HER GUARDIAN"S CONSENT
The Reverend Hugh Lloyd, who was Gwenna Williams" only relative and guardian and therefore the person from whom consent might be asked if ever the girl wished to be engaged, sat reading _The Cambrian News_. He sat, over his breakfast eggs and tea, in the kitchen-sitting-room of his Chapel House. Inside, the grandfather clock ticked slowly but still pointed (as ever) to half-past two; and the cosy room, with its Welsh dresser and its book-shelves, still held its characteristic smell of singeing hearthrug. Outside, quiet brooded over the valley that fine August morning. The smoke from the village chimneys rose blue and straight against the larches of the hill-side. The more distant hills of that landscape were faintly mauve against the cloudless, fainter blue of the late-summer sky. All the world seemed so peaceful!
And the expression on the Reverend Hugh"s face of a Jesuit priest under its thatch of bog-cotton hair was that of a man at peace with all the world.
True, there were rumours, in some of the newspapers, of some War going on somewhere in the world outside.
But it was a long way from here to that old Continent, as they called it! For the matter of that, it was a long way to London, where they settled what they were going to do about Germany....
What they were going to do about Welsh Disestablishment was a good deal more important, to a Welshman. There were some very good things about that in this very article. The Reverend Hugh had written it himself.
Presently, in the midst of his reading, his housekeeper (who was a small, middle-aged woman, rather like a black hen) entered the room at a run.
"Telegram for you, sir."
"Ah, yes; thank you, Margat," her master said as he took it.
He had guessed already what was in it. Some arrangement to do with his next Sabbath-day"s journey. For he was a very popular preacher, invited to give sermons by exchange in every country town in Wales.
"This," he told his housekeeper complacently, as he tore open the envelope, "will be to say am I ex Pected in Carnarvon on the Sat Teudeh, or----"
Here he broke off, staring at the message in his hand. It was a long one.
There was a moment"s silence while the clock ticked. Then that silence was broken by an exclamation, in Welsh, from a man startled out of all professional decorum. He added, with more restraint, but also in Welsh, "Great King!"
Then he exclaimed, "Dear father!" and "_Name_ of goodness!"
"What is it, Mr. Lloyd _bach_?" demanded his housekeeper excitedly in Welsh, clutching her black, crochet wool shawl about her shoulders as she waited by the side of the breakfast.
"Is it somebody died?" In her mind"s eye she saw already that loved orgy of her kind--a funeral.
The Reverend Hugh shook his handsome white head. Again he read through the longest telegraph message that he had ever received:
It ran:
"_Dear Sir am going to marry your niece Gwenna to-morrow Tuesday morning at Hampstead regret forced to give you this short notice but impossible to do otherwise owing military duties trust you will excuse apparent casualness will write further particulars yours sincerely Paul Dampier Lieutenant Royal Flying Corps._"
"_Name_ of goodness!" breathed the Reverend Hugh, brushing back his white locks in consternation. And at short intervals he continued to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. "What did I tell her? _What_ did I tell her!... Indeed, it"s a great pity I ever let her go away from home.... It was my fault; my fault.... Young men----! This one sounds as if he was gone quite mad, whatever."
So the Reverend Hugh addressed his answer to Miss Gwenna Williams at her Club.
And it said:
"_Coming up to see you nine-thirty Euston to-night. Uncle._"
"I"m sure he"ll be simply horrid about it," Gwenna rather tremulously told her betrothed that evening, as they walked, the small, curly-haired girl in dark blue and the tall, grey-clad aviator, up and down the platform at Euston Station, waiting for the Welsh train to come in.
Little Gwenna was experiencing a feeling not unknown among those shortly to be married; namely, that _every prospect was pleasing--save that of having to face one"s relatives with the affair_!
"He was always rather a dret-ful old man," she confided anxiously to Paul, as they paced the sooty flags of the platform. "It"s _just_ like him to be sixteen minutes late already just when I want to get this over. He never understands anything about--about people when they"re young. And the first thing he"s sure to ask is whether you"ve got any money. Have you, Paul?"
"Stacks," said the Airman, rea.s.suringly. "Old Hugo made it sixty, as a wedding-present. Decent of him, wasn"t it?"
They turned by the blackboard with the chalked-up notices of arrivals and departures, and Gwenna ruefully went on with her prophecy of what her Uncle would say.
"He"ll say he never _heard_ of anybody marrying an Airman. (I don"t suppose he"s ever heard of an Airman at all before now!) Ministers, and quarry-managers, and people _with some prospects_; that"s the sort of thing they"ve always married in Uncle Hugh"s family," she said anxiously. "And he"ll say we"ve both behaved awfully badly not to let him know before this. (Just as if there was anything to know.) And he"ll say you turned my silly head when I was much too young to know my own mind! And then he"s quite, quite sure to say that you only proposed to me because---- Well, of course," she broke off a little reproachfully, "you never even _did_ propose to me properly!"
"Too late to start it now," said her lover, laughing, as the knot of porters surged forward to the side of the platform. "Here"s the train coming in!"
Now Gwenna was right about the first thing that Uncle Hugh would ask, when, after a searching glance and a handshake to this tall young man that his niece introduced to him at the carriage-door, he carried off the pair of them to the near-by hotel where the Minister always put up on his few and short visits to London.
"Well, young gentleman," he began, in his crisp yet deliberate Welsh accent. He settled himself on the red plush sofa, and gazed steadily at Paul Dampier on one of the red plush armchairs. "Well! And have you got the money reck-quisite to keep a wife?"
"No. I"m afraid I haven"t, sir, really," returned the young man, looking frankly back at him. "Of course I"d my screw. Three pounds ten a week, I was getting as a pilot. But that was only just enough for myself--with what I had to do for the Machine. Of course I"m going to have her--the Flying Machine--taken up now, so----"
"It"s very little faith I have in such things as flying machines.
Flying? Yes, in the face of Providence, I call it," said the Reverend Hugh, discouragingly, but with the dawn of some amus.e.m.e.nt in his searching eyes. "What I say about the whole idea of Avi_ay_-shon is--_Kite-high lunacy!_"
"Uncle!" scolded Gwenna; blushing for him. But the young Airman took the rebuke soberly enough.
"And out of that income," went on Uncle Hugh, still looking hard, at this modern suitor in that incongruous red-plush setting with its Nineteenth Century clocks and ornaments, "out of that income you will not have saved very much."
"Afraid not, sir," agreed young Dampier, who, last night, had been down to his last eightpence ha"penny and a book of stamps. "Not much to put by, you know----"
"Not even," took up the Reverend Hugh, shrewdly, "enough to pay for a special marriage licence?"
"Oh, yes, I had that. That is, I"ve raised _that_"--("Good old Hugo!" he thought.)--"and a bit over," he added, "to take us for some sort of a little trip. To the sea, perhaps. Before I go on Service."
"Military service, do you mean?" said the Reverend Hugh. "Mmph! (I never have held with soldiery. I do not think that I have ever come into act--ual con--tackt with _any_.)"
"Yes, I probably am going on Service, Mr. Lloyd," answered the young man, quickly, and with a glance at the girl that seemed to indicate that this subject was only to be lightly dealt with at present. "When, I am not sure. Then I shall get my pay as a Flight-Lieutenant, you see.
Shan"t want any money much, then. So _she_"--with a little nod towards the small, defensively set face of Gwenna, sitting very straight in the other red-plush armchair--"she will get that sent home, to her."
"_I_ shan"t want all your pay, indeed," interrupted the girl, hastily.
It seemed to her too revoltingly horrible, this talk about money combined with this sense that a woman, married, must be an _expense_, a burden. A woman, who longs to mean only freedom and gifts and treasure to her lover!
"Oh, a woman ought never, _never_ to feel she has to be _kept_," thought Gwenna, rosy again with embarra.s.sment. "If men don"t think we _mind_, very well, then let all the money in the world be taken away from men, and given to us. Let _them_ be kept. And if they don"t mind it--well, then it will be a happier world, all round!"
And as she was thinking this, she announced eagerly, "If--if you _do_ go away, I shall stay on with the Aeroplane Lady, as I told you, Paul. Yes.
I"d _much_ rather I should have something to do. And I"d get nearly a pound a week, and my keep. Besides! I"ve got my own money."
"Which money, dear?" asked Paul Dampier.
The quick eyes of the Reverend Hugh had not left the young man"s face.