Lines from the _Christian Year_, the book on which her girlhood had been nourished, stole into her mind:
Why should we faint and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?
Never had sunshine seemed to Meynell so life-giving as this pale wintry warmth. The soft sound of Mary"s dress beside him; the eyes she turned upon him when she spoke, so frank and sweet, yet for her lover, so full of mystery; the lines of her young form, compact of health and grace; the sound of her voice, the turn of her head--everything about her filled him with a tumult of feeling not altogether blissful, though joy was uppermost. For now that the great moment was come, now that he trembled on the verge of a happiness he had every reason to think was his, he was a prey to many strange qualms and tremors. In the first place he was suddenly and sorely conscious of his age! Forty-four to her twenty-six!
Was it fitting?--was it right? And more than that! Beside her freshness, her springing youth, he realized his own jaded spirit, almost with a sense of guilt. These six months of strenuous battle and leadership, these new responsibilities, and the fierce call which had been made on every gift and power, ending in the dumb, proud struggle, the growing humiliation of the preceding weeks, had left him ripened indeed, magnified indeed, as a personality; but it was as though down the shadowed vista of life he saw his youth, as "Another self," a Doppelganger, disappearing forever.
While she!--before _her_ were all the years of glamour, of happy instinctive action, when a man or woman is worth just what they dream, when dream and act flow together. Could he give her anything worth her having in exchange for this sheer youth of hers? He saw before him a long and dusty struggle; the dust of it choking, often, the purest sources of feeling. Cares about money; cares about health; the certain enmity of many good men; the bitterness that waits on all controversial success or failure: all these there must be--he could not shield her from them.
She, on her part, saw plainly that he was depressed, knew well that he had suffered. As the Bishop had perceived, it was written on his aspect.
But her timidity as yet prevented her from taking the initiative with him, as later she would learn to do. She felt for him at this stage partly the woman"s love, partly the deep and pa.s.sionate loyalty of the disciple. And it was possibly this very loyalty in her from which Meynell shrank. He felt toward himself and his role, in the struggle to which he was committed, a half despairing, half impatient irony, which saved him from anything like a prophetic pose. Some other fellow would do it so much better! But meanwhile it had to be done.
So that, charged as was the atmosphere between them, it was some time before they found a real freedom of speech. The openings, the gambits, which were to lead them to the very heart of the game, were at first masked and hesitating. They talked a little--perfunctorily--about the dale and its folk, and Mary fell without difficulty now and then into the broad Westmoreland speech, which delighted Meynell"s ear, and brought the laugh back to his eyes. Then, abruptly, he told her that the campaign of slander was over, and that the battle, instead of "infinite mess and dislocation," was now to be a straight and clean one. He said nothing of Barron; but he spoke tenderly of the Bishop, and Mary"s eyes swam a little.
She on her part dared to speak of Alice and Hester. And very soon it was quietly recognized between these two that Alice"s story was known to Mary; and, for the first time in his life, Meynell spoke with free emotion and self-criticism of the task which Neville Flood had laid upon him. Had there been in Mary some natural dread of the moment when she must first hear the full story of his relation to Alice? If so, it was soon dispelled. He could not have told the story more simply; but its beauty shone out. Only, she was startled, even terrified, by certain glimpses which his talk gave her into his feeling with regard to Hester.
She saw plainly that the possibility of a catastrophe, in spite of all he could do, was ever present to him; and she saw also, or thought she saw, that his conception of his own part in the great religious campaign was strangely--morbidly--dependent upon the fate of Hester. If he was able to save her from herself and from the man who threatened her, well and good; if not, as he had said to Mary once before, he was not fit to be any man"s leader, and should feel himself the Jonah of any cause. There was a certain mystical pa.s.sion in it, the strong superst.i.tion of a man in whom a great natural sensitiveness led often and readily to despondency; as though he "asked for a sign."
They pa.s.sed the noisy little river by the stepping-stones and then climbed a shoulder of fell between Long Whindale and the next valley.
Descending a sunny mountainside, they crossed some water meadows, and mounted the hill beyond, to a spot that Mary had marked in her walks.
Beside a little tumbling stream and beneath a thicket of holly, lay a flat-topped rock commanding all the spectacle of flood and fell. Mary guided him there; and then stood silent and flushed, conscious that she herself had brought the supreme moment to its birth. The same perception rushed upon Meynell. He looked into her eyes, smiling and masterful, all his hesitations cleared away....
"Sit there, my lady of the fells!"
He led her to the rocky throne, and, wrapped in his old Inverness cloak, he took a place on a lesser stone at her feet. Suddenly, he raised a hand and caught hers. She found herself trembling, and looking down into his upturned face.
"Mary!--Mary _darling_!--is it mine?"
The question was just whispered, and she whispered her reply. They were alone in a lovely wilderness of fell and stream. Only a shepherd walked with his flock in a field half a mile away, and across the valley a ploughman drove his horses.
At the murmur in his ear, Meynell, this time, put up both hands, and drew her down to him. The touch of her fresh lips was rapture. And yet--
"My rose!" he said, almost with a groan. "What can you make of such an old fellow? I love you--_love_ you--but I am not worthy of you!"
"I am the judge of that," she said softly. And looking up he saw the colour in her cheeks fluttering, and two bright tears in her eyes.
Timidly she took one hand away from him and began to stroke back the hair from his brow.
"You look so tired!"--she murmured--"as though you had been in trouble.
And I wasn"t there!"
"You were always there!"
And springing from his lowly seat, he came to the rock beside her, and drew her within the shelter of his cloak, looking down upon her with infinite tenderness.
"You don"t know what you"re undertaking," he said, his eyes moist, his lips smiling. "I am an old bachelor, and my ways are detestable! Can you ever put up with the pipes and the dogs? I am the untidiest man alive!"
"Will Anne ever let me touch your papers?"
"Goodness! what will Anne say to us! I forgot Anne," he said, laughing.
Then, bending over her, "We shall be poor, darling!--and very uncomfortable. Can you really stand it--and me?"
"Shall we have a roof over our heads at all?" asked Mary, but so dizzily happy that she knew but vaguely what she said.
"I have already bespoken a cottage. They are going to make me Editor of the _Modernist_. We shall have bread and b.u.t.ter, dearest, but not much more."
"I have a little," said Mary, shyly.
Meynell looked rather scared.
"Not much, I hope!"
"Enough for gowns!--and--and a little more."
"I prefer to buy my wife"s gowns--I will!" said Meynell with energy.
"Promise me, darling, to put all your money into a drawer--or a money-box. Then when we want something really amusing--a cathedral--or a yacht--we"ll take it out."
So they laughed together, he all the while holding her close crushed against him, and she deafened almost by the warm beating of a man"s heart beneath her cheek.
And presently silence came, a silence in which one of the rare ecstasies of life came upon them and s.n.a.t.c.hed them to the third heaven. From the fold of the hill in which they sat, sheltered both by the fell itself, and by the encircling hollies, they overlooked a branching dale, half veiled, and half revealed by sunny cloud. Above the western fells they had just crossed, hung towers and domes of white c.u.mulus, beneath which a pearly sunshine slipped through upon the broad fell-side, making of it one wide sunlit pleasance, dyed in the red and orange of the withered fern, and dotted with black holly and juniper. Round the head of the dale the curtain of cloud hung thicker, save where one superb crag tore it asunder, falling sheer into the green gentleness of the fields. In the silence, all the voices of nature spoke; the rising wind, which flung itself against the hill-slopes at their feet; the insistent flow of the river, descending from the reservoirs far away; and the sharp chatter of the little beck leaping at their side from stone to stone. Pa.s.sionately, in Meynell"s heart the "buried life" awoke, which only love can free from the cavern where it lies, and bring into the full energy of day.
"One goes on talking--preaching--babbling--about love," he said to her; "what else is there to preach about? If love is not the key to life, then there is no key, and no man need preach any more. Only, my Amor has been till now a stern G.o.d! He has in his hands!--I know it!--all the n.o.blest rewards and ecstasies of life; but so far, I have seen him wring them out of horror, or pain. The most heavenly things I have ever seen have been the things of suffering. I think of a poor fellow dying in the pit and trying to give me his last message to his wife; of a mother fading out of life, still clasping her babes, with hands twisted almost out of human shape by hard work; or a little lad--" his voice dropped--"only last week!--who saved his worthless brother"s life by giving him warning of some escaping trucks, and was crushed himself. "I couldn"t help it, sir!"--_apologizing_ to me and the foreman, as we knelt by him!--"I knew Jim had the drink in him." In all these visions, Love was divine--but awful! And here!--_here_!--I see his wings outspread upon that mountain-side; he comes clothed, not in agony, but in this golden peace--this beauty--this wild air; he lays your head upon my breast!"
Or again:
"There is a new philosophy which has possessed me for months; the thought of a great man, which seizes upon us dull lesser creatures, and seems to give us, for a time at least, new eyes and ears, as though, like Melampus, we had caught the hidden language of the world! It rests on the notion of the endless creativeness and freedom of life. It is the negation of all fate, all predestination. _Nothing_ foreknown, nothing predestined! No _necessity_--no _anangke_--darling!--either in the world process, or the mind of G.o.d, that you and I should sit here to-day, heart to heart! It was left for our wills to do, our hearts to conceive, G.o.d lending us the world, so to speak, to work on! All our past cutting into--carving out--this present; all our past alive in the present; as all this present shall be alive in the future. There is no "iron law" for life and will, beloved--they create, they are the masters, they are forever new. All the same!"--his tone changed--"I believe firmly that this rock knew from all eternity that you and I should sit here to-day!"
Presently, Mary disengaged herself. Her hat was not what it had been; her hair had escaped its bounds, and must be rigorously put to rights. She sat there flushed and bareheaded, her hands working; while Meynell"s eyes devoured her.
"It is January, Richard, and the sun is sinking."
"In your world perhaps, dear, not in mine."
"We must go back to mother." She laid a hand on his.
"We will go back to mother!" he said, joyously, with a tender emphasis on the word, without moving however. "Mary!--next to you I love your mother!"
Mary"s sweet face darkened a little; she buried it in her hands. Meynell drew them tenderly away.
"All that affection can do to soften the differences between us, shall be done," he said, with his whole heart. "I believe too that the sense of them will grow less and less."
Mary made no reply, except by the slight pressure of her fingers on his.
She sat in an absorbed sadness, thinking of her mother"s life, and the conflict which had always haunted and scorched it, between love and religion; first in the case of her husband, and then in that of her daughter. "But oh! how could I--how could I help it?" was the cry of Mary"s own conscience and personality.
She turned with painful eagerness to Meynell. "How did you think her?--how does she strike you?"
"Physically?" He chose his words. "She is so beautiful! But--sometimes--I think she looks frail."
The tears sprang to Mary"s eyes. She quickly threw herself upon his misgiving, and tried to argue it away, both in herself and him. She dwelt upon her mother"s improvement in sleep and appet.i.te, her cheerfulness, her increased power of walking; she was insistent, almost resentful, her white brow furrowed with pain, even while her hand lay warm in Meynell"s.
He must needs comfort her; must needs disavow his own impression. After all, what value had such an impression beside the judgment of her daily and hourly watchfulness?--the favourable opinion too, so she insisted, of their local doctor.
As they walked home, he startled her by saying that he should only have three days in the valley.