For a moment the remark seemed to vex Grantley, and to sober him. He spent a few seconds evidently reflecting on it.
"Well, I hope not," he said at last. "But at any rate I should think so generally."
"Then you could mostly make her think so. But if it wasn"t true, you might feel a brute."
"So I might, Jeremy."
"And it mightn"t be permanently safe. She sees things uncommonly sharp sometimes. Well, I must be off."
"Going back to Haeckel?"
Jeremy nodded gravely. He was not susceptible to ridicule on the subject of his theories. The two watched him stride away towards Old Mill House with decisive vigorous steps.
"Rum product for a country parsonage, Grantley."
"Oh, he"s not a product; he"s only an embryo. But I think he"s a promising one, and he"s richly amusing."
"Yes, and I wonder how you"re going to manage Miss Sibylla!"
Grantley laughed easily. "My poor old chap, you can"t be expected to take a cheerful view. Poor old Tom! G.o.d bless you, old chap! Let"s go home to tea."
As they walked by the parsonage a bicycle came whizzing through the open garden-gate. It was propelled by a girl of fifteen or thereabouts--a slim long-legged child, almost gaunt in her immaturity, and lamentably grown out of her frock. She cried shrill greeting to Grantley, and went off down the street, displaying her skill to whosoever would look by riding with her arms akimbo.
"Another local celebrity," said Grantley. "Dora Hutting, the new parson"s daughter. That she should have come to live in the village is a gross personal affront to Jeremy Chiddingfold. He"s especially incensed by her lengthy stretch of black stockings, always, as he maintains, with a hole in them."
Courtland laughed inattentively.
"I hope Harriet"ll get that wire in good time," he said.
No remark came into Grantley"s mind, unless it were to tell his friend that he was a fool to stand what he did from the woman. But what was the use of that? Tom Courtland knew his own business best. Grantley shrugged his shoulders, but held his peace.
CHAPTER II
THE FAIRY RIDE
Courtland went off early next morning in the dog-cart to Fairhaven station--no railway line ran nearer Milldean--and Grantley Imason spent the morning lounging about his house, planning what improvements could be made and what embellishments provided against the coming of Sibylla.
He enjoyed this pottering both for its own sake and because it was connected with the thought of the girl he loved. For he was in love--as much in love, it seemed to him, as a man could well be. "And I ought to know," he said, with a smile of reminiscence, his mind going back to earlier affairs of the heart, more or less serious, which had been by no means lacking in his career. He surveyed them without remorse, though one or two might reasonably have evoked that emotion, and with no more regret than lay in confessing that he had shared the follies common to his age and his position. But he found great satisfaction in the thought that Sibylla had had nothing to do with any of the persons concerned.
She had known none of them; she was in no sense of the same set with any one of the five or six women of whom he was thinking; her surroundings had always been quite different from theirs. She came into his life something entirely fresh, new, and unconnected with the past. Herein lay a great deal of the charm of this latest, this final affair. For it was to be final--for his love"s sake, for his honour"s sake, and also because it seemed time for such finality in that ordered view of life and its stages to which his intellect inclined him. There was something singularly fortunate in the chance which enabled him to suit his desire to this conception, to find the two things in perfect harmony, to act on rational lines with such a full and even eager a.s.sent of his feelings.
He reminded himself, with his favourite shrug, that to talk of chance was to fall into an old fallacy; but the sense of accident remained. The thing had been so entirely unplanned. He had meant to buy a place in the North; it was only when the one he wanted had been snapped up by somebody else that the agents succeeded in persuading him to come and look at the house at Milldean. It happened to take his fancy, and he bought it. Then he happened to be out of sorts, and stayed down there an unbroken month, instead of coming only from Sat.u.r.day to Monday. Again, Sibylla and Jeremy had meant to go away when the rector died, and had stayed on only because Old Mill House happened to fall vacant so opportunely. No other house was available in the village. So the chances went on, till chance culminated in that meeting of his with Sibylla: not their first encounter, but the one he always called his meeting with her in his own thoughts--that wonderful evening when all the sky was red, and the earth too looked almost red, and the air was so still. Then he had been with her in his garden, and she, forgetful of him, had turned her eyes to the heavens, and gazed and gazed. Presently, and still, as it seemed, unconsciously, she had stretched out her hand and caught his in a tight grip, silently but urgently demanding his sympathy for thoughts and feelings she could not express. At that moment her beauty seemed to be born for him, and he had determined to make it his. He smiled now, saying that he had been as impulsive as the merest boy, thanking fortune that he could rejoice in the impulse instead of condemning it--an end which _a priori_ would have seemed much the more probable. In nine cases out of ten it would have been foolish and disastrous to be carried away in an instant like that. In his case it had, at any rate, not proved disastrous. From that moment he had never turned back from his purpose, and he had nothing but satisfaction in its now imminent accomplishment.
"Absolutely the right thing! I couldn"t have done better for myself."
He stood still once in the middle of the room and said these words aloud. They exhausted the subject, and Grantley sat down at his writing-table to answer Mrs. Raymore"s letter of congratulation. He had never been in love with Mrs. Raymore, who was his senior by ten years; but she was an old and intimate friend--perhaps his most intimate friend. She had been more or less in his confidence while he was wooing Sibylla, and a telegram apprising her of his success had called forth the letter to which he now owed a response.
"If I had been a poor man," he wrote in the course of his reply, "I wouldn"t have married--least of all a rich wife. Even as a well-to-do man, I wouldn"t have married a rich wife. You have to marry too much besides the woman! And I didn"t want a society woman, nor anybody from any of the sets I"ve knocked about with. But I did want to marry. I want a wife, and I want the dynasty continued. It"s come direct from father to son for five or six generations, and I didn"t want to stand on record as the man who stopped it. I"m entirely contented, no less with the project than with the lady. It will complete my life. That"s what I want--a completion, not a transformation. She"ll do just this for me. If I had taken a child and trained her, I couldn"t have got more exactly what I want; and I"m sure you"ll think so when you come to know her.
Incidentally, I am to acquire a delightful brother-in-law. He"ll always be a capital fellow; but, alas, he won"t long be the jewel he is now: just at that stage between boy and man--hobbledehoy, as you women used to make me so furious by calling me--breathing fury against all inst.i.tutions, especially those commonly supposed to be of divine origin; learned in ten thousand books; knowing naught of all that falls under the categories of men, women, and things; best of all, blindly wrath at himself because he has become, or is becoming, a man, and can"t help it, and can"t help feeling it! How he hates women and despises them! You see, he has begun to be afraid! I haven"t told him that he"s begun to be afraid; it will be rich to watch him as he achieves the discovery on his own account. You"ll enjoy him very much."
Grantley ended his letter with a warm tribute to Mrs. Raymore"s friendship, a.s.surances of all it had been to him, and a promise that marriage should, so far as his feelings went, in no way lessen, impair, or alter the affection between them.
"He"s very nice about me," said Mrs. Raymore when she had finished reading; "and he says a good deal about the brother-in-law, and quite a lot about himself. But really, he says hardly one word about Sibylla!"
Now it was, of course, about Sibylla that Mrs. Raymore had wanted to hear.
Late afternoon found Grantley cantering over the downs towards Fairhaven. Sibylla had been staying the night there with a Mrs.
Valentine, a friend of hers, and was to return by the omnibus which plied to and from Milldean. Their plan was that he should meet her and she should dismount, leaving her luggage to be delivered. He loved his horse, and had seized the opportunity of slipping in a ride. When she joined him he would get off and walk with her. As he rode now he was not in the calm mood which had dictated his letter. He was excited and eager at the prospect of meeting Sibylla again; he was exulting in the success of his love, instead of contemplating with satisfaction the orderly progression of his life. But still he had not, and knew he had not, quite the freedom from self-consciousness which marks a youthful pa.s.sion. The eagerness was there, but he was not surprised, although he was gratified, to find it there. His ardour was natural enough to need no nursing; yet Grantley was inclined to caress it. He laughed as he let his horse stretch himself in a gallop; he was delighted, and a trifle amused, to find his emotions so fresh: none of the luxury, none of the pleasure-giving power, had gone out of them. He was still as good a lover as any man.
He was cantering over the turf thirty or forty yards from the road when the omnibus pa.s.sed him. The driver cried his name, and pointed back with his whip. Grantley saw Sibylla a long way behind. He touched his horse with the spur, and galloped towards her. Now she stood still, waiting for him. He came up to her at full speed, reined in, and leapt off.
Holding his bridle and his hat in one hand, with the other he took hers, and, bowing over it, kissed it. His whole approach was gallantly conceived and carried out.
"Ah, you--you come to me like Sir Galahad!" murmured Sibylla.
"My dear, Sir Galahad! A banker, Sir Galahad!"
"Well, do bankers kiss the hands of paupers?"
"Bankers of love would kiss the hands of its millionaires."
"And am I a millionaire of love?"
Grantley let go her hand and joined in her laugh at their little bout of conceits. She carried it on, but merrily now, not in the almost painful strain of delight which had made her first greeting sound half-choked.
"Haven"t I given it all to you--to a dishonest banker, who"ll never let me have it back?"
"We pay interest on large accounts," Grantley reminded her.
"You"ll pay large, large interest to me?"
She laid her hand on his arm, and it rested there as they began to walk, the good horse Rollo pacing soberly beside them.
"All the larger if I"ve embezzled the princ.i.p.al! That"s always the way, you know." He stopped suddenly, laughing, "It"s quite safe!", and kissed her.
He held her face a moment, looking into the depths of her dark eyes. Now he forgot to be amused at himself or even gratified. If he was not as a boy-lover, it was not because he advanced with less ardour, but that he advanced with more knowledge; not because he abandoned himself less, but that he knew to what the self-abandonment was.
She walked along with a free swing under her short cloth skirt; evidently she could walk thus for many a mile with no slackening and no fatigue. The wind had caught her hair, and blew it from under, and round about, and even over the flat cap of red that she wore; her eyes gazed and glowed and cried joy to him. There under the majestic spread of sky, amid the exhilaration of the salt-tasting air, on the green swell of the land, by the green and blue and white of the sea, she was an intoxication. Grantley breathed quickly as he walked with her hand on his wrist.
"It"s so new," she whispered in a joyful apology. "I"ve never been in love before. You have! Oh, of course you have! I don"t mind that--not now. I used to before--before you told me. I used to be very jealous! I couldn"t be jealous now--except of not being allowed to love you enough."
"When I"m with you I"ve never been in love before."
"I don"t believe you ever have--not really. I don"t believe you could--without me to help you!" She laughed at her boast as she made it, drumming her fingers lightly on his arm; his blood seemed to register each separate touch with a beat for each. "When we"re married, Grantley, you shall give me a horse, such a good horse, such a fast horse--as good and as fast as dear old Rollo. And we"ll ride--we"ll ride together--oh, so far and so fast, against the wind, right against it breathlessly!
We"ll mark the setting sun, and we"ll ride straight for it, never stopping, never turning. We"ll ride straight into the gold, both of us together, and let the gold swallow us up!"
"A bizarre ending for a respectable West End couple!"