Rectory that, to reach the one from the
other, all sorts of corridors and twisting stairways had to be passed;
and when finally she flung herself down in her small arm-chair she was
breathless. Soon, however, the tranquillity of the room restored her.
The faded blue linen, so cool to her cheeks, quieted all the passionate
indignation. On the wall Saint Ursula, asleep in her bed, seemed
inconsistent with a proud rage; nor did Tobit, laughing in the angel's
company, encourage her to sulk. Therefore, almost before Guy had taken
off his wet overcoat, Pauline had rushed down-stairs again, had kissed
Margaret, and had put three stitches in the tail of the scarlet bird
that occupied her tambour-frame. Certainly when he came into the
drawing-room she was as serene as her two sisters, and much more serene
than Mrs. Grey, who had just discovered that she had carefully made the
tea without a spoonful in the pot, besides mislaying a bottle of
embrocation she had spent the afternoon in finding for an old
parishioner's rheumatism.

Pauline, however, soon began to worry herself again because Guy was
surely avoiding her most deliberately, and not merely avoiding her, but
paying a great deal of attention to Margaret. Of course she was glad for
him to like Margaret, but Richard out in India must be considered. She
could not forget that promise she had made to Richard last June, when
they were paddling up-stream into the sunset. Guy was charming; in a way
she could be almost as fond of him as of Richard, but what would she say
to Richard if she let Guy carry off Margaret? Besides, it was unkind not
to have a word for her when she was always such a good listener to his
tales of Miss Peasey, and when they could always laugh together at the
same absurdities of daily life. Perhaps he had felt that Margaret, who
had been so critical over his curtains, must be propitiated--and yet now
he was already going without a word to herself; he was shaking hands
with her so formally that, though she longed to tease him for wearing
silk socks with those heavy brogues, she could not. He seemed to be
angry with her ... surely he was not angry because she had Hailed him
from the window?

"What was the matter with Guy?" she asked when he was gone, and, when
everybody looked at her sharply, Pauline felt herself on fire with
blushes, made a wild stitch in the tail of the scarlet bird, and then
rushed away to look for the lost embrocation, refusing to hear when they
called after her that Mother had been sitting on it all the afternoon.

The windows along the corridors were inky blue, almost turning black, as
she stared at them, half frightened in the unlighted dusk; outside, the
noise of the rain was increasing every moment. She would sit up in her
bedroom till dinner-time and write a long letter to India. By
candle-light she wrote to Richard, seated at the small desk that was
full of childish things.

  WYCHFORD RECTORY, OXON. _Tuesday_.

     MY DEAR RICHARD,--Thank you for your last letter, which was very
     interesting. I should think your bridge was wonderful. Will you
     come back to England when it's finished? There is not much to tell
     you except that a man called Guy Hazlewood has taken Plashers
     Mead. He is very nice, or else I should have hated him to take the
     house you wanted. He is very tall--not so tall as father, of
     course--and he is a poet. He has a very nice bobtail and a
     touching housekeeper who is deaf. Birdwood likes him very much; so
     I expect you would, too. Birdwood wants to know if it's true that
     people in India--oh, bother, now I've forgotten what it was, only
     he's got a bet with Godbold's nephew about it. Guy--you mustn't be
     jealous that we call him Guy because he really is very nice--has
     just been in to tea. Margaret is a darling, but I wish you'd take
     my advice and write more about her when you write. Of course I
     don't know what you do write, and I'm sure she really is
     interested in your bridge, but of course you must remember that
     she's not used to the kind of bridges you're building. But she's a
     darling and I'm simply longing for you to be married so that I can
     come and stay with you when I'm an old maid which I've quite made
     up my mind I'm going to be. Guy has been gardening with Father a
     good deal. Father says he's _fairly_ intelligent. Isn't Father
     sweet? He drank your health at dinner the other night without
     anybody's reminding him it was your birthday. I think Guy likes
     Monica best. I don't think he cares at all for Margaret except of
     course he must admire her--Margaret is such a darling! Oh, a merry
     Christmas because it will be Christmas before you get this letter.
     Percy Brydone and Charlie Willsher came to dinner last month. They
     were so touching and bored.

  Lots of love from Your loving
  PAULINE.

     Don't forget about writing to Margaret more about herself.

Pauline put the letter in its crackling envelope with a sigh for the
unformed hand in which it was written. Nothing brought home to her so
nearly as this handwriting of hers the muddle she was always apt to make
of things. How it sprawled across the page, so unlike Monica's that was
small and neat and exquisitely formed, or Margaret's that was decorated
with fantastic and beautiful affectations of manner. It was obvious, of
course, that her sisters must always be the favorites of everybody, but
it had been rather unkind of Guy to avoid her so obviously to-day.
Richard had always realized that even if she were impulsive and foolish
she was also tremendously sympathetic.

"For I really am sympathetic," she assured her image in the glass, as
she tried to make the light-brown hair look tidy enough to escape
Margaret's remonstrances at dinner. If Guy were hopelessly in love with
Margaret, how sympathetic she would be; and she would try to explain to
him how interesting an unhappy love-affair always made people. For
instance, there was Miss Verney, whom everybody thought was just a
cross old maid; but if they had only seen, as she had seen, that cracked
miniature, what romance even her cats would possess! She must take Guy
to see Miss Verney or bring Miss Verney to see Guy; a meeting must
somehow be arranged between these two, who would surely be drawn
together by their misfortunes in love. Guy was exactly the person whom
an unhappy love-affair would become. It would be so interesting in ten
years' time, when she would be nearly thirty and old enough to be Guy's
confidante without anybody's interference, to keep back the inquisitive
world from Plashers Mead. No doubt by then Guy would be famous; he
always spoke with such confidence of fame. Monica and Margaret would
both be married, and she would still be living at the Rectory with her
father and mother. Pauline, as she pictured the future, saw no change in
them, but rather sacrificed to the ravages of time her own appearance
and Guy's, so that at thirty she fancied both herself and him as already
slightly gray. The gong sounded from the depths of the house, and
hastily she snatched from her wardrobe the first frock she found; it
happened to be a white one, more suitable to June than to December, with
a skirt of many flounces all stiffly starched. After rustling down
passages and stairs she reached the dining-room just as the others were
going in to dinner.

"Pauline, how charming you look in that frock!" her mother exclaimed.
"Why, it's like Summer just to see you!"

Pauline was very happy that night because her mother and sisters petted
her with the simple affection for which she was always longing.

The next day seemed fine enough to justify Mrs. Grey, Margaret, and
Monica in making an expedition into Oxford to see about Christmas
presents; and in the afternoon, while Pauline was sitting alone in the
nursery, Guy was shown in by Janet. Pauline felt very shy and blushful
when she met him so intimately as this, after all her plans for him on
the night before. He, too, seemed ill at ease, and she was sadly
positive he missed Margaret. The sense of embarrassment lasted until
tea-time, when Janet came in to say that the Rector, hearing of Mr.
Hazlewood's arrival, had decided to have tea in the nursery.

"Oh, what fun!" cried Pauline, clapping her hands. "Janet, do give him
the mug with 'A PRESENT FOR A GOOD BOY' on it!"

"Dear me, Miss Pauline, what things you do think of, I do declare. Well,
did you ever? Tut-tut! Fancy, for your father, too!"

Nevertheless Janet sedately put the mug on the tray. When she was gone
Pauline turned to Guy and said:

"I'm sure Father thinks he ought to come and chaperon us. Isn't he
sweet?"

Presently the Rector appeared, looking very tall in the low doorway. He
nodded cheerfully to Guy:

"Seen Vartani? You know he's that pale, blue fellow from Nazareth. Very
often he's a washy lilac, but this is genuinely blue."

"No, I don't think I noticed it--him, I mean," said Guy, apologetically.

"Oh, Father, of course he didn't! It's a tiny iris," she explained to
Guy, "and Father puts in new roots every year...."

"Bulbs, my dear, bulbs," corrected Mr. Grey. "It's one of the Histrio
lot."

"Well, bulbs. And every year one flower comes out in the middle of the
Winter rain and lasts about ten minutes, and then all the Summer
Birdwood and Father grub about looking for the bulb, which they never
find, and then Father gets six new ones."

They talked on, the three of them, about flowery subjects while the
Rector drank his tea from the mug without a word of comment on the
inscription. Then he went off to write a letter, and Guy, with a
regretful glance at the room, supposed he ought to go.

"Oh no! Stay a little while," said Pauline. "Look, it's raining again."

It was only a shower through which the declining sun was lancing silver
rays. As they watched it from the window without speaking, Pauline
wondered if she ought to have given so frank an invitation to stay
longer. Would Margaret have frowned? And how odd Guy was this afternoon.
Why did he keep looking at her so intently as if about to speak, and
then turn away with a sigh and nothing said?

"I do love this room," said Guy at last.

"I love it, too," Pauline agreed.

"May I ask you something?"

"Yes, of course."

"You spoke to Margaret the other day about some one called Richard. Do
you like him very much?"

"Yes, of course. Only you mustn't ask me about him. Please don't. I've
promised Margaret I wouldn't talk about him. Please, please, don't ask
me any more."

"But leaving Margaret out of it, do you like him ... well ... very much
better than me, for instance?"

Guy used himself for comparison with such an assumption of carelessness
as might give the impression that only by accident did he mention
himself instead of the leg of the table, or the kitten.

"Oh, I couldn't tell you that. Because if I said I liked you even as
much, I should feel disloyal to Richard, and he's the best friend I've
got. Oh, do let's talk about something else. Please do, Mr. Hazlewood."

"Oh, look here, I'm going!" exclaimed Guy; and he went instantly.

Pauline felt unhappy to think she had hurt his feelings; but he should
not expect her to like him better than Richard. If Richard were married
to Margaret, it might be different; but suppose that Margaret fell in
love with Guy? Pauline felt her heart almost stop beating at the
notion, and she made up her mind that if such a calamity befell it would
be entirely her fault. The idea that she should so betray Richard's
confidence made her miserable for the rest of the evening. Yet, though
she was unhappy about Richard, it was always the picture of Guy hurrying
from the nursery and his reproachful backward look that was visibly
before her mind. And in the morning, when she woke up, it was with a
strange unsatisfactory feeling such as she had never known before.
Yesterday came back to her remembrance with a great emptiness, seeming
to her a day which had somehow never been properly finished. Here was
the rain again raining, raining; and the old prospect of dreary weather
that would not change for months.

A week went by without any sign of Guy. There were no amusing evenings
now when he stayed to dinner; there were no delightful days of planting
bulbs in the garden; there was nothing indeed to do but visit bedridden
old ladies to whom fine or bad weather no longer mattered. Yet nobody
else except herself seemed at all unhappy about it. Actually not one of
the family commented upon Guy's absence.

"I really am afraid that Margaret _is_ heartless," said Pauline to her
image in the glass. "She doesn't seem to care a bit whether he is here
or not."

Then suddenly the weather changed. The country sparkled with hoar-frost,
and everybody forgot about the rain, asking if ever before such weather
had been known for Christmas. Guy was invited to dinner at the Rectory,
and Pauline forgot about her problems in the pleasure that the jolly
afternoon brought. Self-consciousness under the critical glances of
Monica and Margaret vanished in the atmosphere of intimacy shed by the
occasion. She could laugh and make a great noise without being reproved,
and Guy himself was obviously more at home than he had ever been. There
seemed a likelihood that now, once again the progress of simple
friendship would advance undisturbed by the complications of love, and
Pauline was glad to be able to assure herself that Guy did not that
afternoon display the slightest sign of a hopeless passion for Margaret.
He was more in his mood and demeanor of last month, and diverted them
greatly with an account of struggling to explain to Graves, the
deaf-and-dumb gardener, what he wanted done in the garden.

"But didn't Birdwood help you?" they asked, laughing.

"Well, Birdwood showed me what I ought to do," said Guy. "But it seemed
such a rough method of information that I hadn't the heart to adopt it.
You see, as far as I could make out, it consisted of pulling up a
cabbage by the root, hitting Graves on the head with it, and then
nodding violently. That meant 'clear away these cabbages,' Or if
Birdwood wanted to say, 'Plant broccoli here,' he dug Graves in the ribs
with the dibbler and rubbed his nose in the unthinned seedlings."

"What does Miss Peasey say?" asked Pauline, who was in a state of the
highest amusement, because deaf-and-dumb Graves was one of the villagers
who lived under her particular patronage.

"Well, at first Miss Peasey was rather huffed, because she thought
Graves was mocking her by pretending to be deaf. Now, however, she comes
out and watches him at work and hopes that next Spring there'll be a
little more variety in the garden."

The sunny, sparkling weather lasted for a few days after Christmas; and
one morning Pauline, walking by herself on Wychford down, met Guy.

"I wondered if I should see you," he said.

"Did you expect to see me, then?"

"Well, I knew you often came here, and this morning I couldn't resist
coming here myself."

Pauline felt a sudden impulse to run away; and yet most unaccountably
the impulse led her into walking along with Guy at a brisk pace over the
close-cropped glittering turf. Round them trotted Bob in eddies of
endless motion.

"Listen," said Guy. "I'm sure I heard a lark singing."

They stopped, and Pauline thought that never was there so sweet a
silence as here upon the summit of this green down. Guy's lark could not
be heard. There was not even the faint wind that sighs across high
country. There was nothing but gorse and turf and a turquoise sky
floating on silver deeps and distances above the Winter landscape.

"When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing's out of fashion," he said,
pointing to a golden spray.

Pauline had heard the jingle often enough, but spoken solemnly like this
by Guy on Wychford down, it flooded her cheeks with blushes, and in a
sort of dear alarm the truth of it declared itself. She was startlingly
aware of a new life, as it were demanding all sorts of questions of her.
She felt a shyness that nearly drove her to run away from her companion,
and yet at the same moment brought a complete incapacity for movement of
any kind, an incapacity too that was full of rapture. She longed for him
to say something of such convincing ordinariness as would break the
spell and prove to her that she was still Pauline Grey; while with all
her desire for the spell to be broken, she was wondering if every moment
she were not deliberately offering herself to enchantment.

"Have you ever felt," Guy was asking, "a long time after you've met
somebody, as if you had suddenly met that person again for the first
time?"

Pauline shook her head vaguely. Then with an effort she recaptured her
old self and said, laughing:

"But then, you see, I never think about anything."

"Sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty," said Guy.

And with an abrupt change of manner he began to throw sticks for Bob, so
that the lucid air was soon loud with continuous barking.

"I wonder if we shall ever meet again on Wychford down?" said Guy, as
together they swung along the rolling highroad towards the village.

A horse and trap caught them up before Pauline could answer the
speculation, and Mr. Godbold, as he passed, wished them both a very good
morning.

"Godbold seems extraordinarily interested in us," Guy remarked, when for
the third time before he turned the corner Mr. Godbold looked back at
them.

"Oh, I wonder...." Pauline began, expressing with her lips sudden
apprehension.

"You mean he thought it strange to see us together?"

"People in the country...." she began again.

"Why don't you hurry on alone?" Guy asked. "And I'll come in to Wychford
later."

"Don't be stupid. What do the Wychford people matter? Besides, I should
hate to do anything like that."

She was half angry with Guy for the suggestion. It seemed to cast a
shadow on the morning.

When Pauline got back home she told them all about her meeting with Guy;
nobody had a word of disapproval, not even Margaret, and the faint
malaise of uncertainty vanished.

After tea, however, Mrs. Grey came in, looking rather agitated.

"Pauline," she began at once, "you must not meet Guy alone like that
again."

"Oh, darling Mother, you _are_ looking so pink and flustered," said
Pauline.

"No, there's nothing to laugh at. Nothing at all. I was most annoyed.
Four of the people I visited actually had the impertinence to ask me if
you and Guy were engaged."

Pauline went off into peals of laughter and danced about the room; but
when she was alone and thought again of what the gossips were saying,
she suddenly realized it was not altogether for Richard's sake that she
had dreaded the idea of Guy's falling in love with Margaret.




JANUARY


Plashers Mead and the Rectory were not the only romantic houses in
Wychford. Indeed, the little town as a whole had preserved by reason of
its remoteness from railways and important highroads the character given
to it during the many years of prosperity which lasted until the reign
of Charles the First. From that time it had slowly declined; and now
with a stagnation that every year was more deeply accentuated by modern
conditions it was still declining. New houses were never built, and even
the King's Head, a pledge of commercial confidence in the Hanoverian
succession, seemed to flaunt with an inappropriate modernity its red
bricks mellowed by the passage of two centuries. Apart from this rival
to the Stag Inn the fabric of Wychford was uniformly gray, to which,
notwithstanding Miss Peasey's declaration of sameness, variety was amply
secured by the character of the architecture. Gables and mullions; oaken
eaves and corbels carefully ornamented; latticed oriels and sashed bows;
roofs of steep unequal pitch to which age had often added strange
undulations; chimney stacks of stone and Gothic entries--all these gave
variety enough; and if the whole effect was too sober for Miss Peasey's
taste, the little town on the hillside was now safe for ever from the
brightening of the dolls-house spirit.

Wychford could still be called a town, for it possessed a few
side-streets, along the grass-grown cobbles of which there still existed
many houses of considerable beauty and dignity. These had lapsed into a
more apparent decay, because a dwindling population had avoided their
direct exposure to the bleak country and had left them empty. In the
High Street this melancholy of bygone fame was less noticeable, and here
scarcely a house was unoccupied. Some buildings, indeed, had been
degraded to unworthy usages; and it was sad to see Perpendicular
fireplaces filled with cheap lines in drapery, or to find an ancient
chantry trodden by pigs and fowls. Generally, however, the High Street
to the summit of its steep ascent had an air of sedate prosperity that
did not reflect the reality of a slow depopulation.

About half-way up the hill on the other side of the town from Plashers
Mead and the Rectory was a side-street called Abbey Lane that, instead
of leading to open country, was bounded by a high stone wall. This
blocked the thoroughfare except so far as to allow a narrow path to
skirt its base and give egress along some untidy cottage gardens to a
cross-road farther up the hill.

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."

She sighed, and Guy wondered if the violoncello had been used with as
little reference as a sonnet to the real cause of the mood.

"Why did you sigh just now?" he asked after another minute or two of
silent progress.

"I wonder whether I'll tell you. No, I don't think I will. And yet...."

"And yet perhaps, after all, you will," said Guy, eagerly. "And if you
do, I'll tell you something in turn."

"That's no bribe," said Margaret, laughing. "You foolish creature, don't
you think I know what you'll tell me?"

Guy shook his head.

"I don't think you do. You may suspect. But for that matter, so may I.
Isn't what you might have told me something that might most suitably be
told on the way to Fairfield?"

"You've been talking about me to Pauline," said Margaret, angrily.

"Never," he declared. "But you don't suppose you can have all these
mysterious allusions to Richard without my guessing that his father is
Vicar of Fairfield. Dear Margaret, forgive me for guessing and tell me
what you were going to tell."

"Have you heard I was engaged to Richard Ford?" she asked.

"I heard he was in love with you."

"Oh, he is, he is," she murmured, and Guy, thinking of Richard in India,
wondered if he ever dreamed of Margaret walking like this in a snowy
England. The clock in Fairfield church struck eleven with an icy tinkle
that on the muted air sounded very thinly. "But the problem for me,"
Margaret went on, "is whether I'm in love with him, or if Richard is
merely the nicest person who has been in love with me so far."

"Well, if you'd asked me that three months ago," Guy said, "I would have
answered decidedly that you weren't in love with him if you had one
doubt. But now ... well, you know really now I'm rather in the state of
mind that wants everybody to be in love. And why do you think you're not
in love with him?"

"I haven't really explained well," said Margaret. "What I'm sure of is
that I'm not as much in love with him as I want to be in love."

"You're living opposite a looking-glass," said Guy. "That's what is the
matter."

They had reached the stile leading over into the highroad, and Margaret
gazed back wistfully at the footprints in the snow, before they crossed
it and went on their way.

"Yes," she said. "I am conceited. But my conceit is really cowardice. I
long for admiration, and when I am admired I despise it. I lie in bed
thinking how well I play the 'cello, and when I have the instrument by
me I don't believe I can play even moderately well. I am really fond of
him, but the moment I think that anybody else is thinking about my being
fond of him I almost hate his name. I can't bear the idea of going to
live in India, and I detest bridges--you know he builds bridges--and yet
I couldn't possibly write to him and say that he must think no more
about me. I'm really a mixture of Monica and Pauline, and so I'm not as
happy as either of them."

"Yes, I suppose Pauline is very happy," said Guy in a depressed voice.

"What am I to do?" Margaret asked.

"I'm sure you're much more in love than you think," he declared,
quickly, for he had the ghost of a temptation to tell her she was
foolish to think any more of a love so uncertain as hers. There was
enough jealousy of his standing at the Rectory to give him the impulse
to rob Richard of his foothold, but the meanness destroyed itself on
this virginal morning almost before Guy realized it had tried to exist.
"Yes, I'm sure you're really in love," he repeated. "I think I can
understand what you feel."

"Do you?" said Margaret, shaking her head a little sadly. "I'm afraid
it's only a very willing sympathy on your part, for I'm sure I don't
understand myself. That's why I'm conceited, perhaps. I'm trying to
build up a Margaret Grey for other people to look at, which I admire
like any pretty thing one makes oneself, and perhaps why I can't fall
really in love is because I'm afraid of some one's understanding me and
showing me to myself."

"You'd have to be very clever to disappoint that person," said Guy. "And
why shouldn't Richard Ford be the one?"

"Oh, he'll never discover me," said Margaret. "That's what's so dull."

"Aren't you a little unreasonable?" Guy asked.

"Of course I am. Now don't let's talk about me any more; I'm really not
worth discussing--only just because my family is so exquisite and
because I adore them, I never talk about Richard to them. Here's the old
woman's cottage. I sha'n't be more than a few minutes."

Guy felt honored by Margaret's confidence, but his heart was so full of
Pauline that he transferred all the substance of what she had been
saying to suit his own case. Would Pauline never know if she were in
love? Would he be doomed to the position of Richard? Or worse, would
Pauline fly from his love in terror of anything so disturbing to the
perfection of her life at present? On the whole he was inclined to think
that this was exactly what she would do; and he felt he would never have
the courage to startle her with the question. When he thought of the
girls to whom in the past of long vacations he had made protestations of
devotion that were light as the thistle-down in the summery meadows
where they were uttered, it was incredible that the asking of Pauline
should speed his heart like this. With other girls he had always
imagined them slightly in love with him, but for Pauline to be in love
with him seemed hopeless, though he qualified his humility by assuring
himself that she could be in love with nobody. Did Margaret really have
a suspicion that he was in love with Pauline? If she had, why had she
not drawn his confidence before she gave her own? She came out from the
cottage as he propounded this, and he told her, when their faces were
set towards Wychford and a chilly wind that was rising, how he had been
thinking about her confidence all the while she was in the cottage.
Moreover, he was under the impression this was the truth.

"But don't think about me any more," she commanded.

"Never?"

"Not until I speak first. Isn't it cold? You must have been frozen
waiting for me."

They hurried along, talking mostly, though how the topic arose Guy never
knew, about whether _Alice in Wonderland_ were better than _Alice
Through the Looking-glass_ or not. The quotations that went to sustain
the argument were so many that they arrived back very quickly, it
seemed, at the stile leading into the snowy field.

"Will you go home the same way?" Guy suggested. "Look, nobody has
spoiled our tracks. They're jollier than ever, and do you see those
rooks farther down the field? It will snow again this afternoon and our
footprints will vanish."

By the time they reached the Abbey wood Guy had made up his mind that as
they walked up through the shrubbery, unless people were listening
there, he would tell Margaret how deeply he was in love with Pauline.
The resolution taken, his throat seemed to close up with nervousness,
and, vaulting over the fence, he tripped and fell in a snow-drift.

"Why this violent activity all of a sudden?" Margaret asked.

He laughed gloomily and vowed it was the exhilarating weather. Up the
broad walk they went slowly, and every yard was bringing them dreadfully
nearer to Wychford High Street and the profanation of this snowy
silence. Abruptly a robin began to sing from a bough almost overhead;
and Guy, realizing half-unconsciously that unless he told Margaret now,
his words would die upon that robin's rathe melody, said:

"Margaret, you'll probably be angry, but I must tell you that I'm in
love with your sister."

He drove his stick deep into the snow to give his eyes the excuse of
looking down.

"With Pauline?" she said, softly.

He congratulated himself upon the cunning with which he had at least
thrown something on Margaret of the responsibility, as he almost called
it. Had she said Monica it would have killed his hope at once.

"Of course I know it must sound ridiculous, but...."

"Is she in love with me?" asked Margaret, with tender mockery. "Well, I
think she may be. Perhaps I'm almost sure she is."

"Margaret," said Guy, seizing her hand. "I hope you'll be the happiest
person in the world always. You know, don't you, that I'm dying for you
to be happy?"

There may have been tears in her eyes as she responded with faintest
pressure of her hand to his affection.

"And you won't forget all about me and take no more interest in what
will seem my maddening indecision, when you and Pauline are happy?"

"My dear, as if I could!" he exclaimed.

"Lovers can forget very easily," said Margaret. "You see I've thought
such a lot about being in love that I've got every one else's conduct
clearly mapped out in my mind."

Guy stopped dead; and, as he stopped, the robin now far behind them
ceased his song, and even the flute of the wind sounding on distant
hollows and horizons cracked in the frost so that the stillness was
sharp as ice itself.

"Margaret, what makes you think Pauline cares for me? How dare I be so
fortunate?"

"Because you know you are fortunate," said Margaret, nor could falling
snow have touched his arm more lightly than she. "Why do you suppose I
told you about Richard if it was not because I thought you appreciated
Pauline?"

"Ah, how I shall always love the snow," Guy exclaimed, grinding the
slippery ball upon his heel to powder.

"But now I've got a disappointment for you," said Margaret. "Pauline and
Monica are going into Oxford to-day for a week."

"You won't tell anybody what I've told you?" he begged.

"Of course not. Secrets are much too fascinating not to be kept as long
as possible."

He opened the wicket, and presently they parted in the High Street.

"I shall come in this afternoon," he called after her. "Unless you're
bored with me."

She invited him with her muff, and seemed to float out of sight.
Suddenly Guy remembered that sometime this morning (it seemed as long
ago as when Wychford Abbey was alive) Bob had been with him. He was glad
of an excuse to go back and look for the dog in those now consecrated
arbors. There the robin still sang his rather pensive tune; and there
from a high ash-bough a missel-thrush, wearing full ermine of the
Spring, saluted the vestal day.




FEBRUARY


Pauline started to Oxford with Monica, feeling rather disappointed she
had not seen Guy before she went; for Margaret had come home with news
of having walked with him to Fairfield, and it was tantalizing, indeed a
little disturbing, to leave him behind with Margaret.

"Nothing is said to Margaret," Pauline protested at lunch, "when _she_
goes out for a walk with Guy. Father, don't you think it's unfair?"

"Well, darling Pauline," interrupted Mrs. Grey, with an anxious glance
towards her second daughter, "you see, Margaret is in a way engaged."

"I'm not engaged," Margaret declared.

"But I'm asking Father," Pauline persisted. "Father, don't you think
it's unfair?"

The Rector was turning over the pages of a seed-catalogue and answered
Pauline's question with that engaging irrelevancy to which his family
and parish were accustomed.

"It's disgraceful for these people to offer seeds of _Incarvillea olgae_.
My dears, you remember that anemic magenta brute, the color of a
washed-out shirt? Ah," he sighed, "I wish they'd get that yellow
_Incarvillea_ over. I am tempted to fancy it might be as good as _Tecoma
Smithii_, and, of course, coming from that Yang-tse-kiang country, it
would be hardy."

"Francis dear!" Pauline cried. "Don't you think it's unfair?"

"Pauline," said her mother, "you must not call your father Francis in
the dining-room."

The Rector, oblivious of everything, continued to turn slowly the pages
of his catalogue.

"Oh, bother going to Oxford!" said Monica, looking out of the window to
where Janet with frozen breath listened for the omnibus under gathering
snow-clouds.

"Now, really," Pauline exclaimed, diverted from her complaint of
Margaret's behavior by another injustice, "isn't Monica too bad? She's
grumbling, though it was she who made the plan to stay with the
Strettons. And though they're her friends and not mine, I've been made
to go, too."

"Well, I hate staying with people," Monica explained.

"So do I," said Pauline. "And you accepted the invitation for me that
day you were in Oxford buying Christmas presents, when you forgot to buy
the patience-cards I wanted to give poor Miss Verney, so that I had to
give her a horrid little china dog, though she hates dogs."

"Now I'm sure it'll be charming, yes, charming, when you get there,"
Mrs. Grey affirmed, hopefully.

"Oh, how glad I am I'm not going!" said Margaret.

"I think you ought to go instead of me," Pauline told her.

"They're not my friends," Margaret replied, with a shrug.

"No, but they're more your friends than mine," Pauline argued. "Because
you're nearer to Monica. They're four years off being my friends and
only two from being yours."

"Miss Monica," said Janet, coming into the room, "the 'bus has come out
from the King's Head yard, and you'll be late."

There was instantly a confusion of preparation by Mrs. Grey and Pauline,
while Monica sighed at the trouble of departure, and Margaret with
exasperating indifference sat warm and triumphant by the fire.

"Good gracious!" the Rector exclaimed, flinging the catalogue down and
speaking loud enough to be heard over the feverish search for Pauline's
left glove. "These people have the impudence to advertise _Penstemon
Lobbii_ as a novelty when it's really our old friend _Breviflorus_. What
on earth is to be done with these scoundrels?"

The horn of the omnibus sounded at the end of Rectory Lane; and the fat
guard was marching through the snow with the girls' luggage. The
good-bys were all said; and presently Pauline, with her muff held close
to her cheeks against the north wind, was sitting on top of the omnibus
that was toiling up the Shipcot road. As she caught sight of Plashers
Mead, etched upon the white scene, she wished she had left a message
with Margaret to say in what deep disgrace Guy was. On they labored
across five miles of snow-stilled country with sparse flakes melting
upon the horses' flanks, and never a wayfarer between Wychford and
Shipcot to pause and stare at them.

On the second night of their stay with the Strettons, Monica, when she
and Pauline were going to bed, suddenly turned round from the
dressing-table and demanded in rhetorical dismay why they had come.

"Never mind," said Pauline; "we've only got five more evenings."

"Well, that's nearly a week," Monica sighed. "And I'm tired to death of
Olive already."

"But I'm much worse off," Pauline declared, dolefully. "Because I have
to sit next to the Professor, who does frighten me so. You see, he will
include me in the conversation. Last night at dinner, after he'd been
talking to that don from Balliol who knew Guy and whom I was dying to
ask ... to talk to myself, I mean, he turned round to me and said, 'I am
afraid, Miss Pauline, that Aramaic roots are not very interesting to
you.' Well, of course I got muddled between Aramaic and aromatic, and
said that Father had just been given a lot which were very poisonous."

Monica laughed that sedate laugh of hers, which always seemed to Pauline
like a clock striking, so independent was it of anybody's feelings.

"Monica darling, I don't want to be critical," said Pauline. "But you
know sometimes your laugh sounds just a little--a very little
self-satisfied."

"I think I am rather self-satisfied," Monica agreed, combing her golden
hair away from her high, pale forehead. "And Margaret is conceited, and
you're twice as sweet as both of us put together."

"Oh no, I'm not! Oh no, no, Monica dearest, I'm not!" Pauline
contradicted, hurriedly. "No, really I'm very horrid. And, you know,
when I'm bored I'm sure I show it. Oh, dear, I hope the Strettons didn't
notice I was bored. Mrs. Stretton was so touching with the things they
had brought back from Madeira, and I do hate things people bring back
from places like Madeira."

"And when you're not bored with anybody," said Monica, "you're rather
apt to make that too obvious also."

"Monica, why are you saying that?" Pauline asked, with wide-open eyes.

"Even supposing Guy is in love with you," said Monica, slowly blowing
out the candles on the dressing-table as she spoke, so that nothing was
left but the rosy gas, "I don't think it's necessary to show him quite
so clearly that you're in love with _him_."

"Monica!"

"Darling little sister, I do so want you ... oh, how can I put it? Well,
you know, when you break the time in a trio, as you sometimes do...."

"But I'm not in love with Guy," Pauline interrupted. "At least, oh,
Monica, why do you choose a house like this to tell me such things?" she
asked, with tears and blushes fighting in her countenance.

"Pauline, it's only that I want you to keep in time."

"I can't possibly stay with the Strettons another five days," declared
Pauline in deepest gloom. "You ought not to say things like that here."

She was looking round this strange bedroom for the comfort of familiar
pictures, but there was nothing on these pink walls except a view of the
Matterhorn. Monica was kneeling to say her prayers, and in the stillness
the frost outside seemed to be pressing against the window-panes.
Pauline thought it was rather unfair of Monica to fade like this into
unearthly communications; and she knelt down to pray somewhat vagrant
prayers into the quilted eider-down that symbolized the guest-room's
luxurious chill. She longed to look up in aspiration and behold Saint
Ursula in that tall bed of hers, or cheerful Tobit walking with his dog
in the angel's company, and in the corner her own desk that was full of
childish things. She rose from her knees at the same moment as Monica,
who at once began to talk lightly of the tiresome people at dinner and
seemed utterly unconscious of having wounded Pauline's thoughts. Yet
when the room was dark, for a long while these wounded thoughts danced
upon the wintry air that breathed of Wychford. "_Even supposing Guy is
in love with you._" It was curious that she could not feel very angry
with Monica. "_Even supposing Guy is in love with you._" It really
seemed a pity to fall asleep; it was like falling asleep when music was
being played.

The subject of Guy was not mentioned again, but during the days that
remained of the visit Pauline scarcely felt that she was living in the
Strettons' house, and was so absent in her demeanor that Monica was
disturbed into what was for her a positive sociableness to counteract
Pauline's appearance of inattention. To consummate the vexation of the
visit there came a sudden thaw two days before they left, and Oxford was
ankle-deep in slush. Finally Pauline and Monica were dragged through the
very nadir of depression when on their last night they were taken out to
dinner in trams and goloshes through such abominable conditions of
weather.

"Fancy not ordering a cab," whispered Monica, with cold disapproval.

"Perhaps they can't afford it," Pauline suggested.

"They can afford to go to Madeira," answered Monica, "and buy all those
stupid knickknacks."

"Well, Monica, they are your friends, you know," said Pauline.

However, the 1st of February arrived next morning, and Oxford was left
behind. Pauline sighed with relief when they were seated in the train,
and the twenty miles of country to Shipcot that generally seemed so dull
were as green and welcome as if they were returning from a Siberian
exile.

"You know, Monica, I really don't think we ought to stay with people. I
don't think it's honest to spend such a hateful week as that in being
pleasant," she declared.

"I didn't notice that you were taking much trouble to hide your
boredom," said Monica. "It seems to me that I was always in a state of
trying to steer people round your behavior."

"Oh, but Professor Stretton loves me," said Pauline.

She was trying not to appear excited as the omnibus swished and slapped
through the mud towards Wychford. She was determined that in future she
would lead that inclosed and so serene life which she admired in her
eldest sister. Nobody could criticize Monica except for her coldness,
and Pauline knew that herself would never be able to be really as cold
as that, however much she might assume the effect.

"Grand weather after the snow," said the driver.

The roofs of Wychford were sparkling on the hillside, and earth seemed
to be turning restlessly in the slow Winter sleep.

"This mud'll all be gone with a week of fine days like to-day," said the
driver.

Plashers Mead was in sight now, but it was Monica who pointed to where
Guy and his dog were wandering across the meadows that were so vividly
emerald after the snow.

"I think it is," agreed Pauline, indifferently.

In the Rectory garden a year might have passed, so great was the
contrast between now and a week ago. Now the snowdrops were all that was
left of the snow, and a treasure of aconites as bright as new guineas
were scattered along the borders. Hatless and entranced, the Rector was
roaming from one cohort of green spears to another, each one of which
would soon be flying the pennons of Spring. Pauline rushed to embrace
him, and he, without a word, led her to see where on a sunny bank Greek
anemones had opened their deep-blue stars.

"_Blanda_," he whispered. "And I've never known her so deep in color.
Dear me, poor old Ford tells me he hasn't got one left. I warned him she
must have sun and drainage, but he would mix her with _Nemorosa_ just to
please his wife, which is ridiculous--particularly as they are never in
bloom together."

He bent over and with two long fingers held up a flower full in the
sun's eye, as he might have stooped to chuck under the chin a little
girl of his parish.

Monica had brought back a new quartet, which they practised all that
Candlemas Eve. When it was time to go to bed Mrs. Grey observed in a
satisfied voice that, after all, it must have been charming at the
Strettons'.

"Oh no, Mother; it was terribly dull," Pauline protested.

"Now, dear Pauline, how could it have been dull, when you've brought
back this exquisite Schumann quartet?"

Margaret came to Pauline's room to say good night, sat with her while
she undressed, and tucked her up so lovingly that Pauline was more than
ever delighted to be back at home.

"Oh, Margaret, how sweet you are to me! Why? Is it because you really do
miss me when I go away?"

"Partly," said Margaret.

"Why are you smiling so wisely? Have you put something under my pillow?"
Pauline began to search.

"There's nothing under your pillow except all the thoughts I have
to-night for you."

Once more Margaret leaned over and kissed her, and Pauline faded into
sleep upon the happiness of being at home again.

Next day after lunch her mother and sisters went to pay a long-postponed
call upon a new family in the neighborhood, because Margaret insisted
they must take advantage of this glorious weather which would surely not
last very long.

Pauline spent the early afternoon with the Rector and Birdwood, writing
labels while they sowed a lot of new sweet-peas which had been sent to
the Rector for an opinion upon their merits. The clock was striking four
when Guy strolled into the garden. Somehow Pauline's labels were not so
carefully written after his arrival, and at last the Rector advised her
to take Hazlewood and show him _Anemone blanda_. They left the big
wall-garden and went across the lawn in front of the house to the second
wall-garden, where most of the Rector's favorites grew as it pleased
them best.

"Oh, they've all gone to bed," said Pauline.

Guy knelt down and opened the petals of one.

"They're exactly the color of your eyes," he said, looking up at her.

Pauline was conscious that the simple statement was fraught with a
significance far greater than anything which had so far happened in her
life. It was ringing in her ears like a bugle-call that sounded some
far-flung advance, and involuntarily she drew back and began to talk
nonsense breathlessly, while Guy did not speak. Nor must she let him
speak, she told herself, for behind that simple comparison how many
questions were trembling!

"Oh, I wonder if the others are back yet," she finally exclaimed, and
forthwith hurried from the garden towards the house. She wished she must
not look back over her shoulder to see Guy following her so gravely. Of
course, when they were standing in the hall, the others had not come
back; and the house in its silence was a hundred times more portentous
than the garden. And what would Guy be thinking of her for bringing him
back to this voicelessness in which she could not any longer talk
nonsense? Here the least movement, the slightest gesture, the most
ordinary word, would be weighted for both of them with an importance
that seemed unlimited. For the first time the Rectory was strangely
frightening; and when through the silent passages they were walking
towards the nursery it was the exploration of a dream. Yet, however
undiscoverable the object that was leading them, she was glad to see the
nursery door, for there within would surely come back to her the ease of
an immemorial familiarity. Yet in that room of childhood, that room the
most bound up with the simple progress of her life, she found herself
counting the birds, berries, and daisies upon the walls, as if she were
beholding them vaguely for the first time. Why was she unpicking
Margaret's work or folding into this foolish elaboration of triangles
Monica's music. And why did Guy behave so oddly, taking up all sorts of
unnatural positions, leaning upon the rickety mantelshelf, balancing
himself upon the fender, pleating the curtains, and threading his way
with long legs in and out, in and out of the chairs?

"Pauline!"

He had stopped abruptly by the fireplace, and was not looking at her
when he spoke. Oh, he would never succeed in lifting even from the floor
that match which with one foot he was trying to lift on to the other
foot.

"Pauline!"

Now he was looking at her; and she must be looking at him, for there was
nothing on this settee which would give her a good reason not to look at
him. The room was so still that beyond the closed door the hoarse tick
of the cuckoo-clock was audible; and what was that behind her which was
fretting against the window-pane? And why was she holding with each hand
to the brocade, as if she feared to be swept altogether out of this
world?

"Pauline!"

Was it indeed her voice on earth that said "yes"?

"Pauline, I suppose you know I love you?"

And she was saying "yes."

"Pauline, do you love me?"

And again she had said "yes...."

Outside in the corridor the cuckoo snapped the half-hour; then it seemed
to tick faster and a thousand times faster. She must turn away from Guy,
and as she turned she saw that what had been fretting the window-pane
was a spray of yellow jasmine. Upon the cheek that was turned from him
the dipping sun shed a warm glow, but the one nearer was a flame of
fire.

"Pauline!"

He had knelt beside her in that moment; and, leaning over to his
nearness, Pauline looked down at her hand in his, as if she were gazing
at a flower which had been gathered.




SPRING




MARCH


The doubts and the joys of the future broke upon Guy with so wide and
commingled a vision, that before the others got home and even before
Janet came in with tea, he hurried away from that nursery, where over
the half-stilled echoes of childhood he had heard the sigh of Pauline's
assent. The practical side of what he had done could be confronted
to-morrow, and with a presage of hopelessness the word might have lain
heavily upon his mind, if on the instant of sinking it had not been
radiantly winged with the realization of the indestructible spirit that
would henceforth animate all the to-morrows of time. No day could now
droop for him, whatever the difficulties it brought, whatever the
hazards, when he had Pauline and Pauline's heart; and like disregarded
moments the years of their life went tumbling down into eternity, as the
meaning of that sighed-out assent broke upon his conscience with fresh
glory.

"You'll tell your mother to-night?" he asked. "I think Margaret will
know when she sees your shining eyes."

"Are my eyes shining?"

"Ah, don't you know they are, when you look into mine?"

Guy could have proclaimed that he and she were stars flashing to one
another across a stupendous night; but there were no similes that did
not seem tawdry when he threw them round Pauline.

"Child, child, beloved child!" he whispered; and his voice faltered for
the pitiful inadequacy of anything that he could call her. What words
existed, with whatever tenderness uttered, with whatever passion
consecrated by old lovers, that would not still be words, when they were
used for Pauline? Guy watched for a moment the cheek that was closer to
his lips write in crimson the story of her love. He wished he could tell
his love for her with even the hueless apograph of such a signal; and
yet, since anything he said was only worthy of utterance in so far as
she by this ebb and flow of response made it worthy, why should he
trouble that cheek which, sentient now as a rose of the sun, hushed all
but wonder?

"Good-by!"

He bent over and touched her hand with his lips. Then the Rectory stairs
had borne him down like a feather; the Rectory door had assumed a kind
of humanity, so that the handle seemed to relinquish his grasp with an
affectionate unwillingness. Out in the drive, where the purple trees
were washed by the February dusk, he stood perplexed at himself because
in a wild kiss he had not crushed Pauline to his heart. Had it been from
some scruple of honor in case her father and mother should not
countenance his love? Had it sprung out of some impulse to postpone for
a while a joy that must be the sharpest he would ever know? Or was it
that in the past he had often kissed too lightly, so that now, when he
really loved, he could not imagine the kiss unpassionate and fierce that
would seal her immortally to love, yet leave her still a child?

As he paused in that golden February dusk, Guy rejoiced he had told his
love in such an awe of her girlhood; and when from the nursery window
Pauline blew one kiss and vanished like a fay at mortal trespassing, he
floated homeward upon the airy salute, weighing no more than a seed of
dandelion to his own sense of being. Upon his way he observed nothing,
neither passer-by nor carts in the muddy roads. As he crossed the bridge
the roar of the water into the mill-pond was inaudible, nor did he hear
his melodious garden ways. And when Miss Peasey came to his room with
the lamp, he could not realize for a moment who she was or what she was
talking about. The hour or two before dinner went by as one tranced
minute; in a dream he went down to dinner; in a dream he began to carve;
in a dream the knife remained motionless in the joint, so that Miss
Peasey coming to inquire after his appetite thought it was stuck in a
skewer. Up-stairs in the library again, he dreamed the evening away; and
when the lamp hummed slowly and oilily to extinction he still sat on,
till at last the fire perished, and from complete darkness he roused
himself and went to bed.

Guy was under the cloud of a reaction when he rang the Rectory bell on
the morning after. The door looked less amicable, and the dragon-headed
knocker stared balefully while he was waiting to be let in. He wondered
for whom of the family he ought to ask, but Mrs. Grey came nervously
into the hall and invited him into the drawing-room.

"Pauline has gone over to Fairfield," she began in jerky sentences.
"Charming ... yes, charming, you came this morning."

The sun had not yet reached the oriel of the drawing-room, that with
shadows and fragrance was welcoming Guy where he sat in a winged
arm-chair beside the fire. Time was seeming to celebrate the
momentousness of his visit by standing still as in a picture, and he
knew that every word and every gesture of Mrs. Grey would in his memory
rest always enambered. He was glad, and yet in the captivating quiet a
little sorry, that she began to speak at once:

"Of course Pauline told me about yesterday. And of course I would sooner
she were in love with a man she loved than with a man who had a great
deal of money. But of course you mustn't be engaged at once. At least
you can be engaged; you are engaged. Oh yes, of course if you weren't
engaged I shouldn't allow you to see each other, and you shall see each
other occasionally. Francis has not said anything. The Rector will
probably be rather doubtful. Of course I told him; only he happened to
be very busy about something in the garden. But he would want Pauline to
be happy. Of course she is my favorite--at least I should not say that,
I love all my daughters, but Pauline is--well, she has the most
beautiful nature in the world. My darling Pauline!"

Mrs. Grey's eyes were wet, and Guy was so full of affectionate gratitude
that it was only by blinking very hard at a small picture of Pauline
hanging beside the mantelpiece he was able to keep his own dry.

"I have a nicer picture than that which I will give you," Mrs. Grey
promised. "The one that I am fondest of, the one I keep beside my bed.
Perhaps you would like a picture of her when she was seventeen? She's
just the same now, and really I think she'll always be the same."

"You are too good to me, Mrs. Grey," he sighed.

"We are all so fond of you ... even the Rector, though he is not likely
to show it. Pauline is perhaps more like me. Her impulsiveness comes
from me."

"Ought I to talk to the Rector about our engagement?" Guy asked.

"Oh no, no ... it would disturb him, and I don't think he'll admit that
you _are_ engaged. In fact, he said something about children; but I
would rather.... At least, of course, you are children. But Margaret
says you can't be quite a child or you would not be in love with
Pauline. And now if you go along the Fairfield road you'll meet her. But
that is only an exception. Not often. I think to-day she might be
disappointed if you didn't meet her. And come to lunch, of course.
Poetry is a little precarious, but at any rate for the present we
needn't talk about the future. I wish your mother were still alive. I
think she would have loved Pauline."

"She would have adored her," said Guy, fervently.

"And your father? Of course you'll bring him to tea, when he comes to
stay with you? That will be charming ... yes, charming. Now hurry, or
you'll miss her."

Guy had no words to tell Mrs. Grey of the devotion she had inspired; but
all the way down the Fairfield road he blessed her and hoped that
somehow the benediction would make itself manifest. Then, far away,
coming over the brow of a hill, he saw Pauline. It was one of those
hills with a suggestion of the sea behind them, so sharply are they cut
against the sky. This was one of those hills that in childhood had
thrilled him with promise of the faintly imaginable; and even now he
always approached such a hill with a dream and surmise of new beauty.
Yet more wonderful than any dream was the reality of Pauline coming
towards him over the glistening road. She was shy when he met her, and
the answers she gave to his eager questions were so softly spoken that
Guy was half afraid of having exacted too much from her yesterday. Did
she regret already the untroublous time before she knew him? Yet it was
better that she should walk beside him in still unbroken enchantment,
that the declaration of his love should not have damaged the wings
seeming always unfolded for flight from earth; so would he wish to keep
her always, that never this Psyche should be made a prisoner by him. The
elusive quality of Pauline which was shared in a slighter degree by her
sisters kept him eternally breathless, for she was immaterial as a cloud
that flushes for an instant far away from the sunset. And yet she was
made with too much of earth's simple beauty to be compared with clouds.
Her sisters had the ghostly serenity and remoteness that might more
appropriately be called elusive. Pauline gave more the effect of an
earthly thing that transcends by the perfection of its substance even
spirit; and rather was she seeming, though poised for airy regions,
still sweetly content with earth. She had not been more elusive than
eglantine overarching a deep lane at Midsummer, for he had pulled down
the spray, and it was the fear of a petal falling too soon from the
tremulous flowers that gave him this sense of awe as he walked beside
her.

Yet once again Guy found his comparisons poor enough when he looked at
Pauline, and he exclaimed, despairingly:

"There _are_ no words for you. I wanted to say to your mother what I
thought about you. Oh, she was so charming."

"She is a darling," said Pauline. "And so is Father."

They were come to the stile where he and Margaret had watched their
footprints on the snow.

"And Margaret was very sympathetic, you know," he went on. "Really, if
it hadn't been for her I should never have dared to tell you I loved
you. We talked about her and Richard...."

"Margaret does love him. She does," Pauline declared. "Only she will ask
herself questions all the time."

How she changed when she was speaking of Richard, thought Guy, a little
jealously. Why could she not say out clearly like that her love for him?

"You do love me this morning?" he asked. She was standing on the step of
the stile, and he offered his hand to help her down. "Won't you say, 'I
love you'?"

But only with her eyes could she tell him, and as, her finger-tips on
his, she jumped from the step, she was imponderable as the blush upon
her cheeks.

"In the Summer," said Guy, "you and I will be on the river together.
Will you be shy when Summer comes?"

"Monica says I'm not nearly shy enough."

"What on earth does Monica expect?"

They were under the trees of Wychford Abbey, and Guy told her of the
days he had spent here, thinking of her and of the hopelessness of her
loving him.

"I could not imagine you would love me. Why do you?"

She shook her head.

"One day we'll explore the inside of the house together. Shall we?"

"Oh no! I hate that place. Oh no, Guy, we'll never go there. Come
quickly. I hate that house. Margaret loves it and says I'm morbid to be
afraid. But I shudder when I see it."

They hurried through the dark plantation; and Guy, under the influence
of Pauline's positive terror, felt strangely as if, were he to look
behind, he would behold the house leering at them sardonically.

People, too, eyed them as they went down High Street and turned into
Rectory Lane. Guy had a sensation of all the inhabitants hurrying from
their business in the depths of their old houses to peer through the
casements at Pauline and him; and he was glad when they reached the
Rectory drive and escaped the silent commentary.

When she was at home again Pauline's spirits rose amazingly; and all
through lunch she was so excited that her mother and sisters were
continually repressing her noisiness. Guy, on the contrary, felt
woefully self-conscious, and was wondering all the while with how deep a
dislike the Rector was regarding him and if after lunch he would not
call him aside and solemnly expel him from the house. As they got up
from the table the Rector asked if Guy were doing anything particular
that afternoon, and on receiving an assurance that he was not, the
Rector asked if he would help with the sweet-peas that still wanted
sorting. Guy in a bodeful gloom said he would be delighted.

"I shall be in the garden at two," said the Rector.

"Shall I come as well and help?" Pauline offered.

"No; I want you to take some things into the town for me," said the
Rector.

Guy's heart sank at this confirmation of his fears. Out in the hall
Margaret took him aside.

"Well, are you happy?"

"Margaret, you've been beyond words good to me."

"Always be happy," she said.

Even Monica whispered to him that he was lucky, and Guy was so deeply
impressed at being whispered to by Monica that it gave him a little
courage for his interview. He joined the Rector in the garden punctually
at two, and worked hard with labels and classifications.

"_A7_," the Rector read out. "_A lavender twice as big as Lady Grizel
Hamilton. D21. An orange that will not burn._ Humph! I don't believe it.
Do you believe that, Birdwood?"

The gardener shook his head.

"There never was an orange as didn't burn like a house on fire the
moment the sun set eyes on it."

"Of course it'll burn, and, anyhow, there's no such thing as an orange
sweet-pea. If there is, it's Henry Eckford."

"Henry isn't orange," said Birdwood. "Leastways not an orange like you
get at Christmas."

"More buff?"

"Buff as he can be," said Birdwood. "What do you think, Mr. Hazlenut?"
he went on, turning to Guy and winking very hard.

"I really don't know him ... it...." said Guy.

"_O5_," the Rector began again. "_A cream and rose picotee Spenser._
Yes, I dare say," he commented. "And with about as much smell as
distilled water."

So the business went on, with Guy on tenterhooks all the while for his
own summing-up by the Rector. He thought the moment was arrived when
Birdwood was sent off on an errand and when the Rector, getting up from
his kneeler, began to shake the trowel at him impressively. But all he
said was:

"Tingitana's plumping up magnificently. And we'll have some flowers in
three weeks--the first I shall have had since the Diamond Jubilee. Sun!
Sun!"

Guy jumped at the apostrophe, so nearly did it approximate to
"son-in-law." But of this relation nothing was said, and now Pauline
was calling out that tea was ready.

"Go in, my dear fellow," said the Rector. "I've still a few things to do
in the garden. By the way, was your father at Trinity, Oxford?"

"No, he was at Exeter."

"Ah, then I didn't know him. I knew a Hazlewood at Trinity."

The Rector turned away to business elsewhere, and Guy was left to puzzle
over his casual allusion. Perhaps he ought to have raised the subject of
being in love with Pauline, for which purpose the Rector may have given
him an opening. Or did this inquiry about his father portend a letter to
him from the Rector about his son's prospects? He certainly ought to
have said something to make the Rector realize how much tact would be
necessary in approaching his father. Pauline called again from the
nursery window, and Guy hurried off to join the rest of the family at
tea.

In the drawing-room Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret all seemed anxious
to show their pleasure in Pauline's happiness; and Guy in the assurance
this old house gave him of a smooth course for his love ceased to worry
any longer about parental problems and was content to live in the merry
and intimate present. He realized how far he was advanced in his
relation to the family when Brydone, the doctor's son, came in to call.
Guy took a malicious delight in his stilted talk, as for half an hour he
tried to explain to Monica, a grave and abstracted listener, how the
pike would in March go up the ditches and the shallow backwaters, and
what great sport it was to snare them with a copper noose suspended from
a long pole. There was, too, that triumphant moment he had long desired,
when Brydone, rising to take his leave, asked if Guy were coming and
when he was able to reply casually that he was not coming just yet.

After tea Guy and Pauline, as if by an impulse that occurred to both of
them simultaneously, begged Margaret to come and talk in the nursery.
She seemed pleased that they wanted her; and the three of them spent the
time till dinner in looking at the old familiar things of childhood--at
photographs of Monica and Margaret and Pauline in short frocks; at
tattered volumes scrawled in by the fingers of little girls.

"I wish I'd known you when you were small," sighed Guy. "How wasted all
these years seem."

The gong went suddenly, and Margaret said that of course to-night he
would stay to dinner.

So once again he was staying to dinner, and now on such terms as would
make this an occasion difficult to forget. As he waited alone in the
lamplit nursery, while Margaret and Pauline were dressing, he kissed
Pauline in each faded picture stuck in those gay scrap-books of Varese.
Nor did he feel the least ashamed of himself, although at Oxford his
cynicism had been the admiration even of Balliol, where there had been
no one like him for tearing sentiment into dishonored rags. When the
Rector came in to dinner, carrying with him a dusty botanical folio that
swept all the glass and silver from his end of the table to huddle in
the center, Guy tried to make out if he were very much depressed by his
not having yet gone home.

"Dear me," said the Rector, "I was sure I had seen it in here."

"Seen what, Francis?" asked his wife.

"A plant you wouldn't know. A Cilician crocus.

"Isn't Father sweet?" said Pauline. "Because, of course, Mother never
knows any plant."

"What nonsense, Pauline! Of course I know a crocus."

Towards the end of dinner Mrs. Grey said, rather nervously:

"Francis dear, wouldn't you like to drink Pauline's health?"

"Why, with pleasure," said the Rector. "Though she looks very well."

Pauline jumped in her chair with delight at this, but Mrs. Grey waved
her into silence and said:

"And Guy's health, too?"

The Rector courteously saluted him; but the guest feared there was an
undernote of irony in the bow.

After dinner when Monica, Margaret, and Pauline were preparing for a
trio, Mrs. Grey said confidentially to Guy:

"You mustn't expect Francis--the Rector to realize at once that you and
Pauline are engaged. And, of course, it isn't exactly an engagement yet.
You mustn't see her too often. You're both so young. Indeed, as Francis
said, children really."

Then the trio began, and Guy in the tall Caroline chair lived every note
that Pauline played on her violin, demanding of himself what he had done
to deserve her love. He looked round once at Mrs. Grey in the other
chair, and marked her beating time while like his own her thoughts were
all for Pauline. In the heart of that music Guy was able to say
anything, and he could not resist leaning over and whispering to Mrs.
Grey:

"I adore her."

"So do I," said the mother, breaking not a bar in her beat and gazing
with soft eyes at that beloved player.

When the music stopped Guy felt a little embarrassed by the remembrance
of his unreserved avowal; yet evidently it had seemed natural to Mrs.
Grey, for when he was saying good-by in the hall she whispered to
Pauline that she could walk with Guy a short way along the drive. His
heart leaped to the knowledge that here at last was the final sanction
of his love for her. Pauline flung round her shoulders that white frieze
coat in which he had first beheld her under the moon, misty, autumnal, a
dream within a dream; and now they were actually walking together. He
touched her arm half-timidly, as if even so light a gesture could
destroy this moment.

"Pauline, Pauline!"

He saw her clear eyes in the February starshine, and, folding her close,
he kissed her mouth. When he woke he was home; and for hours he sat
entranced, knowing that never again for as long as he lived would he
feel upon his lips as now the freshness of Pauline's first kiss.

The rest of that February went by with lengthening eyes that died on the
dusky riot of blackbirds in the rhododendrons. Here and there in mossy
corners primroses were come too soon, seeming all aghast and wan to
behold themselves out of the cloistral earth, while the buds of the
daffodils were still upright and would not hang their heads till driven
by the wooing of the windy March sun.

The gray-eyed virginal month, that is of no season and must as often
bear the malice of Winter's retreat as the ruffianly onset of Spring,
had now that very seriousness which suited Guy's troth.

Rules had been made with which neither he nor Pauline were discontented,
and so through all that February Guy went twice a week to the Rectory
and counted himself rich in Mrs. Grey's promise that he and Pauline
should sometimes be allowed, when the season was full-fledged, to go for
walks together. At present, however, the Rectory garden must be a
territory large enough for their love.

These first encounters were endowed with perhaps not much more than the
excitement of what were in a way superficial observations, since neither
of them was yet attempting to sound any deeps in the other's character.
Guy was engaged with driving a wedge into that past of the Rectory whose
least events he now envied, and he was never tired of the talks about
Pauline's childhood, so much of a fairy-tale she still seemed and fit
for endless repetition. And if Guy was never tired of being told, her
family was never tired of telling. Never, he thought, was lover so
fortunate in an audience as he in the willingness with which he was
accorded a confirmation of all his praises. Sometimes, indeed, he had to
look reproachfully at Monica or Margaret when Pauline seemed hurt at
being checked for some piece of demonstrativeness. If he did so the
sisters would always take an opportunity to draw him aside and explain
that it was only Pauline's perfection which made them so anxious for its
security. Indeed, they guarded her perpetually and with such a high
sense of the privilege of wardship that Guy always had to forgive them
at once. Moreover, he was so conscious of their magnanimity in
considering him as a lover that he was almost afraid to claim his right.

"Margaret," he said, one day, "I don't know how you can bear to
contemplate Pauline married. Why, when I think of myself, I'm simply
dumb before the--what word is there--audacity is much too pale and, oh,
what word is there?"

"I don't think I could contemplate her married to anybody but you," said
Margaret.

"But why me?"

"Why, because you are young enough to make love beautiful and right,"
Margaret told him. "And yet you seem old enough to realize Pauline's
exquisite nature. So that one isn't afraid of her being squandered for a
young man's experience."

"But I'm not rich," said Guy, deliberately leading Margaret on to
discuss for the hundredth time this topic of himself and Pauline.

"Pauline wouldn't be happy with riches. They would oppress her. She
isn't luxurious like me."

So round and round, backward and forward, on and on the debate would go,
until Margaret had arranged for Guy and Pauline a life so idyllic that
Shelley would scarcely have found a flaw in her conception.

Pauline, however demonstrative in the presence of her family, was still
shy when she was alone with her lover. Her mirth was turned to a
whisper, and her greatest eloquence was a speech of drooping silences
and of blushes rising and falling. Guy never tired of watching these
flowery motions that were the response of her cheeks to his love. Each
word he murmured was a wind to stir her countenance or ruffle her eyes,
so that they, too, responded with cloudy deeps and shadows and sudden
veilings.

Nothing more was mentioned of the practical side of the engagement, for
Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret were all too delightfully enthralled
with the progress of an idyll that was to each of them her own secret
poem of Pauline in love; while as for the Rector, he remained outwardly
oblivious of the whole matter.

March came crashing into this peace without disturbing the simple
pattern into which the existence of Guy and Pauline had now resolved
itself--a pattern, moreover, that belonged to Pauline's mother and
sisters for their own pleasure in embroidery, so that the lovers were,
as it might be, carried about from room to room. Sometimes, indeed, when
Guy came to the Rectory, there was a pretense of leaving him and Pauline
alone; but mostly they were in the company of the others, and Guy was
now as deep in the family life as if he were a son of the house. Since
he and Pauline never went for walks together, perhaps Wychford
speculation had died down--at any rate there was no gossip to disturb
Mrs. Grey; although, as she had by now given up the theory of a sort of
engagement, yet without consenting to anything in the shape of a final
announcement, it might not have mattered much.

Meanwhile, it began to dawn on Guy that the time was coming when he
would have to make up his mind to do something definite, and on these
bleak mornings of early March, as he watched the scanty snowflakes
withering against the panes, he asked himself if there was any
justification for staying on at Plashers Mead in the new circumstances
of his life there. At night, however, when the wind piped and whistled
round the house, he used to dream upon the firelight and shrink from
the idea of abandoning all that Plashers Mead had stood for and all that
now still more it must stand for in the future. If only a plan could be
devised by which the house were secured against sacrilege; and
half-fantastically he began to imagine a monastic academy for poets, of
which he would be Warden. Perhaps Michael Fane would like this idea, and
since he had money he might come forward with an offer of endowment.
Then he and Pauline could be married; for L150 a year would be an ample
income, if there were no rent to pay and no wages. He, of course, would
earn his living as superintendent of the academic discipline; and
really, as he dreamed over his plan, such an establishment would be an
admirable corollary to Oxford. It might gain even a sort of official
recognition from the university. Plainly some sort of institution was
wanted where in these commercial days young writers could retreat to
learn their craft less suicidally than by journalism. What should he
call his academy? With marriage as the reason for inventing this
economy, he could hardly give it too monastic a complexion. The louder
the wind beat against the house, the more feasibly in the lamplit quiet
within did the scheme present itself; and Michael Fane, who was always
searching for an object in life, would be the very person to involve in
the materialization. He would say nothing to anybody else; not even
would he mention the idea to Pauline herself. These sanguine dreams
occupied his evenings prosperously enough, while March swept past with
searing winds from Muscovy that skimmed the rich earth of the plow-lands
with a dusty pallor, tarnished the daffodils, and seemed to crack the
very bird-song. Guy, however, with every day either a day nearer to
seeing Pauline again or the day itself, did not care about the wind that
blew, and he was as happy walking on the uplands as the spindle-shanked
hares that sported among the turfy mounds.

Later, the shrilling wind from the east surrendered to the booming of
the equinox. Louder than before the weather beat against Guy's house
from the opposite quarter. Chimneys groaned like broken horns, and after
a desperate gale even deaf Miss Peasey complained that she had heard the
wind once or twice in the night, and that her bedroom had seemed a bit
draughty. Guy discovered that several tiles had been blown from the
roof, so that through the lath and plaster above her head there was a
sound of demoniac fife-playing. Then the wind dropped; the rain poured
down; but at last on Lady Day morning Guy woke up to see a rich sky
between white magnificent clouds, a gentle breeze, and a letter from his
father.

  FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS,
  _March 24th_.

     DEAR GUY,--I send you this with the third instalment of the L150.
     Please let me have a prompter acknowledgment than last time, when,
     I remember, you kept me waiting nearly three weeks. I am glad to
     have news of successful experiments in verse-making, but I should
     be much more glad to hear that you had made up your mind to make
     them as an accessory to a regular profession. You will notice that
     I do not attempt to influence your choice in this matter, and so I
     hope you will not retort with invidious comparisons between
     literature and the teaching of small boys.

     No, I do not remember a man called Grey in my time at Oxford, but
     I do remember a man of the same name as ours at Trinity. He came
     to grief, I believe, later on. You must assure your friend that
     this was not myself. I am glad you find the Rector and his wife
     such pleasant people. Have they any children? I wish I could say
     as much for the new Vicar of Galton, who is a pompous nincompoop
     and has introduced a lot of his High Church frippery which so
     annoys some of the parents. Your friend is lucky to be able to
     afford so much leisure for gardening. I am of course far too busy
     to think about anything like that except in the Summer holidays,
     when flowers would scarcely give me the change of air I want. This
     year I hope to come and see you for a week or two, and we shall
     be able to discuss the future. Don't work too hard and please
     oblige me by acknowledging the inclosed cheque.

  Your affectionate father,
  JOHN HAZLEWOOD.

Guy went out in the orchard to meditate upon the advisableness of
telling his father at once about Pauline. If he were coming to stay here
next August, he ought to know beforehand, for it would be horrid to have
the atmosphere of Plashers Mead ruined by acrimonious argument. August,
however, was still a long way off, and now there was going to be fine
weather for a while, which must not be spoiled. Besides, perhaps in the
end his father would not come, and, anyway, himself would be having to
decide pr

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