"Life is like a feast," she went on; "it is spread before everybody and n.o.body must touch it. What am I? Just a prisoner. In a cottage garden.
Looking for ever over a hedge. I should be happier if I couldn"t look.
I remember once, only a little time ago, there was a cheap excursion to London. Our only servant went. She had to get up at an unearthly hour, and I--I got up too. I helped her to get off. And when she was gone I went up to my bedroom again and cried. I cried with envy for any one, any one who could go away. I"ve been nowhere--except to school at Chichester and three or four times to Emsworth and Bognor--for eight years. When you go"--the tears glittered in the moonlight--"I shall cry.
It will be worse than the excursion to London.... Ever since you were here before I"ve been thinking of it."
It seemed to Benham that here indeed was the very sister of his spirit.
His words sprang into his mind as one thinks of a repartee. "But why shouldn"t you come too?" he said.
She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit faces examined each other. Both she and Benham were trembling.
"COME TOO?" she repeated.
"Yes, with me."
"But--HOW?"
Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her troubled eyes looked out from under puckered brows. "You don"t mean it," she said. "You don"t mean it."
And then indeed he meant it.
"Marry me," he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the end of the garden. "And we will go together."
He seized her arm and drew her to him. "I love you," he said. "I love your spirit. You are not like any one else."
There was a moment"s hesitation.
Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.
Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. He drew her still closer.
"Oh!" she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. Their lips touched, and for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.
"I want you," he whispered close to her. "You are my mate. From the first sight of you I knew that...."
They embraced--alertly furtive.
Then they stood a little apart. Some one was coming towards them.
Amanda"s bearing changed swiftly. She put up her little face to his, confidently and intimately.
"Don"t TELL any one," she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize her words. "Don"t tell any one--not yet. Not for a few days...."
She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in a little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.
"Listening to the nightingales?" cried Betty.
"Yes, aren"t they?" said Amanda inconsecutively.
"That"s our very own nightingale!" cried Betty advancing. "Do you hear it, Mr. Benham? No, not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that performs in the vicarage trees...."
11
When a man has found and won his mate then the best traditions demand a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover. This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels. .h.i.therto, and what he would certainly have done at this point had he had the telling of Benham"s story uncontrolledly in his hands. But, indeed, indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not this simplicity.
Only the heroes of romance, and a few strong simple clean-shaven Americans have that much emotional integrity. (And even the Americans do at times seem to an observant eye to be putting in work at the job and keeping up their gladness.) Benham was excited that night, but not in the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the village street of Harting to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression in his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental wonder one could have wished there, but amazement. Do not suppose that he did not love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad lovers was not still striding and flourishing through the lit wilderness of his imagination. For three weeks things had pointed him to this.
They would do everything together now, he and his mate, they would scale mountains together and ride side by side towards ruined cities across the deserts of the World. He could have wished no better thing. But at the same time, even as he felt and admitted this and rejoiced at it, the sky of his mind was black with consternation....
It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned over the abundant but confused notes upon this perplexing phase of Benham"s development that lay in the third drawer devoted to the Second Limitation, how dependent human beings are upon statement. Man is the animal that states a case.
He lives not in things but in expressed ideas, and what was troubling Benham inordinately that night, a night that should have been devoted to purely blissful and exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of stating what had happened in any terms that would be tolerable either to Mrs. Skelmersdale or Lady Marayne. The thing had happened with the suddenness of a revelation. Whatever had been going on in the less illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been merely to bid South Harting good-bye-- And in short they would never understand. They would accuse him of the meanest treachery. He could see his mother"s face, he could hear her voice saying, "And so because of this sudden infatuation for a swindler"s daughter, a girl who runs about the roads with a couple of retrievers hunting for a man, you must spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot of pretentious stuffy lies...." And Mrs. Skelmersdale too would say, "Of course he just talked of the world and duty and all that rubbish to save my face...."
It wasn"t so at all.
But it looked so frightfully like it!
Couldn"t they realize that he had fled out of London before ever he had seen Amanda? They might be able to do it perhaps, but they never would.
It just happened that in the very moment when the edifice of his n.o.ble resolutions had been ready, she had stepped into it--out of nothingness and nowhere. She wasn"t an accident; that was just the point upon which they were bound to misjudge her; she was an embodiment. If only he could show her to them as she had first shown herself to him, swift, light, a little flushed from running but not in the least out of breath, quick as a leopard upon the dogs.... But even if the improbable opportunity arose, he perceived it might still be impossible to produce the Amanda he loved, the Amanda of the fluttering short skirt and the clear enthusiastic voice. Because, already he knew she was not the only Amanda. There was another, there might be others, there was this perplexing person who had flashed into being at the very moment of their mutual confession, who had produced the entirely disconcerting demand that n.o.body must be told. Then Betty had intervened. But that sub-Amanda and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the first occasion, because when aristocrats love they don"t care a rap who is told and who is not told. They just step out into the light side by side....
"Don"t tell any one," she had said, "not for a few days...."
This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about in the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her chin up and contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was apparently engaged in disentangling something obscure connected with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that ought never to have been entangled....
"A human being," White read, "the simplest human being, is a cl.u.s.tering ma.s.s of aspects. No man will judge another justly who judges everything about him. And of love in particular is this true. We love not persons but revelations. The woman one loves is like a G.o.ddess hidden in a shrine; for her sake we live on hope and suffer the kindred priestesses that make up herself. The art of love is patience till the gleam returns...."
Sunday and Monday did much to develop this idea of the intricate complexity of humanity in Benham"s mind. On Monday morning he went up from the Ship again to get Amanda alone and deliver his ultimatum against a further secrecy, so that he could own her openly and have no more of the interventions and separations that had barred him from any intimate talk with her throughout the whole of Sunday. The front door stood open, the pa.s.sage hall was empty, but as he hesitated whether he should proclaim himself with the knocker or walk through, the door of the little drawing-room flew open and a black-clad cylindrical clerical person entirely unknown to Benham stumbled over the threshold, blundered blindly against him, made a sound like "MOO" and a pitiful gesture with his arm, and fled forth....
It was a curate and he was weeping bitterly....
Benham stood in the doorway and watched a clumsy broken-hearted flight down the village street.
He had been partly told and partly left to infer, and anyhow he was beginning to understand about Mr. Rathbone-Sanders. That he could dismiss. But--why was the curate in tears?
12
He found Amanda standing alone in the room from which this young man had fled. She had a handful of daffodils in her hand, and others were scattered over the table. She had been arranging the big bowl of flowers in the centre. He left the door open behind him and stopped short with the table between them. She looked up at him--intelligently and calmly.
Her pose had a divine dignity.
"I want to tell them now," said Benham without a word of greeting.
"Yes," she said, "tell them now."
They heard steps in the pa.s.sage outside. "Betty!" cried Amanda.
Her mother"s voice answered, "Do you want Betty?"
"We want you all," answered Amanda. "We have something to tell you...."