CHAPTER XXVII
'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,
When every little bird shall be a Cupid,
And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blows
And curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,
The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,
And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;
Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,
And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
The shadows have put on their evening length. Even Minky, as he stands with his little face pushed through the bars of his gate, barking at the servants as they return from church – a mere civility on his part, an asking them, as it were, how they enjoyed the sermon – boasts one that would not disgrace a greyhound or a giraffe.
'Are you there, Prue?' softly asks a voice, coming out of the darkening green world outside; coming with an atmosphere of freshness, of dew, of hawthorn, into the little hall, and peering toward the fireside-settle, which, both from the waning light and its own position, hints but dimly that it has an occupant. 'Are you asleep?'
'I do not know,' replies a disconsolate small treble. 'I tried to go to sleep, to get over some of the time. Oh dear, what a long Sunday it has been! Is he gone?' struggling up into a sitting posture out of her enveloping shawls.
'Yes.'
'And you did not sit under our tree?'
'No.'
'How laconic you are!' cries Prue fretfully; 'and I have not exchanged words with a creature since luncheon. Do come here; turn your face to the light. What have you and Mr. Talbot been talking of for the last four hours? John Talbot, as those horrid children call him. I think it is so impertinent of them; but I suppose their mother taught them.'
A slight contraction passes over the radiant, dewy face, so docilely turned towards the western shining.
'Peggy!' cries the younger girl in an altered tone, forgetting her invalidhood, and springing off the settle; 'how odd you look! You do not mean to say – is it possible? You do not suppose that I do not see – that you can hide anything from me!'
'There is nothing that I want to hide,' replies Peggy with dignity, though the blood careers under the pure skin to cheek, and brow, and lily throat; then, with a sudden change of tone to utmost tender deprecation, 'Oh, Prue, you do not mind? You are not vexed? It will not make any difference to you!'
Prue is silent.
'It will make no difference to you,' repeats Peggy, rather faltering at the total dumbness in which her tidings are received. 'Of course you will go on living with me just as you have always done.'
For all answer, Prue bursts into a passion of tears.
'Oh, do not say so!' she cries vehemently. 'You talk as if I never were going to have a home of my own! Oh, it would be too cruel, too cruel!'
Her sobs arrest her utterance. She has collapsed upon the settle, and sits there a disconsolate heap, with its hands over its face. Peggy stands beside her; a sudden coldness slackening the pulsations of her leaping heart.
'You will not care any longer about him and me,' pursues Prue weepingly. 'You will have your own affairs to think of. Oh, I never thought that I should have to give up you. It was the last thing that ever would have entered my head. Whatever happened, I always counted upon having you to fall back upon!'
The dusk is deepening. Peggy still stands motionless and rigid.
'I know that I am not taking it well,' pursues Prue a minute later, dropping the fingers wetted with her trickling tears, and wiping her eyes; while her breath still comes unevenly, interrupted by sobs. 'I know that I ought to pretend to be glad; but it is so sudden, such a surprise – he is such a stranger!'
The cold hand at Peggy's heart seems to intensify its chill. Is there not some truth in her sister's words? Is not he indeed a stranger? Has not she been too hasty in snatching at the great boon of love that has been suddenly held out to her – she, whose life has not hitherto been furnished with over-much of love's sweetness?
'I know that you must think me very selfish,' continues the younger girl, still with that running commentary of sobs. 'I am selfish, though he says that I am not – that he never knew any one who had such an instinct of self-abnegation; but then he always sees the best side of people. Yes, I am selfish; but I will try to be glad by and by – only,' with a redoublement of weeping, 'do not expect it of me to-night.'
And, with this not excessive measure of congratulation, poor Peggy has to be content, on the night of her betrothal. She goes to bed with the cold hand still at her heart; but in the morning it has gone. Who can have a cold hand still at her heart when she wakes at early morning at lilac-tide, to find a little round wren, with tiny tail set on perfectly upright, singing to her from a swaying bough outside her casement, with a voice big enough for an ostrich, and to know that a lover is only waiting for the sun to be well above the meadows to lift the latch of her garden-gate.
Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is presumable that familiarity with her new position will come in time to Peggy; but for the present she cannot get over the extraordinariness of being – instead of anxiously watching for some one else's tardy lover – going to meet her own. And when they have met and greeted, the incredulity, instead of lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable that it can be her whom any one is so extravagantly glad to see? All through the day – all through several after-days – the misty feeling lingers that there must be some mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be the workaday Peggy, whom she has always known, who is being thus unbelievably set on high and done obeisance to.
'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough got over the ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak connectedly.
'Yes.'
'And what did she say?'
Margaret hesitates a moment.
'She – she was very much upset.'
'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion of feeling of one who had imagined that all Creation must be rejoicing with him. 'What was there in it to upset her?'
'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all prepared for it. In that,' blushing, 'she was like me.'
He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he would have liked Prue to have been glad too.
'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy, looking half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of trouble over her limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of it, so you are; if it were not,' laughing a little, 'that I am always hearing the children call you by it, I should not even know what your Christian name was.'
'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice.
'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns Peggy, laughing. 'She will soon grow used to you; and so' (again with that flitting blush) – 'and so shall I. You must tell me all about yourself,' she goes on, a few moments later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive din that Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert his exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond the garden bounds into the green sea of the adjoining park. 'You must begin at the very beginning; you must tell me all.'
Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible emphasis on that concluding word, which insists on the entirety of his confession? Whether it be so, or that the stress exists only in his own imagination, he winces. They have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose hundreds of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in haste to go, is beginning to spring and straighten its creases. Far as the eye can reach, the park's green dips and rises are flushed with the rose and cream of flowering thorn-bushes.
'Will you?' with a soft persistency.
'Of course I will,' replies Talbot; 'only,' with a laugh that does not ring quite naturally, 'you do not know what you are bringing upon yourself. Well, where am I to begin? At the very beginning?'
'At the very beginning,' repeats she, with a sigh of satisfaction, settling herself more comfortably with her back against the tree-trunk to listen. 'Tell me where you were born, and,' laughing, 'what sort of a baby you were.'
And so he begins at the very beginning; and for a while goes on glibly enough.
There are worse occupations for a summer's morning than to sit on juicy May grass, with the woman you love beside you; and to read in the variations of her rapt blue eyes her divine compassion for you. For the you, the innocent distant you of six, who had the whooping-cough so badly; her elate pride in the scarcely less distant you of sixteen, carrying home your school-prizes to your mother; her tearful sympathy with the nearer you – the you who still ache at the memory of the loss you sustained when full manhood had given you your utmost capacity for feeling it. Up to the date of his sister's death he goes on swimmingly; but with that date there coincides, or almost coincides, another. It was during the physical collapse that followed that crushing blow that Betty, with her basket of red roses, had first come tripping into his life. He stops abruptly.
'Well?' she says expectantly, looking towards him, and wiping the sympathetic tears from her soft eyes.
'Well!' he repeats, with an uneasy laugh. 'Have not I dosed you with myself enough for one morning? I – I think that is about all.'
'But that was more than five – nearly six years ago,' objects she.
'Nearly six years ago,' he echoes, in a tone of almost astonishment; 'so it was. But – but, as I need not tell you, the importance of time is not measured by its length; there are moments that bring an empire, and there are years that bring nothing, or less than nothing.'
'They cannot have brought nothing,' replies she, her luminous eyes, in whose pupils he can see himself mirrored in little, still interrogating his; 'they must have brought something, good or bad; they must have brought something.'
'You know that there has been no change of Ministry since then,' he goes on, speaking rather fast, and wincing under the steadiness of her look. 'I have been – 's secretary ever since – a mere machine, a scribbling machine; and you know that machines have no history.'
She is silent, and her eyes leave his face, as if it were useless any longer to explore it. She presses him no further. It would be both ungenerous and bootless to urge him to a confession which he would never make, and in the effort to evade which he would writhe, as he is doing now. Her breast heaves in a long slow sigh. There is nothing for it. She must submit to the fact of the existence for ever, for as long as her own and his being last, of that five years' abyss between them; an abyss which, though she may skirt it round, or lightly overskim it, will none the less ever, ever be there.
There is one subject that, in their moments of closest confidence, must ever be tabooed to them; one tract of time across which, indeed, they may stretch their hands, but which their feet can never together tread; one five years out of the life of him who should be wholly hers, locked away from her to all eternity. Her hand has fallen absently to fondling Minky's poor little gray head, no bigger than a rabbit's. Minky, who has followed them to their love-retreat, and has now come simperingly to offer them his little cut-and-dried remarks upon the fine day.
Talbot's eye jealously follows that long hand in its stroking movement. He would like to take it, and lay its palm across his hot lips. Why should not he? It is his. But that five years' gulf prevents him. A little milky blossom with its tiny stain of red, wind-loosened, has floated down from the horse-chestnut tree, and now rests upon her hair. He would like to brush it off with a kiss. Why should not he? Whose but his is now all that blonde hair? But again the gulf stretches between them.
The sun, steadily soaring zenithwards, sends a warm dart through their tree, which, thick-roofed as it is, is not proof against the vigour of his May strength. The deer gather for shade under the young-leaved oaks. The whole earth simmers in the vivifying heat, and yet they both lightly shiver. Upon Talbot there lies a horrible fancy, as of Betty sitting between them. It seems to him as though, if he stretched out his arm to enfold his new love, it would instead enwrap his old one. Is there no spell by which he can exorcise this persistent vision? Will it always be between them? He is still putting this bitter question to himself, when Peggy speaks:
'Well,' she says, stifling the end of a sigh, and without any trace of resentment in her tone, 'I am very much obliged to you for having told me all that you have. I know that you are not fond of talking of yourself, and if – if' – the carnation mounting even to her forehead – 'there is anything in your life that you had rather not tell me, why we – we will let it alone; we – we will not think of it any more.'
Perhaps her words may contain the spell he has been praying for; since, in a moment, the Betty phantom has vanished, and his new sweetheart lies, live and real, in his arms.
'At all events,' she whispers, 'I can contradict Prue, next time that she says you are such a perfect stranger.'
She smiles as she speaks. How lovely her smile is, when he sees it as close as he is doing now! It is not perhaps quite so radiant as the one with which she met him at the gate – but her eyes! He lets himself drown – drown in those heavenly blue lakes. Why should he ever come to the surface again?
'There they are, Franky!' cries a piercing little voice, cutting the summer air from a few hundred yards' distance, 'under that horse-chestnut tree; how close together they are sitting!'
Another minute has brought the owner of the voice, and of another voice more lisping and less shrill, up to their eagerly sought, if not quite so eagerly seeking, friends.
'You are not sitting so close together as you were,' chirps Franky innocently. 'Mammy used – '
'What do you want? What have you come for?' asks Talbot, in a voice a good deal rougher than his little protégés are apt to hear from him, and breaking into the middle of a sentence, whose close he can only horrifiedly conjecture, before more than its two initial words have had time to leave its small speaker's lips.
At the extreme and unusual want of welcome in his tone, both children stand for a moment silenced. Then Lily, with an offended hoist of her shoulders, turns pointedly to Margaret.
'Nanny says that my tongue is white,' cries she; 'she is always telling me so. I came to ask you; I thought that you would not mind telling me,' with an insinuating air, 'if it really is.'
'And is not mine white too?' inquires Franky eagerly, and in a minute both red tongues are protruded for inspection; and Talbot bursts, against his will, into a vexed laugh.
It is not always, indeed, to have their tongues looked at; but during the ensuing days of his courtship Talbot finds that he must hold himself in continual readiness against onslaughts in unexpected directions from Miss and Master Harborough, who, finding the little Red House more amusing than the empty Manor, and being troubled with no doubts as to their acceptableness, arrive from every point of the compass at each likeliest and unlikeliest hour of the summer day. The only thing for which he has to be thankful is that their arrival is generally heralded by their eager treble voices; so that he has just time to step down out of his seventh heaven before they are upon him. Perhaps if it were not for this, and for one or two other slight abatements from its complete felicity, the tuliped garden, with its lilac breath, its come pansies, and its coming pinks, would be too like that one when the first he and she felt the heavenly surprise of their new kisses.
For the children's intrusions are not quite the only cloud in Talbot's Whitsun sky. It is oftener than once or twice that the phantom of the past has seated itself between them. It is oftener than once or twice that he has found Peggy looking at him in a pained astonishment, at his having suddenly broken off in the middle of some fond phrase. She cannot know, and he can never tell her, that it is because there has suddenly flashed upon him the recollection, vivid as reality, of some occasion on which he had showered the same words of fire upon her who has had precedence over Peggy in his heart. He would fain cut all such words out of his vocabulary; employ in this new worship nothing that had been desecrated by having been offered on the altars of the old. But it is impossible. He had poured out all his heart's best before the first love. How then can he have anything fresh for the second? The thought cuts him like a knife; but none the less, all the more rather – since it is our knife-thoughts that cling most pertinaciously to us – does it come back and back again. In return for all the wealth of her fresh firstfruits, he has nothing to give her but what is stale, threadbare, sullied. This is a reflection that would sit easily upon most men. If it were not so, there would be but few unembittered love-makings. But upon Talbot's palate it is wormwood. And lest there should be any chance of his escaping from his past, there is always some innocent reminiscence, allusion, or appeal on the part of Lily or Franky to bring it back to him.
Prue, too! On the blue of his heaven, Prue forms another little cloud. Prue makes no pretence of pleasure in the prospect of his brotherhood; and to Prue he is sacrificed oftener than he thinks just. It is, thanks to Prue, that he has so often been sent back prematurely to his pot-house; that he has had prematurely to break off his trance of wonder at the eyes, the only blackness under which springs from some slight and fugitive fatigue; at the cheek, which his doubting finger may rub as hard as it chooses without any other result than that of intensifying its damask; at the hair, from which he has been allowed once to withdraw the pins in order to convince himself by ocular demonstration that though it may come down, it can never come off.
'I think you had better go now. She has been alone all day,' is a formula whose recurrence he has now learnt to dread.
He shrugs his shoulders.
'I have been alone for thirty-two years.'
'I think if you would not mind going now – '
'I should mind extremely.'
She laughs softly, the happy low laugh of the consciously well-beloved, rich in the prospect of a whole lifetime of love ahead.
'Whether you mind it or not, I am afraid you must go. She had been crying this morning.'
'More shame for her. What has she to cry about? Now if I were to cry – Peggy, you like her much better than you do me' (taking her half angrily in his arms). 'Pah!' with a change of tone, perceiving, for the first time, a gardenia pinned upon the breast of her gown; 'why do you wear that horrid thing?'
'Franky gave it me. He begged it from the gardener at the Manor for me.'
'Throw it away!' cries Talbot, with more energy than the occasion seems to warrant. 'I detest the smell. It is like a fungus.'
'It will hurt his feelings if I do.'
'It will hurt mine if you do not,' returns Talbot with emphasis; and suiting the action to the word, he snatches the blossom almost violently from her breast, and tosses it away.
She looks at him, her eyes tinged with a faint surprise.
'What a thing it is to have rival admirers!' she says, laughing; and then she sends him reluctantly away.
If it were a scheme of the most deep-laid coquetry, instead of the result of a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice, she could not have hit upon a better method of inflaming his passion. All through the long light evening, whose yellow at this sweetest season is so late in changing to night's blue, he prowls about outside her garden-fence, peering between her lilac-clusters and laburnum-droops for a glint of her white gown; shaking his fist at Prue's selfish little head, and counting, through the fevered night, the strokes of the leisurely church clock as they carry him nearer and nearer to the dewy morning hour, when he may again hold his red rose of Lancaster in his hungry arms.
And meanwhile his short holiday is racing away. Scarcely has it seemed to have begun when the end is already at hand. The date of the reassembling of Parliament, of his chief's return to Downing Street, and his own consequent reappearance there, looms nearer and nearer.
To return to Downing Street without her! He has been without her all his life, and until the last six months has never looked upon himself as particularly an object of commiseration on that score; but now his whole soul swells with a disgusted self-pity at the idea of his lonely return to his Bury Street lodgings.
He has extracted from Peggy without much difficulty a promise that his last evening shall be indeed and wholly his; that for once it shall be Prue, not he, that goes to the wall; that he shall neither be dismissed to his public-house, nor left to disconsolate moonings about the inhospitable roads and fields, until it is time to betake himself to his truckle-bed; that, on the contrary, he may for once have his fill of her fair company, that should by rights be always his; may sit, and saunter, and sweetly stray with her; and at length, when the stars ride high, may leisurely bid 'God bless her!' at the garden gate, and dismiss her to dream of him.
But lovers propose, and freakish chance disposes.
Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and has jumped into his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of the moments stolen from his final hours. He had left Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally quick, so that a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah, with her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud prose, into the whispered poetry of their tête-à-tête. And apparently she has been obedient to his behest, for she is – though he would have thought it impossible – beforehand with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms resting on the top of the gate.
But how is this? She has made no change in her dress, but is still in her morning cotton.
As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to him deprecatingly.
'I hope you will not be very angry!'
A slight chill of apprehension passes over him.
'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty instinct to ward off the impending blow. 'What is it? What do you mean? Not,' with an accent of incredulous indignation, 'Prue again?'
'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet defensively too; 'nobody enjoys being ill. But you know how finely strung she is; something must have upset her.'
'Something is always upsetting her!' returns Talbot brutally.
'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy, wrinkling up her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure I do not know how, but I think she must; she has had to go to bed.'
The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves only her absence from the dinner-table, he will not very violently quarrel with it after all.
'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best place for her! Poor Prue!'
'But – ,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed itself in sympathy with her lover.
'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions returning. 'You are not going to tell me that on my last evening I am to be sacrificed to a malade imaginaire!'
'She is not a malade imaginaire,' answers Margaret half indignantly; 'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse has run up to ninety.'
'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring the gate for fear I should force my way in?'
'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from their resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals hospitably wide. 'Come in! come in! how could you dream of such a thing? Do you suppose that I am going to send you away without your dinner? But after dinner – '
'After dinner?'
'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing her forehead and her hands. I have always done it, ever since she was a baby. When you are ill, I will bathe your forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping her fingers soft and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not you think that it is hard enough for me without that?'