Conventionality demanded this little exchange of them, and to-day the empress sway of conventionality is rarely rebelled. Even, as here, when treading the path of love, the journey must constantly be stopped while handfuls of the sweet-smelling stuff are tossed about our persons. Neglect the duty and you must walk alone. For to neglect conventionality is like going abroad without clothes; the naked man appears. Now, nothing can be more utterly horrid to our senses than a stark woman or stark man walking down the street. We should certainly pull aside the blind to have a peep, and the more we could see of the nakedness the further would we crane our heads (provided no one was by to watch); but to go out and chat, to be seen in company with the naked creature, is another matter. We would sooner chop off our legs.
So with the conventions. The fewer of them you wear, the more naked (that is to say, real) do you become. Eyes will poke at you round the blinds, but you must walk quickly past the gate, please. If you will not go through the machine and come out a nice smooth sausage, well, you must remain original flesh and gristle; but you will smell horrid in nice noses.
Is it not warming, as you read this, to know perfectly well that you are not one of the sausages?
V.
When they had sufficiently daubed themselves, Margaret asked:
"Shall I read the next verse? That was the imagery of our meeting; this of our parting."
Bill gulped. This man was fondling the scented tresses that trickled about his face; speech was a little difficult.
She put her page beneath the moon; gave her voice to its rapture:
"Our parting! Do you remember, dear, How Nature our folly knew?
Mournful swish of the sobbing rain; Distant surge of the Deep in pain; Whispering wail of the wandering wind, Seeking, sobbing, a rest to find; Fitful gleam from a troubled sky (Nature weeping to see love die).
Ah, love, when last we met!
"It was a perfect day, really," she said. "Very hot, and just before lunch, do you remember? But there, again, it is the _imagery_ of it as it seemed to our inner selves. It comes to one, and one is the _instrument_."
Bill"s voice was hoa.r.s.e. "Margaret, come down to me," he said.
"I dare not."
"You must. I must touch you--kiss you. You must come down!"
"Bill, I dare not; I should be heard."
He bitted his next words as they came galloping up. Dare he give them rein? And then again he bathed in the ecstasy of the scene. The black square of the open window; the scented roses that framed it; the silver night that lit its picture--her dusky face between her streaming hair, her white arms, bare to where the pushed-back sleeves gave them to the soft breeze to kiss, the soft outline of her breast where the press of her weight drew close her gown.
It was not to be borne. The bitted words lashed from his hold. He gasped:
"Then I am coming up!"
Was she aghast at him? he asked himself. He stood half-checked while her steady eyes left his face, roamed from him--contrasting, as ashamed he felt, the purity of the still night with the clamour of his turbulent pa.s.sions--and settled on an adjacent flowerbed.
At last she spoke, very calmly.
"There is a potting-box just there," she said. "If you turned it on end you could reach the window, and then--"
The box gave him two feet of reach. He jumped for the ledge--caught it; pulled; fetched the curve of an arm over the sill.
Then between earth and paradise he hung limp; for a sudden horror was in his Margaret"s eyes.
She put upon his brow a hand that pressed him back; gave words to her pictured alarm: "A step upon the gravel!"
"Twixt earth and window, with dangling legs and clutching arms, in muscle-racking pain he hung.
Truly a step, and then another step.
And then a very tornado of sound beat furiously upon the trembling night; with it a flash; from it the pattering of a hundred bullets.
Someone had discharged a gun.
As Satan was hurled, so, plumb out of the gates of Paradise, Bill fell. And now the still air was lashed into a fury of sound-waves, tearing this way and that in twenty keys; now the sleeping garden was torn by rushing figures, helter-skelter for life and honour.
Sounds!--the melancholy bellow of that gardener, Mr. Fletcher, as the recoil of the bell-mouthed blunderbuss he had fired hurled him p.r.o.ne upon the gravel; the dreadful imprecations of Bill striving to clear his leg of the potting-box through whose side it had plunged; piercing screams of Mrs. Major from a ground-floor room; shrills of alarm from Mr. Marrapit; _gurr-r-ing_ yelps from Abiram in ecstasy of man-hunt.
Rushing figures!--Bill, freed from his box, at top speed towards the shrubbery; Mr. Fletcher, up from his fall, with tremendous springs bounding across the lawn; Abiram in hurtling pursuit.
More sounds!--panic screams from Mr. Fletcher, heavily labouring; the protest of a window roughly raised; from George"s head, thrust into the night: "Yi! Yi! Yi! Hup, then! Good dog! Sock him! Sock him! Yi!
Yi! Yi!"
We must seek the fuse that touched off this hideous turbulence.
CHAPTER III.
Alarums And Excursions By Night.
I.
We are going into a lady"s bedroom, but I promise you the thing shall be nicely done: there shall not be a blush.
It was midnight when Bill Wyvern projected the scheme whose execution we have followed through sweetness to disaster. Two hours earlier the Marrapit household had sought its beds.
It was Mr. Marrapit"s wise rule that each member of his establishment should pa.s.s before him as he or she sought their chambers. Night is the hour when the thoughts take on unbridled licence; and he would send his household to sleep each with some last admonition to curb fantastic wanderings of the mind.
Upon this night Mr. Marrapit was himself abed of the chill that Margaret had mentioned in her note to Bill. But the review was not therefore foregone. Upon his back, night-capped head on pillow propped, he lay as the minute-hand of his clock ticked towards ten.
His brow ruffled against a sound without his door. He called:
"Mrs. Armitage!"
"Sir?" spoke Mrs. Armitage through the oak.
"Breathe less stertorously."
Mrs. Armitage, his cook, waiting outside upon the mat, gulped wrath; respirated through open mouth.
The clock at Mr. Marrapit"s elbow gave the first chime of ten.
Instantly Mrs. Armitage tapped.