'Oh, Peggy,' cries Prue, breaking in upon them, in realisation of Talbot's fear, 'he has thrown his cap over too! Is not it foolish of him? Is not he sure to catch cold? And I do not see how he is ever to get it again.'
'As to that, dear,' replies Freddy philosophically, gracefully winding his gown about his neck and over his head, 'I am not at all anxious, as it was not mine.' So saying, he again draws away his little sweetheart, or she him, and the other pair are a second time alone. But for how long?
'Are they – are they —all right?' inquires John, recalling what strides to intimacy he had formerly made by the agency of Prue's love affairs.
'I think so,' she answers doubtfully; 'it is hard to say; pretty right.'
'She looks as if it were all right.'
'Yes, does not she?' returns Peggy eagerly. 'Is not she improved? Is not she wonderfully prettier than when last you saw her?'
Talbot hesitates a second. He knows, of course, that Prue has a face; but whether it is a pretty or an ugly one, a bettered or a worsened one since last he looked upon it, he knows no more than if it had never been presented to his vision.
'Whether you see it or not,' says Peggy, a little piqued at his unreadiness to acquiesce, 'it is so; everybody sees it.'
'But she always was pretty, was not she?' asks he eagerly, trying to retrieve his blunder. 'Could she be prettier than she always was? and happiness is mostly becoming.'
He looks wistfully at her face as he speaks, as if he would not mind trying the effect of that recipe upon his own beauty – so wistfully that she turns away with a sort of confusion; and, resting her hand on the battlement that is still swaying almost like a ship on a sea under the bells' loud joyaunce, looks down. The sun has risen higher. Opposite him his pale sister is swooning away in the west. Before his proud step the spring green grows vivider. The smoke from the morning fires new lit, curls, beautiful as a mist, above the ennobled dwelling-houses, swallowing what is vulgar from sight, as unworthy of the new King's eyes.
The two young people stand tranced for a moment or two side by side without speaking; then Peggy says in a low voice, and with an apparently complete irrelevance to anything that had gone before:
'The lavender-bush is dead.'
'Dead?'
'And the mowing-machine is broken,' adds she, beginning to laugh, though a little tremulously. 'Jacob says it has never been the same since you meddled with it.'
'Jacob and I were always rivals. Then he is not dead too?'
'No.'
'Nor the fox?'
'No.'
'Nor Mink?'
'No.'
'Nor the parrot?'
'No.'
How delightful it seems to him to be standing there in the dawning, asking her after them all! He would like to inquire by name after every one of the eleven finches in the big cage. The crowd has very much thinned. There has been for a quarter of an hour a continual disappearance down the ladder of successive anxious human heads.
'Oh, Peggy!' cries Prue, again running up; 'are you ready? We are going down; which way shall you go – backwards or forwards? He says forwards; but I think I had rather go backwards, because I shall not see what is coming. Which way shall you?'
'I shall go forwards,' replies Peggy, with a sort of start. 'I had always rather see the worst coming, whatever it is.'
As she speaks she turns, with what he recognises as a good-bye look, to Talbot. Is it over already, then? Is this to be all? Can it be his fancy that there has come upon her face a sort of reflection of the blankness of his own – that her eyes, lifted in farewell to his, ask his eyes back again, as his are asking hers, 'Is this to be all?' What! let her slip now that God has sent her to his arms on this strange high place in this blessed vernal morning? The thought fills him with a sort of rage that, in its turn, lends him a boldness he had never before known with her.
'Are you going to say "Good-bye" to me?' he asks, with a kind of scorn. 'Then you may save yourself the trouble; for I have not the remotest intention of saying "Good-bye" to you.'
Prue has fled away again to the stairhead, and from it her little voice now sounds in peremptory imploring:
'Peggy! Peggy! come quick! I want you to go down first. I shall not be frightened if you will go down first. I want you to show me which way you mean to go – backwards or forwards. Peggy! Peggy!'
And Peggy, obedient to the tones which, whether querulous or coaxing, have constituted her law for seventeen years, turns to obey. She will slip from him after all! The thought frenzies him. Before he knows what he is doing he has laid his hand in determined detention on her wrist.
'You shall not go!' he says, with an authority which has come to him in his extremity he does not know whence. 'She does not need you a thousandth part as much as I do. Has not she her Ducane? She is greedy! Must she have everything? Let her call!'
Peggy's course is arrested. She stands quite still, with her blue eyes, bluer than he has ever seen them, looking straight at him, in a sort of waking trance.
'But – she – wants me!' she falters.
'And do not I want you?' asks he, unconsciously emphasising his pressure on her wrist. 'Dare you look me in the face, and tell me that I do not want you? You are a truthful woman – too truthful by half, I thought, the first time I met you. Look me in the eyes if you dare, and tell me that you believe I do not want you.'
She does what he tells her – at least half of it. She looks him penetratingly full in the eyes. If the least grain of falsity lurk in either of his, that clear and solemn gaze of hers must seek it out.
'If you do want me,' she says slowly, and with a trembling lip, 'it has come lately to you.'
'Lately!' echoes he, his voice growing lower as the tide of his passion sweeps higher. 'What do you call lately? I wanted you the first moment I saw you; was not that soon enough? How much sooner would you have had it? The first moment I saw you – do you recollect it? when you were so angry at being sent in to dinner with me that you would not be commonly civil to me; that you turned your back upon me, and insulted me as well as you knew how – I wanted you then. I have wanted you ever since – every hour of every day and every night; and I want you – God knows whether I want you – now!'
Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations, appeals, have died into silence. Her and Freddy's pretty heads have both disappeared. Talbot and Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her lip trembles.
'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not seen me since.'
'No, worse luck!' cries he passionately; 'but you need not throw that in my teeth. You might pity me for it, I think. Eight whole months gone, Peggy – wasted, lost out of our short lives! But how dare you stand there and say that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn, winter, summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps, between yourself and me. You do not want me, that is likely enough. You could not even pretend to have been giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You would have been glad – I saw by your face that your kind heart would have been glad – if you could have told me, with any semblance of truth, that you had been thinking of me; but you had not. I was miles away from you.'
Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving. She has not had many love-tales told her; not many more perhaps, or of much better quality, than those with which Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has let her eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their old directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.
'Why did you go away?'
Why did he go away? That is a question to which, in one sense, the answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty Harborough sent him.' In another – the only one, unfortunately, in which he can employ it – it is absolutely unanswerable.
'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question, and, with her eyes on his, awaits the answer.
And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of eager words to pour straight and hot from his heart into hers, he stands dumb before her.
She does not repeat the question; but she does what is far worse, she moves away to the stairhead and disappears, as all the other votaries of the ceremony, as Freddy and Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.
He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnashing his teeth. Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step? Is the old love to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead, that it had done living? Before God, no! Not if he can hinder it. She has not waited for him at the tower-foot; but he overtakes her before she has reached the High Street, and without asking her leave.
The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city clocks, with their variously-toned voices, are striking six; to their daily toil the workmen, with tools on back, are swinging along. To them there is certainly nothing unfamiliar, probably nothing lovely, in the morning's marvellous clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning, as if God had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I make all things new!'
'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot abruptly.
'Yes.'
'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot answer it now. As long as you and I shall live, I can never answer it!'
He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a passionate anxiety. O God! Is Betty's shadow to come between them still? Betty renouncing and renounced; Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his bane, his evil demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of whose prime years she has already burnt and withered? If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin has found him out.
In passionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but she is holding her head low, and he cannot get a good view of her face.
'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes taking in the rapidly diminishing space that lies before him. 'Is not the distance short enough in all conscience without your lessening it? Walk slower.'
She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.
'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost in a whisper, and with his heart beating like a steam-ram. 'Does that mean that it made any difference to you? May I make it mean that it did? Stay – do not speak – I will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it did not, I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe you!'
He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses, hanging in a suspense that is almost ungovernable – for they have passed Queen's classic front, are passing 'All Souls' – upon her slow-coming words. There is a little stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.
'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'
'I am coming back for it,' he cries passionately, the joy-tide sweeping up over his heart to his lips, and almost drowning his words. 'Coming back for it – for it and for all else that I left behind me!'
The smile spreads, red and wavering.
'You left nothing else; I sent all your books after you.'
'Yes,' he says reproachfully, 'you were very conscientious. It would have been kinder to be a little dishonest. You might have kept back the one that we had been reading out of. I had a faint hope that you might have kept it back.'
'I did think of it,' she answers, under her breath.
'The mark is in it still!' he cries joyfully. 'Shall we take it up again where we left off? Where shall we sit? Under the Judas-tree?'
Her flickering smile dies into gravity.
'You are getting on very fast,' she says tremulously. 'Are you sure that it is not too fast?'
They have passed St. Mary's; noble porch and soaring spire lie behind them.
'Is it worth while your coming,' she continues, with evident difficulty, and with a quiver she cannot master in her low voice, 'when at any moment you may be obliged to go away again?'
'Why should I be obliged to go away again?'
Her voice has sunk to a key that is almost inaudible.
'I am only judging of the future by the past.'
He groans. The past! Is he never to escape from the past? never to hear the last of it? Is it always to dog him to his dying day?
'Are you sure?' she pursues, lifting – though, as he sees, with untold pain – the searching honesty of her eyes to his, while a fierce red spot burns on each of her cheeks, 'that you are not promising more than you can perform when you talk of coming? Are you sure that – you – are free – to come? You know – you were – not free to stay.'
His face has caught a reflection of the crimson dyeing hers, but his look shows no sign of blenching.
'I am free,' he answers slowly and emphatically. 'Why do you look as if you did not believe me? Cannot you trust me?'
At his words a shadow passes over her face. Is not Freddy Ducane always inviting her to trust him? She has grown to hate the phrase.
'I am not good at trusting people,' she says plaintively, with a slight shiver. 'I do not like it.'
They have reached the door of the Mitre.
'Over already!' cries Talbot, in a voice of passionate revolt and discontent; 'my own good hour gone before I had well laid hold of it? Who could believe it? Then at least,' speaking very rapidly, 'say something to me – something else – something better! Whether you trust me or not – God knows why you should not – do not let me go away with that for – '
'Peggy dear,' interrupts a soft and rather melancholy voice from an upper window above the door – and yet not very much higher than they, so low and unpretending is the old and famous inn in comparison with its staring towering competitors – 'we would not for worlds begin breakfast without you; but I am afraid that Prue is growing rather faint.'
CHAPTER XXV
Whitsun is here. Again the tired workers are let loose. Again the great cities pour out their grimy multitudes over the fair green country, upon which, year by year, day by day almost, their sooty feet further and further encroach. Among the multitudes there are, of course, a good many who are not grimy. Cabinet ministers are, as a rule, not grimy – nor fashionable beauties – nor famous lawyers; but yet they all volley out, too, with the rest, to drink the country air, and smell the cowslips. All over the country the churches are being pranked for Whit-Sunday. It is that festival for which there is least need for devout souls to strip their hothouses and conservatories. In each parish the meadows need only be asked to give a few never-missed armfuls out of their perfumed plenty, and the church is a bower. The brunt of the labour of decorating her church, as of most other parish festivities, falls upon the shoulders – happily vigorous ones – of Peggy Lambton. The Whitsuns, Easters, Christmases, on which Mrs. Evans is not hovering on the verge of a new baby or two, and consequently handicapped for standing poised on ladders, are so few as not to be worth taking into consideration. Prue is willing; but her flesh is weak, and she tires easily. With the aid, therefore – an interchangeable term, as she sometimes thinks, for hindrance – of half a dozen of the best among the young Evanses, Peggy endures the toil, and reaps the glory alone. She has been standing most of the day, and for the greater part of the time with her arms uplifted, so that she is sufficiently weary; but as the work is not yet done, and there is no one to take her place, she treats her own fatigue with the contempt it deserves.
It is tolerably late in the afternoon, and Mrs. Evans has just looked in. Being in her normal condition, she has at once sunk down upon a seat. Mr. Evans has sauntered in after her. He has not much that is beautiful in his life; and the sight of the garlanded church gives him a sort of pale pleasure, something akin to that produced by the luscious flow of his favourite poem. He could not stir a finger to produce the effect himself; but he likes it when it is done for him.
'What a size these gardenias are!' says Mrs. Evans, fingering the blossoms in a box of hothouse flowers reserved for the altar. 'From the Hartleys of course? They are double as big as milady's. I wonder how her gardener likes having all the prizes carried off from under his nose! Dear me! what a thing money is! Burton, the butcher, told me the other day that five and twenty prime joints go into that house every week, beside soup-meat and poultry; and of course they have their own game and rabbits. Five and twenty prime joints, and a yacht that they can go round the world in! Not, I am sure, that I envy them that; for I am such a wretched sailor.'
Peggy makes no answer. Perhaps her attention is sufficiently occupied by the management of her long garland of cowslips, catchfly, and harebell; perhaps she has already heard, though not from Mrs. Evans, more about that world-girdling yacht than she cares to hear. She sighs, and her sigh is taken up and echoed in a deeper key by the Vicar; though whether his sigh is caused by regret at the sinful profuseness of a parishioner, or by a reflection upon the inequality of human destiny, that sends five and twenty prime joints into one man's kitchen, and sets a solitary leg of mutton spinning on another man's spit, may be best decided by those most acquainted with Mr. Evans's habitual turn of thought.
'It is a great disadvantage to a neighbourhood having a millionnaire in it,' pursues Mrs. Evans, going on contentedly with her trickle of talk; 'it sends up the price of everything – even eggs. I was saying so just now to Mrs. Bates at the Roupell Arms. I wanted to know whether she could let me have a dozen fresh ones. My hens are all sitting; and you would not believe the number of eggs we get through at the Vicarage – egg-puddings, and so on. Oh, by the bye,' with a change to an alerter key, 'from what she told me, I suppose that Lady Betty Harborough is expected at the Manor.'
The garland, whose dexterous disposition has cost Peggy ten minutes' labour, drops suddenly loose and wavering – a long rope of flowers – in the air.
'Lady Betty Harborough!' she repeats slowly – 'with milady away? – most unlikely. Oh, now I see!' with a sudden dawn of relief breaking over her face; 'now I understand how the report has arisen! The children are to arrive to-day, and so it was supposed that she must be coming with them – of course, of course!'
'No; it has nothing to say to the children,' rejoins the Vicar's wife cheerfully; 'and I cannot say that I have heard in so many words that she is coming. It was only' (looking cautiously down the aisle, and lowering her voice) – 'I suppose one ought not to talk scandal in a church, but it really is such an open secret – that I concluded it must be so, because a friend of hers is expected.'
'A friend of hers!' repeats Peggy slowly, the blood rushing to her cheek and brow, as she stands poised in space, with the unfinished wreath still dangling forgotten before her.
'Rather more than a friend, I am afraid,' returns Mrs. Evans, with a significance by no means devoid of enjoyment. 'Dear me! I do not half like talking of it here; but, after all, the truth is the truth. To the Roupell Arms of all places, too! and there can be no mistake about it, for I have just seen his portmanteau with "John Talbot, Esq.," in large letters upon it; his man arrived in charge of it this afternoon, and he is to follow by a later train. It really is too barefaced, is not it? I could see that Mrs. Bates herself thought so though of course I did not breathe a word to her.'
Peggy has put out a hand to steady herself on the ladder, since, for a moment, church and heaped flower-baskets, guelder roses and lilac branches, whirl round with her. His portmanteau come, and he coming! It would be a pity then if to-day, of all days, she were to break her neck.
It is nearly three weeks since she had parted from him at the door of the Mitre, in the middle of a sentence which Freddy Ducane never gave him the chance to finish, or her to answer; and since then she has heard neither tale nor tidings of him. Why should she? Of course his octopus has him again. Poor fellow! no doubt from those hundred straggling polypus arms it is harder than she, with her life ignorance, can estimate to tear himself free. And yet he had said he was free; said so – yes. But men's words and their actions are not apt to tally very nicely; at least, the words and the actions of the only man with whom she has any intimacy are not. 'They are all alike,' she has said to herself, and so has gone heavily – a little more heavily perhaps for that bootless, barren morning meeting on the tower-top – about her daily work. And now he is here – as good as here, at least – for does not his herald portmanteau make sure his approach?
'I wonder how he will like his quarters,' continues Mrs. Evans, with a rather malicious laugh. 'The beds are clean, I will say that for Mrs. Bates; but how a man accustomed to a French chef will enjoy her chops and rashers, is another question. She is very nervous about it herself, good woman!'
Peggy laughs; a little low laugh.
'Of course Lady Betty will make a pretence of coming to see her children,' pursues Mrs. Evans, warming with her theme; 'and indeed, after the escape that boy had, I cannot think how she can ever bear him out of her sight. And as milady and Freddy are both away, they will have the park all to themselves to philander in. It really is too barefaced.'
'Too barefaced, is it?' repeats Peggy, softly smiling, and staring at a great sheaf of sweet nancies that she has absently picked up.
'Is it?' echoes Mrs. Evans in astonishment; 'why, is not it? What other motive could bring him to such a dull village as this?'
'What indeed?' replies Peggy with emphasis, while the thought crosses her mind that she ought to feel mortified at its evidently never having come within the range of the Vicaress's possibilities that any one could visit a dull village in search of her. 'It cannot surprise her more than it does me,' she says to herself.
'One can only hope that he will be too uncomfortable to stay long,' says Mrs. Evans, slowly rising, and preparing to depart. 'Well, I wish I could help you' (this is a formula that recurs as often as do the festivals of the Church); 'but you are getting on capitally. Do you think that the font is quite as pretty as it was last year? I am so glad I sent the children to help you; do not overtire yourself.'
She strolls away, with the contented feeling of having done her part in the church decoration; but it is a couple of hours later before Peggy follows her example. It is nearly eight o'clock when, with stiff arms and tired legs, she enters the hall – embowered in spring blossoms, like the church she has just left – of the Red House. As she comes in Prue springs to meet her.
'Oh, Peggy, Peggy! have you heard?'
The elder sister's heart leaps. Prue understands. Prue is glad – gladder than she had had any conception that she would have been. Kind little Prue!
'Yes,' she falters, grateful surprised tears at her sister's sympathy rushing to her eyes; 'yes, I have heard. Oh, Prue, how nice of you to be glad!'
'Nice of me to be glad!' repeats Prue in a tone of profound wonderment, her eyes growing round. 'Why is it nice of me? It would be very odd of me if I were not glad; but I do not see anything nice about it. How did you hear? Has milady come back? Have you seen any one from the Big House? Why, I only got the letter by the second post.'
'The letter?' repeats Peggy stupidly; 'what letter?'
'What letter? why, his letter of course, telling me that he is not going to stay up for Commemoration after all: he says that without me the balls would be Dead Sea apples to him, so he will be home a week sooner; and the Hartleys are going, and they will not find him there after all. But oh, Peggy! how could you have heard? I do not believe that you did. Why did you say you had?'
The sparkle, but now as bright in Peggy's eyes as in her junior's, dies out; a cold ripple of disappointment rises, and flows over her heart. Prue was not glad for her, after all. It was her own preoccupation that had credited her sister with a knowledge and an interest of which she is quite innocent.
'You shall tell me about it at dinner,' she answers in an altered voice, turning away.
And at dinner Prue does tell her all about it. Too excited to eat, she chatters through their simple repast about the beauty of Freddy's renunciation; his thoughtfulness for others; the irreparable loss that Commemoration will sustain by his absence; the bitter disappointment of Miss Hartley.
Into the middle of her talk, near the close of their short dinner, comes the sound of a railway whistle, announcing the arrival of one of the few stopping trains – in this case the last train of all that touches at their little station. Peggy involuntarily puts up her hand, and cries: 'Hush!'
'The wind must be changed,' she says, reddening at the consciousness of her own motive, though she is safe indeed from having it divined, 'one hears the train so plainly; it is late to-night!'
'What of that?' cries Prue gaily; 'are you expecting a friend by it? Ah, me! how I wish that I was! He came by that train last time.'
And so Peggy keeps her tidings to herself. Perhaps if she had had some one to impart them to they would not have made her so restless. As it is, she cannot settle to any occupation. The wheels that will roll him from the station to his inn must pass her door; and through all the trickle of Prue's talk her ear is pricked to catch them. But it is market night, and from the many vehicles noisily passing by, her hearing is incapable of disentangling his. He must have reached the Roupell Arms by now. Is Mrs. Bates setting a very unappetising dinner before him, so unappetising that it will, in accordance with Mrs. Evans's pious aspiration, drive him prematurely away?
'How fidgety you are!' cries Prue, surprised at her sister's unusual restlessness. 'I should have thought that you would have been thankful to sit down, after being on your legs all day.'
'So should I,' replies Peggy, again blushing, and sitting down; 'and I have been upon them since ten o'clock in the morning, have not I?'
'It is quite disgraceful the way in which the Evanses put everything upon you!' cries Prue indignantly; 'though indeed' – with an accent of remorse not very common to her – 'I do not think that they are much worse than the rest of us. Why does everybody put everything upon you, Peggy? You do everything for everybody, and nobody ever does anything for you.'
Peggy's eyes brim up at this unexpected recognition of her services by the seventeen-years sovereign of them. Are all good things to come to her together?