"And how he hates me," she went on.
"Oh, really, my dear child, you are ridiculous," Guy exclaimed, petulantly. "Are you going to take up this att.i.tude towards all my friends? You"re simply horridly jealous, that"s the whole matter."
Pauline did not quarrel now, because she thought it might gratify Michael Fane to see the discord he had created, but she treasured up her anger and knew that, when later she and Guy were alone, she would say whatever hard things now rested unsaid. Next morning Guy asked her if she would be very cross to hear that he was going to town for a night.
"With your friend?" she asked.
He nodded, and she turned away from him clouded blue eyes.
"It _is_ unfair of you to hate Michael," he pleaded. "I told him you thought he was cold, and he said at once, "Do tell her I"m not cold, and say how lovely I think her." He said you were very lovely and strange ... a fairy"s child."
Still Pauline would not turn her head.
"I told him that you were indeed a fairy"s child," Guy went on, "and I told him how sometimes I felt I should go off my head with the responsibility your happiness was to me. For indeed, Pauline, it is, it is a responsibility."
She felt she must yield when Guy spoke like that, but then, unfortunately, he began to talk about his friend again, and sullen jealousy returned.
"Listen, Pauline, I"m going up to town because Michael wants me to see this girl he is going to marry. He was rather pathetic about her. It seems that ... well ... it"s a sort of misalliance, and his people are angry about it, and really I must be loyal and go up to town and help him with ... well ... you see, really all his friends have been unsympathetic about her."
"I expect they"ve every right to be," said Pauline.
"I do think you"re unreasonable. I"m only going away for a night."
"Oh, go, go, go!" she cried, and, pulling herself free of his caress, she left him by the margin of the stream disconsolate and perplexed.
Pauline, when Guy had gone to London with his friend, began to fret herself with the fear that he would not come back, and she was very remorseful at the thought that if he did not she would be responsible.
She half expected to get a letter next day to tell her of his determination to remain in town for good, and when no letter came she exaggerated still more all her fears and longed to send him a telegram to ask if he had arrived safely, railing at herself for having let him leave her without knowing where he was going to stay. By the following afternoon all the jealousy of Michael had been swallowed up in a pa.s.sionate desire for Guy"s return, and when about three o"clock she saw him coming through the wicket in the high gray wall her heart beat fast with relief. She said not a word about Guy"s journey, nor did she even ask if his friend had come back with him. She cared for nothing but to show by her tenderness how penitent she was for that yesterday which had torn such a rent in the perfection of their love. Guy was visibly much relieved to find that her jealous fit had pa.s.sed away, and when she asked for an account of his journey he gave it to her most eagerly.
"Yesterday was rather tragic," he said. "We went to see this Lily Haden to whom Michael had engaged himself, and ... well ... it"s impossible to explain to you what happened, but it was all very horrible and rather like a scene in a French play. Anyhow, Michael is cured of that fancy, and now he talks of going out of England and even of becoming a monk.
These extraordinary religious fads that succeed violent emotion of an utterly different kind! Personally I don"t think the monkish phase will survive the disillusionment that"s just as much bound to happen in religion as it was bound to happen over that girl."
"What was she like?" Pauline asked, resolving to appear interested in Michael.
"I never saw her," said Guy. "The tragedy took place "off" in the Aristotelian manner."
"Oh, Guy, don"t use such long words."
"Dear little thing, I wish you wouldn"t ask any more about this girl.
She is something quite outside your imagination; though I could make of her behavior such a splendid lesson for you, when you think you have behaved dreadfully in escaping from your room for an hour or two of moonlight. Poor Michael! he"s as scrupulous as you are, and it"s rather ironical that you and he shouldn"t get on. Puritans, both of you! Now there"s another friend of mine, Maurice Avery, whom you"d probably like very much, and yet he isn"t worth Michael"s little finger."
"Did you see him yesterday?"
"Yes, we went round to his studio in Grosvenor Road. Oh, my dear, such a glorious room, looking out over the river right into the face of the young moon coming up over Lambeth. A jolly old Georgian house. And at the back another long, low window looking out over a sea of roofs to the sunset behind the new Roman cathedral. There were lots of people there, and a man was playing that Brahms sonata your mother likes so much.
Pauline, you and I simply must go and live in Chelsea or Westminster, and we can come back to Plashers Mead after the most amazing adventures.
You would be such a rose on a London window-sill, or would you then be a tuft of London Pride, all blushes and bravery?"
"Bravery! Why I"m frightened to death by the idea of going to live in London! Oh, Guy, I"m frightened of anything that will break into our life here."
"But, dearest, we can"t stay at Wychford for ever doing nothing. Read "The Statue and the Bust" if you want to understand the dread that lies cold on my heart sometimes. Think how already nearly twenty months have gone by since we met, and still we are in the same position. We know each other better, and we are more in love than ever, but you have all sorts of worries at the back of your mind, and I have all sorts of ambitions not yet fulfilled. Michael has at last managed to make a complete a.s.s of himself, but what have I done?"
"Your poems ... your poems," she murmured, despairingly. "Are your poems really no use? Oh, Guy, that seems such a cruel thing to believe."
Guy talked airily of what much more wonderful things he was going to write, and when he asked Pauline to meet him this very midnight on the river she had to consent, because in the thought that he appeared to be drifting out of reach of her love she felt half distraught and would have sacrificed anything to keep him by her.
The June evening seemed of a sad, uniform green, for the blossom of the trees was departed and the borders were not yet marching in Midsummer array. There was always a sadness about these evenings of early June, a sadness, and sometimes a threat when the wind blew loudly among the young foliage. Those gusty eves were almost preferable to this protracted and luminous melancholy in which the sinking crescent of the moon hung scarcely more bright than ivory. The pensive beauty was too much for Pauline, who wished that she could shut out the obstinate day and read by candle-light such a book as _Alice in Wonderland_ until it was time to go to bed. Her white fastness, rose-bloomed by sunset as she dressed for dinner, reproached her intention of abandoning its shelter to-night, and she determined that this should really be the last escapade. There was no harm in what she had done, of course, as Guy a.s.sured her, and yet there was harm in behaving so traitorously towards that narrow white bed, towards pious, wide-eyed Saint Ursula and Tobit"s companionable angel.
The languor of the evening was heavy upon all the family; Monica was the only one who had the energy to go to her instrument. She played Chopin, and the austerity of her method made the ballads and the nocturnes more dangerously sweet. Gradually the melodies lulled most of Pauline"s fears and charmed her to look forward eagerly to the velvet midnight when she with Guy beside her would float deep into such caressing glooms. After Monica had played them all into drowsiness, Pauline had to wait until the last sound had died away in the house and the illumination of the last window had faded from the bodeful night that was stroking her window with invitation to come forth.
Twelve o"clock clanged from the belfry, and Pauline opened her bedroom door to listen. She had put on her white frieze coat, for although the night was warm, the wearing of such outdoor garb gave a queer kind of propriety to the whole business, and at the far end of the long corridor she saw herself in the dim candle-light mirrored like a ghost in the Venetian gla.s.s. From the heart of the house the cuckoo calling midnight a minute or two late made her draw back in alarm, and not merely in alarm, but also rather sentimentally, as if by her action she were going to offend that innocent bird of childhood. She wondered why to-night she felt so sensitive beforehand, since usually the regret had followed her action; but promising herself that to-night should indeed be the last time she would ever take this risk, she crept on tip-toe down the stairs.
In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket in the high gray wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness all around him, where the invisible trees gathered and h.o.a.rded the gloom. She sighed with relief to find that the arms with which so gently he enfolded her were indeed warm with life. Her pa.s.sage over the lawn had been one long increasing fear that the shape, so indeterminate and motionless, that awaited her approach, might not be Guy in life, but a wan image of what he had been, a demon lover, a shadow from the cave of death.
"Guy, my darling, my darling, it is you! Oh, I was so frightened that when I came close you wouldn"t really be there."
She leaned half sobbing upon his shoulder.
"Pauline, don"t talk so loud. I only did not come across the lawn to meet you for fear of attracting attention."
"Let me go back now," she begged, "now that I"ve seen you."
But Guy soon persuaded her to come with him through the wicket and out over the paddock where the gra.s.s whispered in their track, until at the sight of the canoe"s outline she lost her fears and did not care how recklessly she explored the deeps of the night.
In silence they traveled up-stream under the vaulted willows; under the giant sycamore whose great roots came writhing out of the darkness above the sheen of the water; under Wychford bridge whose cold breath dripped down in icy beads upon the thick swirl beneath; and then out through starshine across the mill-pool. Pauline held her breath while around their course was a sound of water sucking at the vegetation, gurgling and lapping and chuckling against the invisible banks.
"The Abbey stream?" murmured Guy.
She scarcely breathed her consent, and the canoe tore the growing sedge like satin as it b.u.mped against the slope of the bank. Pauline felt that she was protesting with her real self against the part she was playing in this dream; but the dream became too potent, and she had to help Guy to push the canoe up through the gra.s.s and down again into the quiet water beyond. It was much blacker here on account of the overhanging beeches, but continually Pauline strained through the darkness for a sight of the deserted house, the windows of which seemed to follow with blank and bony gaze their progress.
"Guy, let"s hurry, for I can see the Abbey in the starlight," she exclaimed.
"You have better eyes than mine if you can," he laughed. "My sweet, your face from where I"m sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it"s going to run down the hill and swim after us?"
Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a new terror, and, huddled among the cushions, she sat with beating heart, shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her hair. She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if she had left the candle burning there; it seemed to her that she had, and that perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see why it was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How empty her room would look, and what a chill would fall upon the sister or mother that peeped in.
"Oh, take me back!" she cried.
But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream coiled and uncoiled itself.
Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank, making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely, indeed, was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became more real; suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked, to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or present or to come.
In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had not even known were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin.
This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his own past Guy had once hinted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit to London a.s.sumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.
Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies; faster and still faster the evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping into her face.
"Don"t talk so loud," said Guy, crossly. "Do remember where we are."
Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and louder until Guy, with feverish strokes, urged the canoe down-stream towards home.