Guy rather resented the implication of this birdlike intrusion in company with the doctor"s son, a lanky youth whom he had often noticed slouching about Wychford in a cap ostensibly alive with artificial flies. Apparently Willsher must also be expected, against whom Guy had already conceived a violent prejudice dating from the time he called at his father"s office to sign the agreement for the tenancy of Plashers Mead. It was of ill augury that the Greys should apparently be supposing that he would make a trio with Brydone and Willsher.
"Brought a lantern, eh?" said Brydone.
"Yes, this is a lantern," Guy answered, coldly.
"You"ll never see me with a lantern," Brydone declared.
Guy would have liked to retort that he hoped he would never even see Brydone without one. But he contented himself by saying, with all that Balliol could bring to his aid of crushing indifference:
"Oh, really?"
Somebody behind them was running down the drive and shouting, "Hoo-oo,"
in what Guy considered a very objectionable voice. It probably was Willsher.
"Hullo, Charlie," said Brydone.
"Hullo, Percy," said Willsher, for it was he.
"Know this gentleman? Mr. Hazlewood?"
"Only officially. Pleased to meet you," said the new-comer.
"Not at all," answered Guy. He felt furious to think that the Greys would suppose he had arranged to arrive with these two fellows.
"Done any fishing yet?" asked Brydone.
"No, not yet," said Guy.
"Well, your bit of river has been spoilt. Old Burrows let every one go there. But when you want some good fishing, Willsher and I rent about a mile of stream further up and we"ll always be glad to give you a day.
Eh, Charlie?"
Charlie replied with much cordiality that Percy had taken the very words of invitation out of his mouth; and Guy, unable any longer to be frigid, said that he had some books at which they might possibly care to come and look one afternoon. Mr. Brydone and Mr. Willsher both declared they would be delighted, and the latter added in the friendliest way that he knew an old woman in Wychford who was very anxious to sell a Milton warranted to be a hundred years old at least. Was that anything in Mr.
Hazlewood"s way? Guy explained that a Milton of so recent a date was not likely to be much in his way, and Mr. Brydone remarked that no doubt if it had been a Stilton it would have been another matter. His friend laughed very heartily indeed at this joke, and in an atmosphere of almost hilarious good-fellowship, that was to Guy still a little mortifying, they rang the Rectory bell.
None of the family had reached the drawing-room when they were shown in, and Guy was afraid they were rather early.
"Always like this," said Brydone. "Absolutely no notion of time.
Shouldn"t be surprised if we had to wait another quarter of an hour.
Known them for years, and they"ve always been like this. Eh, Charlie?"
The solicitor"s son shook his head gravely. He seemed to feel that as a man of business he should display a slight disapproval of such a casual family.
"Ever since I was a kid I can remember it," he said.
Guy tried to tell himself that all this talk of intimacy was merely due to the accidental a.s.sociations of country life over many years. But it was with something very like apprehension that he waited for the Greys to come down. It would be dreadful to find that Brydone and Willsher had a status in the Rectory. When, however, their hosts appeared, Guy realized with a tremendous relief that Brydone and Willsher obviously existed outside his picture of the Rectory. To be sure, they were Charlie and Percy to Monica, Margaret, and Pauline; but galling as this was, Guy told himself that after a lifelong acquaintance nothing else could be expected.
It pleased Guy really that the dinner was not a great success, for he was able to fancy that the Greys were enc.u.mbered by the presence of Brydone and Willsher. Monica was silent; Margaret was deliberately talking about things that could not possibly interest either of the young men; and Pauline was trying to save the situation by wild enthusiasms which were continually being repressed by her sisters. Mrs.
Grey alternated between helping to check Pauline and behaving in exactly the same way herself. As for the Rector, he sat silent with a twinkle in his eye. Guy wished regretfully, when the time came to depart, that he could have stayed another few minutes to mark his superiority to the other guests; but alas, he was still far from that position, and no doubt he would never attain to it.
"Oh, have you brought a lantern?" asked Pauline, excitedly, in the hall.
"Oh, I wish I could walk back with you. I love lantern-light."
"Pauline! Pauline! Do think what you"re saying," Mrs. Grey protested.
"I like lantern-light, too," Margaret proclaimed.
"When you come to see us again," said Pauline, "will you bring your dog?"
"Oh, I say, shall I?" asked Guy, flushing with pleasure.
"Such a lamb, Margaret," said Pauline, kissing her sister impulsively and being straightly reproved for doing so.
The good-nights were all said, and Guy walked up the drive with Brydone and Willsher.
"Queer family, aren"t they?" commented the doctor"s son.
"Extraordinarily charming," said Guy.
"I"ve known them all my life," said Willsher, a little querulously. "And yet I never seem to know them any better."
Guy was so much elated by this admission that he repeated more warmly his invitation to come and see him and his books, and parted from the two friends very pleasantly.
Two or three days later Guy thought he might fairly make his dinner call, and with much forethought did not take Bob with him, so that soon there might be an excuse to come again to effect that introduction. Mrs.
Grey and Monica were out; and Guy was invited to have tea in the nursery with Margaret and Pauline. He was conscious that an honor had been paid to him, partly by intuition, partly because neither of the girls said a conventional word about not going into the drawing-room. He felt, as he sat in that room fragrant with the memories of what must have been an idyllic childhood, the thrill that, as a child, he used to feel when he read, "_The Queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey._" This was such another parlor infinitely secluded from the world; and he thought he had never experienced a more breathless minute of antic.i.p.ation than when he followed the girls along the corridor to their nursery. The matting worn silky with age seemed so eternally unprofaned, and on the wall outside the door the cuckoo calling five o"clock was like a confident bird in some paradise where neither time nor humanity was of much importance. Janet, the elderly parlor-maid, came stumping in behind them with the nursery tea-things; and, as Guy sat by the small hob-grate and saw the moist autumnal sun etherealize with wan gold the tattered volumes of childhood, the very plum cake on the tea-table was endowed with the romantic perfection of a cake in a picture-book. When the sun dipped behind the elms Guy half expected that Margaret and Pauline would vanish too, so exactly seemed they the figures that, were this room a mirage, he would expect to find within as guardians of the rare seclusion. Guy never could say what was talked about that afternoon; for when he found himself outside once again in the air of earth, he was bemused with the whole experience, as if suddenly released from enchantment. Out of a mult.i.tude of impressions, which had seemed at the time most delicately strange and potent, only a few incidents quite commonplace haunted his memory tangibly enough to be seized and cherished. Tea-cups floating on laughter against that wall-paper of berries, birds, and daisies; a pair of sugar-tongs clicking to the pressure of long, white fingers (so much could he recapture of Margaret); crumpets in a rosy mist (so much was Pauline); a copper kettle singing; the lisp of the wind; a disarray of tambour-frames and music, these were all that kept him company on his way back to Plashers Mead through the colorless twilight.
Chance favored Guy next day by throwing him into the arms of the Rector, who asked if he were fond enough of flowers to look round the garden at a dull season of the year. Guy was so much elated that, if love of flowers meant more frequent opportunities of going to the Rectory, he would have given up poetry to become a professional gardener. Of course there was nothing to see, according to the Rector--a few nerines of his own crossing in the greenhouse; a _Buddleia auriculata_ honeycomb-scented in the angle of two walls; the double Michaelmas daisy, an ugly brute already condemned to extermination; a white red-hot-poker, evidently a favorite of the Rector"s by the way he gazed upon it and said so casually _Kniphofia multiflora_, as if it were not indeed a treasure blooming in Oxfordshire"s dreary Autumn.
"Tulips to go in next week," said the Rector, rolling the prospect upon his tongue with meditative enjoyment. "A friend of mine has just sent me some nice fellows from Bokhara and Turkestan. I ought to get them in this week, but Birdwood must finish with these roses. And I"ve got a lot of clusiana too that ought to be in. I am going to try her in compet.i.tion with shrubbery roots and see if _they"ll_ make her behave herself."
"Could I come in and help?" offered Guy.
"Well, now that would certainly be most kind," said the Rector; and his thin, handsome face lit up with the excitement of infecting Guy with his own pa.s.sion. "But aren"t you busy?"
"Oh no. I usually work at night."
So Guy came to plant tulips, and from planting tulips to being asked to lunch was not far, and from finishing off a few left over to being asked to tea was not far, either. Moreover, when the tulips were all planted there were gladioli to be sorted and put away. Incidentally, too, the punt had to be calked and the boat-house had to be strengthened, so that in the end it was half-way into November before Guy realized he had been coming to the Rectory almost every day. The more he came, however, the more he was fascinated by the family. They still eluded him, and he was always aware, particularly between Margaret and Pauline, of a life in which as yet he hardly shared. At the same time, so familiar now were the inner places of the house and most of all the nursery, he felt as if happily there would come a day when to none of the sisters would he seem more noticeable than one of their tumble-down arm-chairs.
Once or twice he stayed to dinner, and the long dining-room with the sea-gray wall-paper and curtains of the strawberry-thief design was always entered with a particular contentment of spirit. The table was very large, for somebody always forgot to take out the extra leaf put in for a dinner sometime last summer, or perhaps two summers ago. The result was that the Rector was far away in the shadows at one end; Mrs.
Grey equally remote at the other; while Guy would in turn be near to Margaret or Pauline or even Monica in the middle. Old-fashioned gla.s.ses with spirals of green and white blown in their stems; silver that was nearly diaphanous with use and age; candlesticks solid as the Ionic columns they counterfeited, or tapering and fluted with branches that carried the candle-flames like flowers, everything seemed as if it had been created for this room alone. From the wall a lacquered clock as round and big and benign as the setting sun wavered in the coppery shadows of the fire, and with scarcely the sound of a tick showed forth time. Guy had never appreciated the sacredness of eating in good company until he dined casually like this at the Rectory. He never knew what he ate and always accepted what was put before him like manna; yet he was always conscious of having enjoyed the meal, and next morning he used to face, unabashed, Miss Peasey"s tale of ruined tapioca which had waited for him too long.
The seal of perfection was generally set on these unexpected dinners by chamber-music afterwards, when under the arched roof of the big music-room for an hour or more of trios and quartets Guy contemplated that family. The Greys could not have revealed the design of their life with anything but chamber-music, and setting aside any expression of inward things, thought Guy, how would it be possible to imagine them more externally decorative than seated so at this formal industry of art? He liked best perhaps the trios, when he and Mrs. Grey, each in a Caroline chair with tall wicker back, remained outside, and yet withal as much in the picture as two donors painted by an old Florentine.
Monica in a white dress sat straight and stiff, with pale-gold hair that seemed the very color of the refined, the almost rarefied accompaniment upon which her fingers quivered and rippled. Something of her own coldness and remoteness and crystalline severity she brought to her instrument, as if upon a windless day a fountain played forth its pattern. Margaret"s amber dress deepened from the shade of Monica"s hair, and Margaret"s eyes glowed deep and solemn as the solemn depths of the violoncello over which she hung with a thought of motherhood in the way she cherished it. Was it she, wondered Guy, who was the ultimate lure of this house, or was it Pauline? Of her, as she swayed to the violin, nothing could be said but that from a rose-bloomed radiance issued a sound of music. And how clearly in the united effect of the three sisters was written the beauty of their lives. Guy could almost see every hour of their girlhood pa.s.sing in orderly pattern as the divine Houris dance along a Grecian frieze. There was neither pa.s.sion nor sentiment in the music; there was neither sorrow nor regret. It was heartless in its limpid beauty; it was remote as a cloud against the sunrise; cold as water was it, and incommunicable as a dream; yet in solitude when Guy reconjured the sound afterwards, it returned to his memory like fire.
A great occasion for Guy was the afternoon when first the Greys came to tea with him at Plashers Mead. Himself went into Wychford and bought the cakes, so many that Miss Peasey held up her hands with that ridiculously conventional gesture of surprise she used, exclaiming:
"Oh, dear, this _is_ a variety!"
Guy led them solemnly round the house and furnished the empty rooms with such vivid descriptions that their emptiness was scarcely any longer perceptible. In his own room he waited anxiously for judgment. Margaret was, of course, the first to declare an opinion. She did not like his curtains nor his green canvas, and she was by no means willing to accept his excuse that they were relics of undergraduate taste.