THE MARRIAGE OF THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN
-- 1
For three or four days I could get no word with Mary. I could not now come and go as I had been able to do in the days when we were still "the children." I could not work, I could not rest, I prowled as near as I could to Burnmore House hoping for some glimpse of her, waiting for the moment when I could decently present myself again at the house.
When at last I called, Justin had gone and things had some flavor of the ancient time. Lady Ladislaw received me with an airy intimacy, all the careful responsibility of her luncheon party manner thrown aside. "And how goes Cambridge?" she sang, sailing through the great saloon towards me, and I thought that for the occasion Cambridge instead of Oxford would serve sufficiently well. "You"ll find them all at tennis," said Lady Ladislaw, and waved me on to the gardens. There I found all four of them and had to wait until their set was finished.
"Mary," I said at the first chance, "are we never to talk again?"
"It"s all different," she said.
"I am dying to talk to you--as we used to talk."
"And I--Stevenage. But---- You see?"
"Next time I come," I said, "I shall bring you a letter. There is so much----"
"No," she said. "Can"t you get up in the morning? Very early--five or six. No one is up until ever so late."
"I"d stay up all night."
"Serve!" said Maxton, who was playing the two of us and had stopped I think to tighten a shoe.
Things conspired against any more intimacy for a time. But we got our moment on the way to tea. She glanced back at Philip, who was loosening the net, and then forward to estimate the distance of Maxton and Guy.
"They"re all three going," she said, "after Tuesday. Then--before six."
"Wednesday?"
"Yes."
"Suppose after all," she threw out, "I can"t come."
"Fortunes of war."
"If I can"t come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"You know the old Ice House?"
"Towards the gardens?"
"Yes. On the further side. Don"t come by the road, come across by the end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I"ve not played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."
This last was for the boys.
"You"ve played twenty times at least since you"ve been here," said Guy, with the simple bluntness of a brother. "I"m certain."
-- 2
To this day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and of the little sc.r.a.ps and seeds of gra.s.s upon my soaking and discolored boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey gra.s.s. And I feel the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings.
Presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. Everything is different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a different value from what it has by day. All the little things upon the ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary, flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"Oh Stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
We each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly kiss.
"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It"s still not six. And there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the wet. Oh! it"s so good to be out of things again--clean out of things--with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."
"You"re glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don"t we always get up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"
We go rustling through the gra.s.s to the prostrate timber she has chosen.
(I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from which her feet can swing....
Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to put my heart"s wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three years for me--until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way--I will get hold of things. Believe me!--with all my strength."
I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon me.
"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."
She bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.
"My Knight," she whispered close to me. "My beautiful young Knight."
I whispered back and touched her dew fresh lips....
"And tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.
I cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the sundering universe with which I replied. Her hand was on my shoulder as she listened....
But I do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into heroic gossamer. All my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as I stood, a little hidden in the shadows of the Killing Wood and ready to plunge back at the first hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit circ.u.mspectly towards the house.
-- 3
Our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. We did not meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different mood. We had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an overcast morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite alien to her dreams.
"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don"t you love me? Don"t you want me?"
"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."
"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together, they want to belong to each other."
She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning.
"Stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "I want to belong to myself."