"But, four o"clock?"
He drew out his watch, and his eyebrows went up. It was already nearly a quarter past four.
"Is it past four?" she asked, and abruptly they were face to face with parting. That Lewisham had to take "duty" at half-past five seemed a thing utterly trivial. "Surely," he said, only slowly realising what this parting meant. "But must you? I--I want to talk to you."
"Haven"t you been talking to me?"
"It isn"t that. Besides--no."
She stood looking at him. "I promised to be home by four," she said. "Mrs. Frobisher has tea...."
"We may never have a chance to see one another again."
"Well?"
Lewisham suddenly turned very white.
"Don"t leave me," he said, breaking a tense silence and with a sudden stress in his voice. "Don"t leave me. Stop with me yet--for a little while.... You ... You can lose your way."
"You seem to think," she said, forcing a laugh, "that I live without eating and drinking."
"I have wanted to talk to you so much. The first time I saw you.... At first I dared not.... I did not know you would let me talk.... And now, just as I am--happy, you are going."
He stopped abruptly. Her eyes were downcast. "No," she said, tracing a curve with the point of her shoe. "No. I am not going."
Lewisham restrained an impulse to shout. "You will come to Immering?"
he cried, and as they went along the narrow path through the wet gra.s.s, he began to tell her with simple frankness how he cared for her company, "I would not change this," he said, casting about for an offer to reject, "for--anything in the world.... I shall not be back for duty. I don"t care. I don"t care what happens so long as we have this afternoon."
"Nor I," she said.
"Thank you for coming," he said in an outburst of grat.i.tude.--"Oh, thank you for coming," and held out his hand. She took it and pressed it, and so they went on hand in hand until the village street was reached. Their high resolve to play truant at all costs had begotten a wonderful sense of fellowship. "I can"t call you Miss Henderson," he said. "You know I can"t. You know ... I must have your Christian name."
"Ethel," she told him.
"Ethel," he said and looked at her, gathering courage as he did so. "Ethel," he repeated. "It is a pretty name. But no name is quite pretty enough for you, Ethel ... _dear_."...
The little shop in Immering lay back behind a garden full of wallflowers, and was kept by a very fat and very cheerful little woman, who insisted on regarding them as brother and sister, and calling them both "dearie." These points conceded she gave them an admirable tea of astonishing cheapness. Lewisham did not like the second condition very much, because it seemed to touch a little on his latest enterprise. But the tea and the bread and b.u.t.ter and the whort jam were like no food on earth. There were wallflowers, heavy scented, in a jug upon the table, and Ethel admired them, and when they set out again the little old lady insisted on her taking a bunch with her.
It was after they left Immering that this ramble, properly speaking, became scandalous. The sun was already a golden ball above the blue hills in the west--it turned our two young people into little figures of flame--and yet, instead of going homeward, they took the Wentworth road that plunges into the Forshaw woods. Behind them the moon, almost full, hung in the blue sky above the tree-tops, ghostly and indistinct, and slowly gathered to itself such light as the setting sun left for it in the sky.
Going out of Immering they began to talk of the future. And for the very young lover there is no future but the immediate future.
"You must write to me," he said, and she told him she wrote such _silly_ letters. "But I shall have reams to write to you," he told her.
"How are you to write to me?" she asked, and they discussed a new obstacle between them. It would never do to write home--never. She was sure of that with an absolute a.s.surance. "My mother--" she said and stopped.
That prohibition cut him, for at that time he had the makings of a voluminous letter-writer. Yet it was only what one might expect. The whole world was unpropitious--obdurate indeed.... A splendid isolation _a deux_.
Perhaps she might find some place where letters might be sent to her?
Yet that seemed to her deceitful.
So these two young people wandered on, full of their discovery of love, and yet so full too of the shyness of adolescence that the word "Love" never pa.s.sed their lips that day. Yet as they talked on, and the kindly dusk gathered about them, their speech and their hearts came very close together. But their speech would seem so threadbare, written down in cold blood, that I must not put it here. To them it was not threadbare.
When at last they came down the long road into Whortley, the silent trees were black as ink and the moonlight made her face pallid and wonderful, and her eyes shone like stars. She still carried the blackthorn from which most of the blossoms had fallen. The fragrant wallflowers were fragrant still. And far away, softened by the distance, the Whortley band, performing publicly outside the vicarage for the first time that year, was playing with unctuous slowness a sentimental air. I don"t know if the reader remembers it that, favourite melody of the early eighties:--
"Sweet dreamland faces, pa.s.sing to and fro, (pum, pum) Bring back to Mem"ry days of long ago-o-o-oh,"
was the essence of it, very slow and tender and with an accompaniment of pum, pum. Pathetically cheerful that pum, pum, hopelessly cheerful indeed against the dirge of the air, a dirge accentuated by sporadic vocalisation. But to young people things come differently.
"I _love_ music," she said.
"So do I," said he.
They came on down the steepness of West Street. They walked athwart the metallic and leathery tumult of sound into the light cast by the little circle of yellow lamps. Several people saw them and wondered what the boys and girls were coming to nowadays, and one eye-witness even subsequently described their carriage as "brazen." Mr. Lewisham was wearing his mortarboard cap of office--there was no mistaking him. They pa.s.sed the Proprietary School and saw a yellow picture framed and glazed, of Mr. Bonover taking duty for his aberrant a.s.sistant master. And outside the Frobisher house at last they parted perforce.
"Good-bye," he said for the third time. "Good-bye, Ethel."
She hesitated. Then suddenly she darted towards him. He felt her hands upon his shoulders, her lips soft and warm upon his cheek, and before he could take hold of her she had eluded him, and had flitted into the shadow of the house. "Good-bye," came her sweet, clear voice out of the shadow, and while he yet hesitated an answer, the door opened.
He saw her, black in the doorway, heard some indistinct words, and then the door closed and he was alone in the moonlight, his cheek still glowing from her lips....
So ended Mr. Lewisham"s first day with Love.
CHAPTER VII.
THE RECKONING.
And after the day of Love came the days of Reckoning. Mr. Lewisham was astonished--overwhelmed almost--by that Reckoning, as it slowly and steadily unfolded itself. The wonderful emotions of Sat.u.r.day carried him through Sunday, and he made it up with the neglected Schema by a.s.suring it that She was his Inspiration, and that he would work for Her a thousand times better than he could possibly work for himself. That was certainly not true, and indeed he found himself wondering whither the interest had vanished out of his theological examination of Butler"s a.n.a.logy. The Frobishers were not at church for either service. He speculated rather anxiously why?
Monday dawned coldly and clearly--a Herbert Spencer of a day--and he went to school sedulously a.s.suring himself there was nothing to apprehend. Day boys were whispering in the morning apparently about him, and Frobisher ii. was in great request. Lewisham overheard a fragment "My mother _was_ in a wax," said Frobisher ii.
At twelve came an interview with Bonover, and voices presently rising in angry altercation and audible to Senior-a.s.sistant Dunkerley through the closed study door. Then Lewisham walked across the schoolroom, staring straight before him, his cheeks very bright.
Thereby Dunkerley"s mind was prepared for the news that came the next morning over the exercise books. "When?" said Dunkerley.
"End of next term," said Lewisham.
"About this girl that"s been staying at the Frobishers?"
"Yes."
"She"s a pretty bit of goods. But it will mess up your matric next June," said Dunkerley.
"That"s what I"m sorry for."