The Whitsun garlands that had so gaily wound about the pillars of Roupell Church have long ago been taken down, dead and faded. Poor Peggy has once again stood all day on her ladder, and decked aisle and chancel and font and altar with the manifold roses and the May lilies that by Trinity Sunday are bountifully ready to her hand. Once again has Mrs. Evans sat in a pew and helped her with moral suasion, and with easy suggestions of alterations that would entail her undoing half her work.
The scent of the lilies is too much next day for the youngest church-going Evans, and he has to be carried out, with his boots in the air, to the great delight of the schoolchildren, and enlivenment of the congregation generally. Not one of the civil parishioners, dropping in now and again to observe her progress and offer help, would think that the Peggy they see smiling down upon them from her ladder had been lately treading on hot ploughshares. But yet she has. The worst is over now, she tells herself. Which was the worst hour? Which the worst moment? she asks, with what she thinks to be a perfectly dispassionate inquiry. That one when she had found his glove lying quite naturally, and as if at home, on the hall-table? That one when she had had to tell Prue that it was all over; when through the obstinacy of the young girl's disbelief she had had to asseverate and re-asseverate it, until she had almost screamed out loud in the agony of that reiteration? That one when scarce two days after the blow had fallen, going on some necessary business to the Parsonage, Mrs. Evans had met her with the triumphant announcement that she--Mrs. Evans--had been right after all in her conjecture as to Lady Betty Harborough? that though it might not be known to many persons, yet the fact was none the less certain that she had paid a flying visit to the Manor: Mrs. Evans's nurse having had the information from the very flyman who had driven her from the station; adding the circumstance, that so little sense of shame did she manifest that she insisted upon an open fly.
'Of course the children were the pretext,' pursues the Vicar's wife, with a shrug; 'it is so shocking to think that they should be made accomplices, as it were. One always feels,' looking affectionately round at the various Evans specimens--old and new baby, little girl with a cold, middle-sized boy with a stomach-ache, kept indoors by reason of these ailments, and now littering the worn carpet--'one always feels that one's children are one's best safeguard.'
And Peggy remembers to have smiled. That a hideous knife is cutting her own heart in two, does not make the fact of Mrs. Evans's virtue requiring a safeguard at all the less funny. The worst is over, so she assures herself. The wren that sang at her chamber-window, waking her to tell her that Talbot was at the gate, that waked her all the same when it had no such news to tell her, is happily silent.
The pungent hawthorn-blossoms are discoloured and dead. She smiles drily as she sees them swept up, and rolled away in Jacob's barrow. What a mercy it would be if she could sweep up the dead brown love they emblematise, and get Jacob to wheel it away too!
After all she is but where she was before Whitsuntide, where she has been all her life. She has only a few, such a few steps to retrace. Ah, but the retracing of those steps! The nights are worst. All the great nations of the variously woeful on this sorrowful earth's face, know that the nights are worst. Oh, the agony of that crying out of strong souls for earth's supreme good just shown them, and then for ever snatched away! She had thought herself happy before--quite sufficiently happy, and had walked smiling and content along her path, until suddenly one had taken her by the hand, and had led her into God's paradise; and having just given her time to have her astonished eyes for ever dazzled by the shining of that great light, had pushed her away into the darkness, where she must stand henceforth with blind hands beating on the unopened door. She had thought herself happy before. In the darkness she laughs out loud. She had mistaken that wretched farthing rushlight for day.
All night she struggles in the deep waters, foothold slipping from under her. All night she fights with dragons, with noisome, baleful creatures, like stout Christian in the Valley of the Shadow; wrestles with temptations unworthy of her; with base longings to have him back, even though it be to go shares with another in his love; to cry 'Come back, come back! fool me, cheat me again--only come back!'
She had told him but the truth in saying that when she cared for any one, she cared very badly. She is caring very badly now, and it goes hard with her. What wonder that the wakening birds and the uprising wind of morning find her daily staring dry-eyed, watchful, languid, at the rose of dawn!
'Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How can she seek the empty world again?'
But through the day no one finds out her languor; no one knows that she is going about her daily work unfortified by sleep. Happily for her there is no one to observe her very nicely. If there were any one to steal anxious glances of sympathy at her to see how she is bearing it, she must break down; but, as I have said, happily for her, there is no one.
Prue, indeed, is quite affectionate and sorry; rather remorseful, in fact, at the consciousness of having but grudgingly given that kindness which, as it turns out, would have been needed only for one week. Her method of compensation for former shortcomings, that of repeating many times how unworthy she had always thought Talbot of her sister, is perhaps scarcely judicious. The assertion of his unworthiness cuts Peggy like a lash, but she bears it with set teeth and a sort of smile. It is true. He is unworthy. And after a while--but a little while--this part of her ordeal is over; for Prue, swallowed up in the sea of her own coming troubles, forgets to remember that there is any one else struggling in the waves.
And so, by and by, Peggy grows to walk her ploughshares with as unshrinking a foot as if they were velvet turf; grows to thank God again for her garden, and to be able to thank Him even for that one glimpse of the supremest good, though given but to be withdrawn; last of all, to acquiesce in that withdrawal. Since she is so urgently needed by the poor little life beside her, it is as well, so she tells herself, that she should have no distracting life of her own to pull her two ways. Whatever else her Prue loses, she can now never lose her.
And as time goes on, it seems as if Prue, too, were to have her losses. The first of these is perhaps but a little one, merely the loss of that promised company of her betrothed through those rich June days when Oxford is holding her yearly riot of pleasure--the riot from which he had joyfully engaged to steal away to her quiet side. But, as has happened not unfrequently before in Freddy's history, as it may be confidently predicted will happen not unfrequently again, he has promised more than when pay-day comes he is able to perform. After all, it seems--and at that poor Prue would be the last to wonder--Commemoration cannot get on without him.
Strange as it may appear, among the crowd, unusually large this year, that throngs to the fair city for her saturnalia, and extensive as is the acquaintance among undergraduates of the Hartley family--two of the sons, indeed, being at the present time members of the University--there is no one who is found capable of doing the honours of the festival to these comparatively new acquaintance with the exception of Mr. Ducane. He is therefore compelled, in compliance with his own creed of, as he very nobly says in his letter to Prue, 'making Self march last in the Pageant of Life,' to forego the simple joys he had planned in his sweetheart's company, and carry his absent, yearning heart through the bustle of theatre, ball, and fete. It is not until the last moment that he has announced to Prue his change of project, not until all her little preparations for his reception had been made, all the flowers gathered to be laid on the altar of the poor soul's God.
'He might have told you before,' says Peggy indignantly, when one morning the news of this defalcation is brought her by a trembling-lipped pale Prue.
'He did not know it himself,' replies the other, in eager defence; 'he says so somewhere, doesn't he?' (turning over the pages in feverish search); 'or if he did know, it was out of consideration for me that he kept me in the dark, that I might have less time to be disappointed in; and he was right. I have had all these weeks--all this hope and looking forward--to the good.'
Her under-lip quivers so piteously, as she makes this cheerful statement of her gains, that she puts up her hand in haste to hide it. But after all, Commemoration is only a matter of four days; and perhaps it is worth while to have the pleasure of his company deferred for that short interval, for the sake of the still higher pleasure she receives on his return, of hearing him read aloud to her a choice little poem he has found time to write on the subject of his own distraught wandering through the gay throng; questioning every maid he meets as to why she was not Prue. After he is gone, Prue repeats it--she has already learnt it by heart--with sparkling eyes to her sister. It is not only that it is so beautiful, as she says, but it is so true. Nobody could write like that, unless he felt it, could he now? Peggy is spared the pain of a reply by her sister's hurrying off to copy out the lines into that gold-clasped, vellum-bound volume, in which, written out in his sweetheart's best hand, the productions of Mr. Ducane's muse find a splendid shelter, until that surely near moment when rival publishers will snatch them from each other. She has plenty of time to devote her best penmanship to them, as it turns out; since after two days at the Manor, Freddy has to be off again. It is to London this time that a harsh necessity drives him. Freddy never 'goes,' or 'wishes to go.' He always 'has to go.'
'Whatever happens, we must not lose touch with the Great World-Heart beating outside us!' he has said, looking solemnly up at the stars over his betrothed's head, hidden sobbingly on his breast.
And she, though she knows little, and cares less, about the Great World-Heart, acquiesces meekly, since he must be right. So the Red House relapses into its condition of female tranquillity; a tranquillity of two balked young hearts beating side by side. The one pastures her sorrow on the name that now appears almost daily among the titled mob that crowds the summer columns of the Morning Post. The other digs hers into the garden; paints it into pictures for the workhouse; turns it into smiles for the sorrowful; stitches it into clothes for the naked.
The stillness of high summer is upon the neighbourhood; all the leafy homes around emptied of their owners; the roses, ungathered, shedding their petals, or packed off in wet cotton-wool to London. Milady is in London. So are the Hartleys. So is everybody; everybody, that is, except the Evanses. The Evanses are at home. They mostly are. A family of their dimensions, even in these days of cheap locomotion, does not lend itself to frequent removals. A couple of years ago, indeed, milady good-naturedly whisked off the Vicar for a fortnight's Londoning. But he came back so unaffectedly disgusted with his cure, his offspring, and his spouse, that the latter cherishes a hope, not always confined to her own breast, that this act of hospitality may never be repeated. And hay-harvest comes. The strawberries ripen, and jam-making begins. The Evans boys are home for the holidays; and one of them breaks his leg. The threatened baby arrives; and all the little events, habitual in the Red House's calendar, happen punctually; for even the Vicarage fracture is not more than the usual and expected outcome of the summer holidays. But neither hay-time, nor hot jam-time, nor holiday-time bring back Freddy to the Manor, whither his country-loving aunt has hastened back joyfully to spud and billycock and shorthorns, a round month ago. He does not even write very often. How should he? as Prue says. How could any one who knows anything of London expect it of him? But in all his letters, when they do come, there is invariably an underlying ring of sadness, that proves to demonstration how cogent though unexplained are the reasons which alone keep him from that dear and sacred spot, where alone, as he himself says, his soul reaches its full stature. But at length, apparently, the occult causes relax their hold of him; and when August has begun to bind her gold stooks, and the cuckoo has said good-bye, he comes. In August. It is a month to whose recurrence Peggy has looked forward with dread: to her a month of anniversaries. Happily it is only to herself that they are anniversaries. Who but she will remember that on such a day the fox bit Talbot? Dingo himself has certainly forgotten it; though he is as certainly quite ready to do it again, if the chance is afforded him. Who will know, or even suspect, that such and such days are made bitter to her by the fact that on their fellows in last year he drove the mowing-machine, or gathered the lavender, or cut out the new flower-bed? She smiles half sarcastically, wrapping herself securely in the cloak of her little world's entire indifference to her epoch-making moments.
'One has no windows in one through which one's friends can look in at one,' she says philosophically, 'even if they would take the trouble. Mrs. Evans perhaps would take the trouble; I do not know any one else that would. As long as one is not foolish outside, it does not matter; and I am not foolish outside.'
August is here; and the sacred seat under the Judas-tree, the seat that had been forbidden to Peggy during her one triumph-hour, is again occupied: save in the dead of the night has, for the last five days, been scarcely a moment unoccupied; and Prue's little cup--the cup that had run as low as mountain-springs in a droughty summer--again brims over.
'It is so much better than if he had never gone away,' she says rapturously, 'for then I might have thought that he liked me only because he had never seen anything better; but now that he has had all the most beautiful ladies in London at his feet----'
'Has he indeed?' rejoins Peggy, smiling; 'does he tell you so?'
But she has not the heart to suggest that the present emptiness of the Manor of all inmates, except himself and his aunt, may count for even more in Mr. Ducane's assiduities than his indifference to the London beauties.
One afternoon she has left the young pair cooing on their rustic seat as usual, and has betaken herself to the Manor, on one of her mixed errands of parish business and individual friendliness to its mistress. She finds the old lady surrounded by all the signs and symptoms of a new hobby--plans, encaustic tiles, designs for the decorated pans and skimmers of an ornamental dairy.
'I have a new toy, my dear!--congratulate me!' says she, looking up from the litter around her, almost as radiant as Prue; 'an ornamental dairy-house! I cannot think how I have lived without it for sixty-five years! After all, there is nothing like a new toy; you would not be the worse for one,' she adds, glancing kindly at the girl's face, a little oldened and jaded since this time last year, its beauty lending itself even less than it had then done to Lady Betty's sarcasm about being improved by being bled. 'And Prue?--how is Prue? She is not in want of a new toy par hasard?--still quite satisfied with the old one, eh? Well, he is a very ingenious piece of mechanism!'
'Very!' replies Peggy drily.
'And when are the banns to be put up?' inquires the old lady abruptly, resting her arms upon the heap of her plans and estimates, and pushing up her spectacles on her forehead, in order to get a directer view of her young vis-a-vis. 'I should like to have a week's notice, in order to get myself a new gown; Mason was telling me this morning that I have not one that can be depended upon to hold together.'
'The banns?' repeats Peggy, a flush of pleasure spreading over her face; 'then he has told you! Oh, I am so glad! I was afraid that he would not!'
'Told me!' repeats the elder woman, with a withering intonation; 'not he!--trust him for that! No doubt he has some high-falutin' reason for not doing so; it would wound my feelings!--it would be dangerous at my age! He had rather efface himself and his own interests for ever than roughen, by one additional pebble, my path to the grave!' mimicking, with ludicrous insuccess, Freddy's round young tones. 'Told me?--not he!' The tinge brought into Peggy's face by that emotion of transient satisfaction of which milady's words have proved the fallaciousness, dies out of it again. 'Nobody has told me,' continues the old lady tranquilly; 'I have only taken the liberty of seeing what was directly under my nose. No offence to you, Peggy; but I had quite as soon not have seen it.'
'I suppose that we have no one but ourselves to thank,' says milady, with philosophy, her eye returning affectionately to one of the designs for the front of her hobby. 'I do not care about that one; it is too florid--it would look like Rosherville. Throw two selfish idle young fools together, and the result has been the same since Adam's time!'
Peggy's heart swells. Idle and selfish! Never, even in the most secret depths of her own mind, has she connected such epithets with her Prue; and here is milady applying them to her as if they were truisms.
'I must send him away somewhere, I suppose,' pursues Lady Roupell, with a rather impatient sigh. 'He is an expensive luxury, is Master Freddy, as your poor little Prue would find; but no doubt it will come cheaper in the end. Give him a couple of hundred pounds, and pack him off on a voyage round the world! Believe me, dear,' laying her hand--whose tan, contracted by an inveterate aversion for gloves, contrasts oddly with its flashing diamonds--compassionately on Peggy's shoulder, 'he would have clean forgotten her before he had got out of the chops of the Channel.'
A great lump has sprung into Peggy's throat, constricting the muscles.
'And she?'
The old woman shrugs her shoulders.
'When we are forgotten, child, we do the graceful thing, and forget too. I suppose we all know a little about that.'
Margaret has picked up one of the Dutch tiles that are to line the walls of milady's new plaything; but it is but a blurred view that she gets of its uncouth blue figures.
'She would not forget,' she says in a low voice, that, low as it is, has yet been won with difficulty from that seeming mountain in her throat; 'she has put all--everything into one boat! Oh! poor Prue, to have put everything into one boat!'
'And such a boat!' adds milady expressively.
For all rejoinder, Peggy fairly bursts out crying. The accumulated misery of weeks, so carefully pent and dammed in the channels of her aching heart, breaks down her poor fortifications. Her own life-venture hopelessly perished! Prue's foundering on the high seas before her very eyes! She had not cried for herself; she may, at least, have leave to cry for Prue.
'God bless my soul, Peggy!' says the elder woman, taking off and laying down her spectacles, and speaking with an accent of pronounced surprise and indignation; 'you do not mean to say that you are going to cry! There's an end to all argument while you are sniffing like that.' Then as the girl rises to go, but imperfectly strangling her sobs, she adds in a still vexed but rather remorseful voice: 'You make me feel quite choky too. You have no right to make me feel choky! Run away! run away! What do I care for any of you? I have got my dairy-house!'
