And while he walked by May"s side past the bowling-greens at the summit of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and its appurtenances, he wondered, he honestly wondered, that he could ever have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her superiority was too obvious; she was a woman of the world! She.... In a flash he knew that he would propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested a stroll towards Moorthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was conscious of a tumultuous uplifting and splendid carelessness of spirits. "Imagine me bringing it to a climax to-day," he reflected, profoundly pleased with himself. "Ah well, it will be settled once for all!" He admired his own decision; he was quite struck by it. "I shall call her May before I leave her," he thought, gazing at her, and discovering how well the name suited her, with its significances of alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coyness.
"So school is closed," he said, and added humorously: ""Broken up" is the technical term, I believe."
"Yes," she answered, "and I had walked out into the park to meditate seriously upon the question of my holiday."
She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and romance was in the air. They had crossed a couple of smoke-soiled fields, and struck into the old Hanbridge road just below the abandoned toll-house with its broad eaves.
"And whither do your meditations point?" he demanded playfully.
"My meditations point to Switzerland," she said. "I have friends in Lausanne."
The reference to foreign climes impressed him.
"Would that I could go to Switzerland too!" he exclaimed; and privately: "Now for it! I"m about to begin."
"Why?" she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.
At the moment, as they were pa.s.sing the toll-house, the other girl appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the toll-house, where the lane from Toft End joins the highroad. This second creature was smaller than Miss Lawton, less a.s.sertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much more beautiful.
Everyone halted and everyone blushed.
"May!" the interrupter at length stammered.
"May!" responded Miss Lawton lamely.
The other girl was named May too--May Deane, child of the well-known majolica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughter in a solitary and ancient house at Toft End.
Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands--his famous way with women seemed to have deserted him--and then he actually stated that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He had gone before the girls could move.
When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused, hostile, almost homicidal.
"I hope I didn"t spoil a _tete-a-tete_," said May Deane, stiffly and sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature.
The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.
"No," she answered; "but if you had come three minutes earlier----"
She smiled calmly.
"Oh!" murmured May Deane, after a pause.
III
That evening May Deane returned home at half-past nine. She had been with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport, and she told her father, who was reading the _Staffordshire Signal_ in his accustomed solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss certain household matters: Jim"s early breakfast, the proper method of washing Herbert"s new flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were shrunk), and the dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down near the window.
She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming nunlike mystery which often comes to a woman who lives alone and unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one, save the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie might glance carelessly through the open door in pa.s.sing along the corridor, but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have exclaimed with momentary interest, "So this is May"s room!" And some hint that May was more than a daughter and sister--a woman, withdrawn, secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the household life--might have penetrated their obtuse paternal and fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and mouth were perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down), her dark hair, her quiet voice and her gentle acquiescence (diversified by occasional outbursts of sarcasm), appealed to them and won them; but they accepted her as something of course, as something which went without saying. They adored her, and did not know that they adored her.
May took off her hat, stuck the pins into it again, and threw it on the bed, whose white and green counterpane hung down nearly to the floor on either side. Then she lay back in the chair, and, pulling away the blind, glanced through the window; the moon, rather dim behind the furnace lights of Red Cow Ironworks, was rising over Moorthorne. May dropped the blind with a wearied gesture, and turned within the room, examining its contents as if she had not seen them before: the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, which was also a dressing-table, the washstand, the dwarf book-case with its store of Edna Lyalls, Elizabeth Gaskells, Thackerays, Charlotte Yonges, Charlotte Brontes, a Thomas Hardy or so, and some old school-books. She looked at the pictures, including a sampler worked by a deceased aunt, at the loud-ticking Swiss clock on the mantelpiece, at the higgledy-piggledy photographs there, at the new Axminster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front of the washstand, and the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door. She missed none of the details which she knew so well, with such long monotonous intimacy, and sighed.
Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a small drawer in the chest of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and drew forth a photograph. She carried the photograph to the light of the candles on the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows. It was a portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by what subterfuge or lucky accident she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given it to her. She loved Lionel. She had loved him for five years, with a love silent, blind, intense, irrational, and too elemental to be concealed. Everyone knew of May"s pa.s.sion. Many women admired her taste; a few were shocked and puzzled by it. All the men of her acquaintance either pitied or despised her for it. Her father said nothing. Her brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel in the curt, scornful a.s.sertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at tennis. But May would never hear ill of him; he was a G.o.d to her, and she could not hide her worship. For more than a year, until lately, she had been almost sure of him, and then came a faint vague rumour concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumour which she had refused to take seriously. The encounter of that afternoon, and Miss Lawton"s triumphant remark, had dazed her. For seven hours she had existed in a kind of semi-conscious delirium, in which she could perceive nothing but the fatal fact, emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her thoughts, that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to May Lawton, and been accepted, just before she surprised them together; and Lionel, with a man"s excusable cowardice, had left his betrothed to announce the engagement.
She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in the grate, and set a light to them.
Her father"s step sounded on the stairs; he hesitated, and knocked sharply at her door.
"What"s burning, May?"
"It"s all right, father," she answered calmly, "I"m only burning some papers in the fire-grate."
"Well, see you don"t burn the house down."
He pa.s.sed on.
Then she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on it in pencil, using the mantelpiece for a desk: "Dear home. Good-night, good-bye." She cogitated, and wrote further: "Forgive me.--MAY."
She put the message in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope "Jim," and placed it prominently in front of the clock. But after she had looked at it for a minute, she wrote "Father" above Jim, and then "Herbert" below.
There were noises in the hall; the boys had returned earlier than she expected. As they went along the corridor and caught a glimpse of her light under the door, Jim cried gaily: "Now then, out with that light! A little thing like you ought to be asleep hours since."
She listened for the bang of their door, and then, very hurriedly, she removed her pink frock and put on an old black one, which was rather tight in the waist. And she donned her hat, securing it carefully with both pins, extinguished the candles, and crept quietly downstairs, and so by the back-door into the garden. Carlo, the retriever, came halfway out of his kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with a yawn. She patted his head and ran stealthily up the garden, through the gate, and up the waste green land towards the crown of the hill.
IV
The top of Toft End is the highest land in the Five Towns, and from it may be clearly seen all the lurid evidences of manufacture which sweep across the borders of the sky on north, east, west, and south.
North-eastwards lie the moorlands, and far off Manifold, the "metropolis of the moorlands," as it is called. On this night the furnaces of Red Cow Ironworks, in the hollow to the east, were in full blast; their fluctuating yellow light illuminated queerly the gra.s.s of the fields above Deane"s house, and the regular roar of their breathing reached that solitary spot like the distant rumour of some leviathan beast angrily fuming. Further away to the south-west the Cauldon Bar Ironworks reproduced the same phenomena, and round the whole horizon, near and far, except to the north-east, the lesser fires of labour leapt and flickered and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning ceaselessly, as they burned every night and every day at all seasons of all years. The town of Bursley slept in the deep valley to the west, and vast Hanbridge in the shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers accustomed to rest quietly amid great disturbances; the beacons of their Town Halls and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was dominated by the placidity of the moon, which had now risen clear of the Red Cow furnace clouds, and was pa.s.sing upwards through tracts of stars.
Into this scene, climbing up from the direction of Manifold, came Lionel Woolley, nearly at midnight, having walked some eighteen miles in a vain effort to re-establish his self-satisfaction by a process of reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the brief episode of the afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity. In other words, he was fully and painfully aware that he must have looked a fool, a coward, an a.s.s, a contemptible and pitiful person, in the eyes of at least one girl, if not of two. He did not like this--no man would have liked it; and to Lionel the memory of an undignified act was acute torture. Why had he bidden the girls adieu and departed? Why had he, in fact, run away? What precisely would May Lawton think of him? How could he explain his conduct to her--and to himself? And had that worshipping, affectionate thing, May Deane, taken note of his confusion--of the confusion of him who was never confused, who was equal to every occasion and every emergency? These were some of the questions which harried him and declined to be settled. He had walked to Manifold, and had tea at the Roebuck, and walked back, and still the questions were harrying; and as he came over the hill by the field-path, and descried the lone house of the Deanes in the light of the Red Cow furnaces and of the moon, the worship of May Deane seemed suddenly very precious to him, and he could not bear to think that any stupidity of his should have impaired it.
Then he saw May Deane walking slowly across the field, close to an abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him.
She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently, turned, and began to approach him. And he too, moved by a mysterious impulse which he did not pause to examine, swerved, and quickened his step in order to lessen the distance between them. He did not at first even feel surprise that she should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently she stood still, while he continued to move forward. It was as if she drew him; and soon, in the pale moonlight and the wavering light of the furnaces, he could decipher all the details of her face, and he saw that she was smiling fondly, invitingly, admiringly, l.u.s.trously, with the old undiminished worship and affection. And he perceived a dark discoloration on her right cheek, as though she had suffered a blow, but this mark did not long occupy his mind. He thought suddenly of the strong probability that her father would leave a nice little bit of money to each of his three children; and he thought of her beauty, and of her timid fragility in the tight black dress, and of her immense and unquestioning love for him, which would survive all accidents and mishaps. He seemed to sink luxuriously into this grand pa.s.sion of hers (which he deemed quite natural and proper) as into a soft feather-bed.
To live secure in an atmosphere of exhaustless worship; to keep a fount of balm and admiration for ever in the house, a bubbling spring of pa.s.sionate appreciation which would be continually available for the refreshment of his self-esteem! To be always sure of an obedience blind and willing, a subservience which no tyranny and no harshness and no whim would rouse into revolt; to sit on a throne with so much beauty kneeling at his feet!
And the possession of her beauty would be a source of legitimate pride to him. People would often refer to the beautiful Mrs. Woolley.
He felt that in sending May Deane to interrupt his highly emotional conversation with May Lawton Providence had watched over him and done him a good turn. May Lawton had advantages, and striking advantages, but he could not be sure of her. The suspicion that if she married him she would marry him for her own ends caused him a secret disquiet, and he feared that one day, perhaps one morning at breakfast, she might take it into her intelligent head to mock him, to exercise upon him her gift of irony, and to intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave he was deceived. That she sincerely admired him he never for an instant doubted. But----
And, moreover, the unfortunate episode of the afternoon might have cooled her ardour to freezing-point.
He stood now in front of his worshipper, and the notion crossed his mind that in after-years he could say to his friends: "I proposed to my wife at midnight under the moon. Not many men have done that."
"Good-evening," he ventured to the girl; and he added with bravado: "We"ve met before to-day, haven"t we?"
She made no reply, but her smile was more affectionate, more inviting, than ever.