It is May morning, but May morning as yet in early childhood--a radiant infancy that but few persons comparatively are awake to see. It has not struck five; and yet on the top of Magdalen Tower, in Oxford, Talbot is standing. Love has not driven him crazy, as might be the inference drawn from this fact. But those who know Oxford, know too that, as some say, since the time of Henry VIII.--though that overshoots the mark--Magdalen College has observed the rule of sending up her sweet-voiced choir to the summit of Wolsey's Tower on each new May morning, to greet the sun's uprising with a monkish hymn. And there are never wanting those who think it worth while to leave their beds almost before night has withdrawn, to hear those sweet singers greet the dawn with the ancient piety of their Latin hymn; and amongst them, as chance has brought him to Oxford, stands Talbot. He has run down to Oxford for Sunday; and since some of his fellow-guests have willed to rise and be present at the keeping of this unique and old-world custom, the fancy has taken him to come too. Not since the first year of his undergraduate-ship has he stood, as he now stands, on that stern height, looking for once at the world as the birds look, having climbed the steep and endless corkscrew stair. The years that have passed him since then seem to go by him in a solemn procession--solemn as this ante-dawning hour; solemn as the worn pinnacles above his head that have cut the blue of day, and pointed to the planets of night, through three hundred rolling years; solemn as the great and dying moon that is only waiting for her greater brother's upspringing to fade away and be not.
In each interval of the ancient balustrades, and through the opening in the pierced stone, Talbot can see far down a picture differently lovely. Here the world-famous street, taking its way between its schools and stately college-fronts; and with its Mary church's noble spire and the Radcliffe's dome for crown and finish. Here again the low, scarce swelling hills that so softly girdle the fair town, with the morning mists, not yet sun-pierced, streaming across their dim flanks. Here the river stealing; there the bridge, with its black cluster of men and women, waiting to hear the Hymnus Eucharisticus float down. Here a white snow of cherry-blossom in some garden; there, close at hand, so that he can look down, far below, upon their rooks' nests, Magdalen's tenderly greening trees. Infinite gradations of tender green; infinite gradations of delicate blue dying into dreamy gray, all woven into a mantle in which to wrap the yet sleeping city; and above it all, above Talbot, as he stands, lifted half-way to heaven, as it seems, in the august hush of the dawn, is the arch, severely beautiful, of a sky that seems made out of one pale, perfect turquoise.
He has moved away from his companions. He does not want them; does not want any companion. He leans against the parapet; and his eyes rise to the great old pinnacles, whose time-painted gray is married in such marvellous harmony to the cold azure into which they climb. Talbot is thinking of Peggy. She can never be at any very great distance from his thoughts, since there is no fair sight that does not, in one instant, conjure her back to them. There is nothing beautiful whose beauty he does not gauge by its worthiness to be looked at by her. To that height of excellence he acknowledges that the spectacle he is now looking upon attains. He would like her to see it. Where is she now? What is she doing? Doing? Why, asleep, of course; placidly slumbering; or perhaps not so placidly dreaming of Prue. But why is it that on this May morning Talbot is only thinking of Peggy? Why, since it is now more than four months since he was set free to seek her, is he still seeking her only in thought? Surely even his busy life may have spared him the necessary moment to put his fortune
'To the touch,
To win, or lose it all.'
He had meant to have sought her at Easter. To put a lesser interval than that which stretches from Christmas to Easter between the decent interment of the old love and the proclamation of the new would have seemed to him a disrespect--a disloyalty to that now dead but once so living passion. Why, by showing such an overhaste to take upon himself another tie than hers, should he cut to the quick her who, not so long ago, was all earth, and all heaven too to him? But when Easter comes, it brings with it the news, borne on the breath of common fame, of the serious illness of that old love; and again his loyalty forbids him--while she, who for five years made sunshine or storm in his life, lies on what may perhaps be her death-bed--to go courting another than she. And before the tidings of her recovery reach him his holiday has been long over. He will have no other worth the name until Whitsun. But to Whitsun there are now only twenty-one days. 'Only twenty-one days!' he says to himself under his breath, still looking up at the pinnacle. He could of course have written to her; but from that he has shrunk with unconquerable repugnance. To put a cold proposition in cold black and white upon cold paper? What could she do but say 'No' to it? He will ask her by word of mouth; if possible under the Judas-tree, with Minky lying on her gown, so that she can't rise up hastily and flee from him. Will ask her by word of mouth, eye to eye; and with such a compelling urgency of look and speech that she shall say 'Yes' to him--if out of nothing else, out of sheer pity for his great and utter need of her. 'Twenty-one days and twenty-one nights!' he repeats to himself once again.
The choristers stand surpliced, looking eastwards to where the sun is rearing his red shoulder. The crowd on the old lead roof is thickening. Undergraduates in cap and gown; fat Fellows, thin Fellows; young ladies, old ladies--every moment a new head, with an expression of relief upon its features at having come to the end of its corkscrew scramble, appears at the head of the ladder that closes the climb. Talbot is not paying much attention to any of them, least of all, perhaps, to his own party, when a voice that has surely a familiar ring in it brings him back to the present.
'You see, dear, you need not have been in such a fuss; we are in plenty of time. The sun has waited for us, as I told you he would.'
Talbot's eyes have sprung to the speaker. Yes, of course it is Freddy Ducane. But after all there is nothing very wonderful in that; for has not he already known Freddy to be pursuing his studies in Oxford? But who is it whom Freddy has addressed as 'dear'? As to that, Talbot is not long left in doubt. Close behind young Ducane, as though afraid of being separated from him by the press, two girls are eagerly following. There are two in reality, but Talbot sees only one. She is not asleep after all; not dreaming of Prue, or of any one else. She is here, wide awake, on the top of Magdalen Tower, not three feet from him, and with her great blue eyes plunged into his. There are some moments in looking back upon which afterwards one wonders how it came about that they did not kill one.
Sometimes, in the retrospect of after-days, Talbot marvels what he could have been made of, not to have fallen dead at her feet on the top of that giddy tower out of sheer joy. He has but just realised her presence, when five grave strokes beat the air. The clock is telling that it is five, the immemorial hour at which the May-Day hymn is wont to soar heavenwards. In a moment a hush has fallen upon the buzzing crowd. Off goes every college cap. All eyes look eastward to where the vanquishing sun has now fairly emerged from night and mist, and sweetly and softly upsails to heaven the ancient monkish hymn:
'Te Deum Patrem colimus,
Te laudibus prosequimur;
Qui corpus ciborificis,
Coelesti mentem gratia.'
The harmony has swelled up skywards, and again died into silence; and no sooner has it ceased than the great bells imprisoned in the belfry below take up the tale. Standing so immediately above them, they do not sound like bells, rather like some loud vague booming music; and to that loud booming music the meeting of Talbot and Margaret is set.
'Talbot!' Freddy has cried cordially, on catching sight of him; 'my dear fellow, I am delighted to see you! Peggy, Prue, are you awake enough to realise that this is Talbot? Who on earth would have expected to find you up here?'
And Prue's little voice has echoed, 'Who indeed?' and Peggy has said nothing; but the touch of her hand in his--the thirsty aching dream of so many empty months--is a reality; and for him too the day is breaking, not less genuinely than is the real day so superbly opening--
'Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious sun uprist.'
The first beam has struck one of the lofty pinnacles, and made laughter and gaiety of its tercentenary gloom. Now it is laying long shadows about mead and street--shadows of noble buildings, of cropping cows, of commonplace yet dawn-ennobled houses, and of vernal trees. Far below on the bridge is the pigmy crowd, with the vulgar din of its May horns, blown thus early, in ill-survival of some Puritan custom, to drown the notes of the Latin hymn. But here, high up above the world, is no music but that august one of the loud bells; no sight but the arch of the perfect sky, and the solid grandeur of God's first best gift to man--new light.
In this stately dawning they stand together, he and she, despite the crowd, virtually alone; for Prue has drawn away Freddy to point out to him what is indeed startlingly obvious, the rocking of the tower under the vibration of the bells. Several undergraduates--more indeed than not--are taking off their college caps, and flinging them down over the battlements. The wind blows colder with the sunrise, but they pay little heed to its chill admonishment. With their bare young heads they stand laughing and leaning down to watch the fate of their mortar-boards. Most alight on the college roofs; one sticks on a pinnacle, greatly to its owner's delight. There is a noise of young voices, exclamations, bets, jolly laughter, on the crisp morning air. And meanwhile Talbot and Margaret stand staring at each other, silent at first; for how from such a torrent of words as he has to pour out before her can he choose which to begin with?
At last, 'I--I--did not expect to meet you here,' he says stupidly.
'Nor I you.'
'Are you staying in Oxford?'
'Yes, at the Mitre. Freddy was very anxious that we should come, and so Lady Roupell brought us.'
She answers him quietly, in a rather low voice, but she does not on her side originate any question. Can it be that she is struggling with a difficulty in any degree akin to his own? Urged by this dazzling possibility; urged still more by the shortness of the time--since what security is there that Prue may not be back upon them at any moment with some fresh discovery about the tower or the bells?--he hazards a speech of greater significance, of such significance in his own eyes that he trembles almost as much as the bell-rocked tower in making it.
'At the moment I first caught sight of you, and before that, I was thinking of you.'
'Were you?'
'I suppose that there are few things in the world more unlikely than that you were thinking of me?'
She hesitates a second. He sees by a sort of distress in her sweet, candid eyes, that she would like to be able to tell him that she had been thinking of him. But she evidently had not, and is too honest to be able to feign that she had.
'I was not thinking of you at that moment,' she answers reluctantly; 'I was too much out of breath with my climb,' she adds, with a rather embarrassed laugh, 'to be thinking of anything.'
'Oh, Peggy,' cries Prue, breaking in upon them, in realisation of Talbot's fear, 'he has thrown his cap over too! Is not it foolish of him? Is not he sure to catch cold? And I do not see how he is ever to get it again.'
'As to that, dear,' replies Freddy philosophically, gracefully winding his gown about his neck and over his head, 'I am not at all anxious, as it was not mine.' So saying, he again draws away his little sweetheart, or she him, and the other pair are a second time alone. But for how long?
'Are they--are they--all right?' inquires John, recalling what strides to intimacy he had formerly made by the agency of Prue's love affairs.
'I think so,' she answers doubtfully; 'it is hard to say; pretty right.'
'She looks as if it were all right.'
'Yes, does not she?' returns Peggy eagerly. 'Is not she improved? Is not she wonderfully prettier than when last you saw her?'
Talbot hesitates a second. He knows, of course, that Prue has a face; but whether it is a pretty or an ugly one, a bettered or a worsened one since last he looked upon it, he knows no more than if it had never been presented to his vision.
'Whether you see it or not,' says Peggy, a little piqued at his unreadiness to acquiesce, 'it is so; everybody sees it.'
'But she always was pretty, was not she?' asks he eagerly, trying to retrieve his blunder. 'Could she be prettier than she always was? and happiness is mostly becoming.'
He looks wistfully at her face as he speaks, as if he would not mind trying the effect of that recipe upon his own beauty--so wistfully that she turns away with a sort of confusion; and, resting her hand on the battlement that is still swaying almost like a ship on a sea under the bells' loud joyaunce, looks down. The sun has risen higher. Opposite him his pale sister is swooning away in the west. Before his proud step the spring green grows vivider. The smoke from the morning fires new lit, curls, beautiful as a mist, above the ennobled dwelling-houses, swallowing what is vulgar from sight, as unworthy of the new King's eyes.
The two young people stand tranced for a moment or two side by side without speaking; then Peggy says in a low voice, and with an apparently complete irrelevance to anything that had gone before:
'The lavender-bush is dead.'
'Dead?'
'And the mowing-machine is broken,' adds she, beginning to laugh, though a little tremulously. 'Jacob says it has never been the same since you meddled with it.'
'Jacob and I were always rivals. Then he is not dead too?'
'No.'
'Nor the fox?'
'No.'
'Nor Mink?'
'No.'
'Nor the parrot?'
'No.'
How delightful it seems to him to be standing there in the dawning, asking her after them all! He would like to inquire by name after every one of the eleven finches in the big cage. The crowd has very much thinned. There has been for a quarter of an hour a continual disappearance down the ladder of successive anxious human heads.
'Oh, Peggy!' cries Prue, again running up; 'are you ready? We are going down; which way shall you go--backwards or forwards? He says forwards; but I think I had rather go backwards, because I shall not see what is coming. Which way shall you?'
'I shall go forwards,' replies Peggy, with a sort of start. 'I had always rather see the worst coming, whatever it is.'
As she speaks she turns, with what he recognises as a good-bye look, to Talbot. Is it over already, then? Is this to be all? Can it be his fancy that there has come upon her face a sort of reflection of the blankness of his own--that her eyes, lifted in farewell to his, ask his eyes back again, as his are asking hers, 'Is this to be all?' What! let her slip now that God has sent her to his arms on this strange high place in this blessed vernal morning? The thought fills him with a sort of rage that, in its turn, lends him a boldness he had never before known with her.
'Are you going to say "Good-bye" to me?' he asks, with a kind of scorn. 'Then you may save yourself the trouble; for I have not the remotest intention of saying "Good-bye" to you.'
Prue has fled away again to the stairhead, and from it her little voice now sounds in peremptory imploring:
'Peggy! Peggy! come quick! I want you to go down first. I shall not be frightened if you will go down first. I want you to show me which way you mean to go--backwards or forwards. Peggy! Peggy!'
And Peggy, obedient to the tones which, whether querulous or coaxing, have constituted her law for seventeen years, turns to obey. She will slip from him after all! The thought frenzies him. Before he knows what he is doing he has laid his hand in determined detention on her wrist.
'You shall not go!' he says, with an authority which has come to him in his extremity he does not know whence. 'She does not need you a thousandth part as much as I do. Has not she her Ducane? She is greedy! Must she have everything? Let her call!'
Peggy's course is arrested. She stands quite still, with her blue eyes, bluer than he has ever seen them, looking straight at him, in a sort of waking trance.
'But--she--wants me!' she falters.
'And do not I want you?' asks he, unconsciously emphasising his pressure on her wrist. 'Dare you look me in the face, and tell me that I do not want you? You are a truthful woman--too truthful by half, I thought, the first time I met you. Look me in the eyes if you dare, and tell me that you believe I do not want you.'
She does what he tells her--at least half of it. She looks him penetratingly full in the eyes. If the least grain of falsity lurk in either of his, that clear and solemn gaze of hers must seek it out.
'If you do want me,' she says slowly, and with a trembling lip, 'it has come lately to you.'
'Lately!' echoes he, his voice growing lower as the tide of his passion sweeps higher. 'What do you call lately? I wanted you the first moment I saw you; was not that soon enough? How much sooner would you have had it? The first moment I saw you--do you recollect it? when you were so angry at being sent in to dinner with me that you would not be commonly civil to me; that you turned your back upon me, and insulted me as well as you knew how--I wanted you then. I have wanted you ever since--every hour of every day and every night; and I want you--God knows whether I want you--now!'
Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations, appeals, have died into silence. Her and Freddy's pretty heads have both disappeared. Talbot and Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her lip trembles.
'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not seen me since.'
'No, worse luck!' cries he passionately; 'but you need not throw that in my teeth. You might pity me for it, I think. Eight whole months gone, Peggy--wasted, lost out of our short lives! But how dare you stand there and say that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn, winter, summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps, between yourself and me. You do not want me, that is likely enough. You could not even pretend to have been giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You would have been glad--I saw by your face that your kind heart would have been glad--if you could have told me, with any semblance of truth, that you had been thinking of me; but you had not. I was miles away from you.'
Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving. She has not had many love-tales told her; not many more perhaps, or of much better quality, than those with which Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has let her eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their old directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.
'Why did you go away?'
Why did he go away? That is a question to which, in one sense, the answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty Harborough sent him.' In another--the only one, unfortunately, in which he can employ it--it is absolutely unanswerable.
'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question, and, with her eyes on his, awaits the answer.
And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of eager words to pour straight and hot from his heart into hers, he stands dumb before her.
She does not repeat the question; but she does what is far worse, she moves away to the stairhead and disappears, as all the other votaries of the ceremony, as Freddy and Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.
He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnashing his teeth. Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step? Is the old love to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead, that it had done living? Before God, no! Not if he can hinder it. She has not waited for him at the tower-foot; but he overtakes her before she has reached the High Street, and without asking her leave.
The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city clocks, with their variously-toned voices, are striking six; to their daily toil the workmen, with tools on back, are swinging along. To them there is certainly nothing unfamiliar, probably nothing lovely, in the morning's marvellous clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning, as if God had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I make all things new!'
'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot abruptly.
'Yes.'
'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot answer it now. As long as you and I shall live, I can never answer it!'
He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a passionate anxiety. O God! Is Betty's shadow to come between them still? Betty renouncing and renounced; Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his bane, his evil demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of whose prime years she has already burnt and withered? If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin has found him out.
In passionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but she is holding her head low, and he cannot get a good view of her face.
'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes taking in the rapidly diminishing space that lies before him. 'Is not the distance short enough in all conscience without your lessening it? Walk slower.'
She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.
'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost in a whisper, and with his heart beating like a steam-ram. 'Does that mean that it made any difference to you? May I make it mean that it did? Stay--do not speak--I will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it did not, I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe you!'
He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses, hanging in a suspense that is almost ungovernable--for they have passed Queen's classic front, are passing 'All Souls'--upon her slow-coming words. There is a little stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.
'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'
'I am coming back for it,' he cries passionately, the joy-tide sweeping up over his heart to his lips, and almost drowning his words. 'Coming back for it--for it and for all else that I left behind me!'
The smile spreads, red and wavering.
'You left nothing else; I sent all your books after you.'
'Yes,' he says reproachfully, 'you were very conscientious. It would have been kinder to be a little dishonest. You might have kept back the one that we had been reading out of. I had a faint hope that you might have kept it back.'
'I did think of it,' she answers, under her breath.
'The mark is in it still!' he cries joyfully. 'Shall we take it up again where we left off? Where shall we sit? Under the Judas-tree?'
Her flickering smile dies into gravity.
'You are getting on very fast,' she says tremulously. 'Are you sure that it is not too fast?'
They have passed St. Mary's; noble porch and soaring spire lie behind them.
'Is it worth while your coming,' she continues, with evident difficulty, and with a quiver she cannot master in her low voice, 'when at any moment you may be obliged to go away again?'
'Why should I be obliged to go away again?'
Her voice has sunk to a key that is almost inaudible.
'I am only judging of the future by the past.'
He groans. The past! Is he never to escape from the past? never to hear the last of it? Is it always to dog him to his dying day?
'Are you sure?' she pursues, lifting--though, as he sees, with untold pain--the searching honesty of her eyes to his, while a fierce red spot burns on each of her cheeks, 'that you are not promising more than you can perform when you talk of coming? Are you sure that--you--are free--to come? You know--you were--not free to stay.'
His face has caught a reflection of the crimson dyeing hers, but his look shows no sign of blenching.
'I am free,' he answers slowly and emphatically. 'Why do you look as if you did not believe me? Cannot you trust me?'
At his words a shadow passes over her face. Is not Freddy Ducane always inviting her to trust him? She has grown to hate the phrase.
'I am not good at trusting people,' she says plaintively, with a slight shiver. 'I do not like it.'
They have reached the door of the Mitre.
'Over already!' cries Talbot, in a voice of passionate revolt and discontent; 'my own good hour gone before I had well laid hold of it? Who could believe it? Then at least,' speaking very rapidly, 'say something to me--something else--something better! Whether you trust me or not--God knows why you should not--do not let me go away with that for----'
'Peggy dear,' interrupts a soft and rather melancholy voice from an upper window above the door--and yet not very much higher than they, so low and unpretending is the old and famous inn in comparison with its staring towering competitors--'we would not for worlds begin breakfast without you; but I am afraid that Prue is growing rather faint.'
