Plashers Mead Part 51

"For G.o.d's sake, keep quiet!" he begged. "What has happened to you?"

That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had ceased to believe in G.o.d, to care for her family, for her honor, for him, for life itself.

"Pauline, will you keep quiet? Are you mad to behave like this?"

He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and in an elation of woe she screamed again.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.

She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.

"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do you like it? Do you like it?"

"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will you promise to keep quiet if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"

He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before urged it towards home.

When they reached the gra.s.sy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.

"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."

He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her, and finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her.

Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.

"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"

"Well, at present you're lying on the gra.s.s, but where you've been or where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself again?"

"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...." She burst into tears. "My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.

"Well, naturally," he said, with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."

Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go up-stairs alone.

"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.

She kissed him tragically and crept in. Her room was undisturbed, but in the looking-gla.s.s she saw a dripping ghost, and when she held her candle to the window another ghost vanished slowly into the high gray wall. A c.o.c.k crowed in the distance, and through the leaves of the wistaria there ran a flutter of waking sparrows.

JULY

When Guy looked back next morning at what had happened on the river, he felt that the only thing to do was to leave Pauline for a while and give her time and opportunity to recover from the shock. He wondered if it would be wiser merely to write a note to announce his intention or if she had now reached a point at which even a letter would be a disastrous aggravation of her state of mind. He felt that he could not bear any scene that might approximate to that horrible scene last night, and yet to go away abruptly in such circ.u.mstances seemed too callous. Supposing that he went across to the Rectory and that Pauline should have another seizure of hatred for him (there was no other word that could express what her att.i.tude had been), how could their engagement possibly go on?

Mrs. Grey would be appalled by the emotional ravages it had made Pauline endure; she would not be justified, whatever Pauline's point of view, in allowing the engagement to last a day longer. It would be surely wiser to write a letter and with all the love he felt explain that he thought she would be happier not to see him for a short while. Yet such a course might provoke her to declare the whole miserable business, and the false deductions that might be made from her account were dreadful to contemplate. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened, and yet he could scarcely have foreseen such a violent change. Even now he could not say what exactly had begun the outburst, and indeed the only explanation of it was by a weight of emotion that had been acc.u.mulating for months. Of course he should never have persuaded her to come out on the river at night, but still that he had done so was only a technical offense against convention. It was she who had magnified her acquiescence beyond any importance he could have conceived. He must thank religion for that, he must thank that poisonous fellow in the confessional who had first started her upon this ruinous path of introspection and self-torment. But, whatever the cause, it was the remedy that demanded his attention, and he twisted the situation round and round without being able to decide how to act. He realized how month by month his sense of responsibility for Pauline had been growing, yet now the problem of her happiness stared at him, brutally insoluble. What was it Margaret had once said about his being unlikely to squander Pauline for a young man's experience? Good G.o.d! had not just that been the very thing he had nearly done; and then with a shudder, remembering last night, he wondered if he ought any longer to say "nearly." He must see her. Of course he must see her this morning. He must somehow heal the injury he had inflicted upon her youth.

Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for herself and the way she had frightened him.

"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be married."

She acquiesced half listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true significance of her att.i.tude, because it held in its heart a premonition for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the future only as ghosts may meet in shadowy converse and meaningless communion.

"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.

"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad!"

He kissed her good-by, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.

When Guy was driving with G.o.dbold along the s.h.i.+pcot road he had not made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all, and of whom he suddenly thought with affection.

"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall. "And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George was ill and did not start."

"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.

"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then, of course, there is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."

Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of love.

His father shrugged his shoulders.

"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.

His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the secretarys.h.i.+p had naturally presented itself as the more important occasion.

"If you want any help with your outfit...."

"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."

Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night he had come to think of it again, and fancied it might have been merely an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course, he would not dream of going, really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes, it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London, either, so Guy went round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road, and in the pleasure of the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent.

Maurice himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the English ballet for a critical weekly journal called _The Point of View_. They went to a theater together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's jargon felt for a while quite rustic, and was once or twice definitely taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford? And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his friend rea.s.serted itself.

"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of your brain must be unparalleled."

"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed, laughing.

"I don't believe I shall get much out of breath, catching up with your advanced ideas," Guy retorted. "Anyway, this Autumn I shall come to town for good."

"And about time you did," said Maurice. "I say, mind you send your poems to _The Point of View_, and I'll give you a smas.h.i.+ng fine notice the week after publication."

Guy asked when Michael was coming back.

"He's made a glorious mess of things, hasn't he?" said Maurice.

"Oh, I don't know. Not necessarily."

"Well, I admit he found her out in time. But fancy wanting to marry a girl like that. I told him what she was, and he merely got furious with me. But he's an extraordinary chap altogether. By the way, when are _you_ going to get married?"

"When I can afford it," said Guy.