“I might come with you, if you asked me, who knows?” said Mr. Wilson, twinkling; “I’ve only been once to Lord’s in my life,—it would be quite a jaunt for me.”
“They talked of abolishing Lord’s, I believe,” said Dan hurriedly, to divert Mr. Wilson from this dangerous idea; “for the sake of economy, you know.”
“Abolish Lord’s!” cried Mr. Wilson in consternation; “bless my soul, they’ll abolish the Constitution next.” He was shaken; his vision of himself; strolling on the grass with an elegant young grandson, which had become quite vivid for a moment, was unkindly shattered. “Bless my soul,” he said again.
Dan wanted to argue. He looked at his mother, but she winked him into silence. She would have been ruffled by an argument between Dan and his grandfather,—an argument leading nowhere but to mutual irritation and misunderstanding. Better to let things slide; better to let Mr. Wilson and his generation slip undisturbed into their graves. There was enough to disturb them without carrying the disturbance into the heart of their own families. Poor old men, let them go in peace. Dan agreed, when she put it to him later in the seclusion of her bedroom. She was grateful to him for his agreement, for she wanted no echoes of Miles and his subversive doctrines among the water-colours of Biggleswade.
The July weather was against her, in her rejection of Miles, for it spoke to her of the softness of love. She knew that Miles was at his castle, and, walking between the rose-beds of her father’s little garden, the insufferable ache for Miles returned. She sent him a telegram, when Dan had gone back to Eton, saying that she would come down to stay with him.
“Miles,” she said, when he met her at the station and they racketed off in the same old motor down the lanes now rich with summer, “do you remember the first time you met me here, me and Dan, on a winter’s night, and the old man was killed at the level-crossing?”
“Don’t think of thatt.”
“I don’t want to think of it. Thatt’s why I spoke of it. I felt superstitious about it, as though it were an ill-omen haunting me ever since. If I tell you so, perhaps the shadow will go. I always avoided speaking of it before. I want us to be completely happy now, without a cloud.” She looked at him with a frank and confident smile. She felt happier and more light-hearted, suddenly, then she had felt for weeks.
“Don’t drive quite so fast; let’s dawdle a little; I want to look at the country, so green after London. I like the waste ground along the hedgerows, encroaching on the width of the road with all kinds of flowers whose names I don’t know. I like the wild roses waving their sprays above the hedges. I feel like a Fresh Air Fund child from the slums, released out of London into the country. I like the tall grass, and the fields where the hay has been cut. Will you take me out into the fields, tomorrow? every day?”
“How many days are you going to stay with me, then?” He was amused by her enthusiasm; amused, delighted, and puzzled.
“For as many days as you want me. Something has happened, something has come right. I don’t know what it is; I only know that while I was with my father I tried to forget you, and then wanted you so urgently that nothing else mattered. Miles, drive even a little slower. Let me enjoy this summer drive, and let it wipe out thatt winter evening. Do you remember, you said you wanted me to see your castle in the summer? and I said, it couldn’t be more lovely than on thatt winter day? I think I really meant that our love was independent of the seasons. It was so perfect then, that I didn’t believe it could last; I certainly didn’t believe it could grow. But it has grown, hasn’t it? I love you now even more than I did then. You disturb me, you upset me, but I love you more; I’m less able to escape from you. I’ve no desire to do so.”
She murmured to him, sitting close beside him as he drove. She stooped swiftly, and her lips touched his hand as it lay on the driving-wheel. Responsive, he caught her exaltation, slackened his speed, and they lingered between the July hedges as people in a trance. He had not expected her to come, and her telegram had brought him to the station in a mood divided between apprehension and excitement. But when they met, the apprehension vanished; their moods rushed together; fused; found perfection in the microcosm of love. She, alone, existed for him, and he for her. The summer and the country lanes existed for them both.
“You didn’t enjoy coming to night-clubs with me,” he said, confessing to an unkindness which he had imposed upon her.
“I hated it, Miles; it wasn’t you, it wasn’t me. Or, if it was me, it was a contemptible me. This is better. Let’s stay here, buried, lost.—Look, here we are at the turning to your castle. There’s the board which says ‘Private road, no thoroughfare.’ Do you know, I was frightened when I first saw thatt board. It was the first time I came here, and the lights of your car swept across it, and I knew I had committed myself to a road without retreat. Stop for a minute; pull up.”
He stopped the car by the side of the road, shut off the engine, and she lay against him, so close that she could feel the beating of his heart.
“Can you feel my heart, too, Miles? no, of course you can’t, I’m on the wrong side. Darling, drive on very slowly. This is your own rough lane. These are your own fields on either side. This is the real you, I think,—more real than the you of night-clubs, or even than the you of the House of Commons. Bretton doesn’t really know this side of you, nor do the Anquetils. Nor do I,” she added humbly; “I’ve never been a country person, and I can’t understand a word that Munday says. And I was very indignant—though you didn’t know it—when you dragged me across your ploughed fields. Still, I can feel your castle and your fields as a back-ground to you and to our love. DO you look on me altogether as an interloper?”
The motor slipped down the steep approach to Miles’ lane, a lane so roughly kept that the Queen Anne’s Lace and flowering grasses brushed the mudguards as they passed. He put his arm round her shoulders and drove with one hand, scaring a brood of young partridges into the ditch.
“I want nothing but this,” he said, and, at the moment, believed it.
The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sun-dial veering slowly with the sun. Everything was hushed and drowsy and silent, but for the coo of the white pigeons sitting close together on the roof. Miles said that he really preferred the spring, when the green was fresher, the trees less dark and heavy, the year less full-blown, but Evelyn forbade him to find any fault with such perfection.
“Even if we die tomorrow, Miles, today will have been flawless.”
He teased her, saying that she and he and the castle between them made a picture like Marcus Stone, and that thatt was what she liked; and she grew momentarily a little sad, not because he had teased her, but because she knew that Marcus Stone painted only young lovers. She refrained, however, from explaining the reason of the tiny cloud crossing her. There were no other clouds; she was determined that there should not be. She even made him talk to her about his book, the bugbear subject which even in their happier moments was taboo. He had just finished it, he said; had, indeed, written to tell her so three days ago; and was now making the final corrections. Well, she said, he should work at it tomorrow morning, but not this evening, Miles, please; let this evening be mine. At which he laughed, but fondly, and said that she was no wife for an author or for a politician.
They wandered under the high brick walls after dinner in a perfect communion. The evening was absolutely still; the tower sprang like a bewitched and rosy fountain towards the sky. Evelyn looked up at its windows, and her clasp tightened on Miles’ fingers. She remembered the first night when she had gone across crisp, frozen grass, to find Miles in his tower, while Dan lay innocently asleep in the cottage a hundred yards away. Then, it had been cold, and she had come shivering and unaccustomed into Miles’ arms. Now, it was warm, and they were exquisitely familiar to one another.
“Miles,” she said, “are you sleeping in the cottage or in the tower?”
They laughed over the question. Of course he was sleeping in the tower. What would Mrs. Munday think, if he slept in the cottage alone with Mrs. Jarrold? They laughed happily, as lovers laugh, who share a secret.
“I shall come to you this time, Evelyn, and leave you with the dawn.”
They strolled up and down the path under the wall. They forgot the world, and broke off little branches of southern-wood to crush between their fingers. The pansies and the white lilies stood out startingly in the half light. It was a dream, a suspension, a trance.
Later, they climbed the seventy-five steps of the tower and stood on the leaden flat, leaning their elbows on the parapet, and looking out in silence over the fields, the woods, the hop-gardens, and the lake down in the hollow from which a faint mist was rising. The moon was full in a light sky; few stars were visible, by reason of the brightness of the moon; only stars of the first magnitude, and one or two steady planets. Evelyn asked Miles which they were, and he immediately named them; it was the sort of thing he always knew, and, although such things were alien to her, she always delighted in his knowledge. She took a pride in making him show off; in testing his superior information. Nor did he ever fail her. Other people might say that young Vane-Merrick was a bit glib, a bit shallow,—though in some directions he was serious enough, they said; even weighty;—Evelyn, at any rate, was infallibly impressed by the catholicity of his knowledge, especially when it interfered in no way between him-self and her. If he had been engaged on serious astronomical studies, she would have resented a night spent at the telescope; as it was, she liked to point to a bright star and say, “What’s thatt one, Miles?” and to receive his answer, meaningless to her though it might be, “Arcturus,—you can find him always by following a half-circle down from the Plough.” It was elementary, but Evelyn did not know it. She did not discriminate between the things which Miles really knew about, and the things which he scarcely knew about at all. She knew only that some things bored her and others did not; politics bored her, and his book bored her, and astronomy bored her, but it did not bore her when Miles named Venus to her in the evening sky, and told her that this was the planet consecrated to lovers. She looked at Venus, after thatt, with an added respect.
They came down again, and wandered away from the tower, the garden, and the moat.
Down in the wood, by the lake, they sat on a fallen tree among the tall bracken. The lake glimmered through a clearing. The oaks above them blotted out half the sky. It was still and warm,—so still, that they heard a rustle in the leaves; so warm, that Evelyn threw back her cloak and Miles let his hand fall across her bare throat. It was a real, warm summer night, rare in England. They scarcely spoke.
They sighed at last, and, rising, wandered across the meadows back towards the tower. Some belated grass had been cut, and they walked between the ridges of the fresh swathes. Once, they sank down into the scented hay and stayed there for a space, silent but for the eloquent touch of love. Then they rose again, as by common consent, and, looking at one another,—though by now the night had fallen, and they could scarcely see one another—pursued their way, hand in hand, across the meadow towards the tower.
Next morning Evelyn awoke still filled with the same sense of supreme happiness. Their absolute seclusion at the castle, in the middle of Miles’ thousand acres, invested their secret love with idyllic colours. Far away was the censure of the Jarrolds and the threat of the discrepancy of age. They were purely lovers, united by the ever-young, lyrical bond of love. She sprang from her bed and began to dress, joyful in the thought that she would go down to meet Miles at breakfast, and that another day would unroll itself for their delectation, with another sinking of the summer evening, and another coming of the summer night, and the moon shining through the latticed windows of the tower. The anticipation of such renewed joy weakened her as she dressed, and made her sit swooning for a moment in the chair beside the vast, unlit fireplace of her bedroom. Swallows were nesting in the chimney; they swooped down the chimney, out into the room, perched briefly on the bar of the open window, then swept out into the garden, and returned, regardless of the room’s other inhabitant, with nourishment for their cheeping, invisible brood. Evelyn watched them go and come. She would never have believed that she,—she of all people!—she, so urban,—could enter into a communion with swallows; but love worked strange miracles. She watched the little creatures at their parental business, and forgave them the messes they made over her hairbrushes and dressing-table. They were occupied solely in fulfilling the demands of nature. How natural, simple, and inevitable their creed! So natural, that it seemed to her divine. To pair; to nest; to hatch out a brood; to seek food for their young; to bring food, whether down the chimney or through the window; to spill their little innocent dung on the way; to pause in confabulation on the top of her mirror; to feel nothing but the urgency of begetting and upbringing in the brief months before the inexplicable necessity of migration began; to have such confidence in man’s benevolence as to nest under his roof or in his very chimney! those fragile, vulnerable birds, destined to the long mysterious journey after the simplicity of their English summer! Sunk into the chair before the fireplace, she watched them on their restless flight; and found no strength to go on with her dressing, so absorbed was she in the tiny drama of the swallows, so envious of their simplicity, so envious of the babies they reared up there in the darkness of the chimney. Half-dressed, in her shift, she went down on her knees and peered up the chimney; and there, on the edge of the nest, she saw two hesitating, bunched, half-fledged forms, almost ready to fly; and, drawing back, she pressed her fingers into her eyes so that the eye-balls hurt, thinking of the children that she and Miles might have begotten; and then she thought of Dan, who was not Miles’ son; but the summer morning was so sweet, outside the window, and the memory of the night so fresh, and the anticipation of the days so clear, that she took her fingers away and roused herself, and put on a summer frock to go down and meet Miles who was, after all, her lover.
He had been swimming in the lake before breakfast and came in, sleeking back his wet hair. Mrs. Munday was in the room, putting down a large dish of eggs and bacon; she wore her usual air of wide serenity and perfect understanding. The door stood open on to the garden and bright flowers; sunlight poured into the room.
“I hope you slept well?”
She answered him with a quick and meaning smile.
“Perfectly, thank you. Am I late! I dawdled, watching a pair of swallows fly up and down my chimney.”
“I should have warned you that they were there,—why, you might have lit the fire last night! Mrs. Munday doesn’t like them, but I intercede for them and she spares their lives.”
“You wouldn’t like them either, sir, if you had to clean up after them.”
“I dare say not, but you know you wouldn’t hurt them even if I let you. In Greece, Mrs. Munday, it is considered the luckiest thing in the world if swallows nest in the house.”
“Indeed, sir? I learn a lot from Mr. Vane-Merrick, don’t I?” she said, turning humorously to Evelyn. “Now I hope the coffee is as you like it, and is there anything else I can get you?”
“We have everything we could possibly want in the world, Mrs. Munday.”
When Mrs. Munday had gone, Evelyn stretched out her hand to him.
“Did you really mean thatt? About having everything we wanted in the world? Do you feel like thatt too, Miles? I felt so happy when I woke this morning that I thought I should die of it. Come to the door just a moment before we have our breakfast. Oh, Miles, the warmth of the sun! Lay your hand on the brick,—it’s quite hot. I never saw flowers look so brilliant before; it seems as though they had doubled themselves during the night, and every separate petal shines. Is it possible that you and I are here together? alone? and in love?”
Sh
e leant up against the doorway in the sunlight in her summer frock, excited, radiant, incredulous, looking now at Miles and his sleeked and shining hair, now out at the garden brilliant with flowers and sun. She crushed his fingers between her own. The knuckles hurt, bone against bone. The memory of the night was alive within her, an ideal night succeeded by so ideal a day.
“Now we’ll have breakfast,” she said, releasing his hand, and going to the table she poured out his coffee and gave him his eggs and bacon on a plate. Their intimacy rejoiced her. After such a night, she could help him to eggs and bacon.
“Why are you smiling, Miles?”
“I’m smiling at your domesticity.”
They breakfasted in perfect union. “I never knew,” she felt but did not say, “that breakfast could be so romantic a meal.” She was in so good a mood that after breakfast she asked him what he was going to do, instead of assuming that he would stay idling with her. “I’m sure you ought to see Munday, Miles. I’m sure a cow has calved during the night. Something of the sort always seems to happen in the country. Or, even if no cow has calved, you ought to correct your book. I shall go and stroll across the fields, and you can come and join me. Don’t hurry.” Privately she thought that the ecstasy of the moment when he re-joined her would be enhanced by their brief separation. She felt full of virtue, too, for suggesting that he should correct his book.
He let her go, watching her muslin figure under a parasol recede down the long colonnade of cobnuts. The Great Dane stood by his side, waiting patiently. He saw her pass out from the shade of the nuts, unlatch the little gate, and walk out into the sunshine of the field beyond. She turned and waved to him. He waved back. She was as brightly coloured as the flowers in his garden. He fancied, indeed, as he watched her with the eyes of love, that she was just a flower blown out of his garden, blown down the avenue of the nut-trees, passing through shadow as a petal might go whirling, recovering its colour as it came again into the sunlight. She could be darkened by shadow, or lit up by the sun. He preferred her lit up by the sun. Shadow made him impatient and irritable. His life was too full and virile to admit her purely feminine problems. He loved her, but she represented his diversion; not his whole life. He loved her, certainly. But he loved her especially when she was as gay, as happy, as simple, as easy, as decorative as the flowers in his garden this morning through the open door. What he could not endure was when she was difficult and strenuous and jealous. Then he felt that he wanted to break away from her for ever, and be rid of love and all its wearisome and feminine complications, but when she was gay and easy, and as pretty as she had looked in her muslin frock leaning up against the door-jamb in the sun, then he felt that he would keep to her for ever.
Family History Page 18
