CHAPTER XVIII

She never once looked back in any sense, when she had passed out of the gates of the Manor. She had known that it was laid upon her to go through this ordeal of standing before the mother whom he loved, to be approved by her. She had faced the ordeal without shrinking, because she loved him. She was as sure of him and his love for her as she had been certain of the deceit of the wretch with whom she had gone through the empty ceremony of marriage in order that her mother might die happy—though the result was that she died of her misery.

She knew that if Mrs. Wingfield were pleased with her, Jack would be delighted and ask her to marry him the next time they met, if he did not force a meeting with her for the purpose; but if his mother did not approve of her, and called her heartless because her dress was white instead of black, and flippant because she had appeared several days at a sporting meeting within a couple of months of her husband’s death, he would be greatly downcast, but he would ask her to marry him all the same.

But she had set forth to face the ordeal by visit as firmly as she would have gone to meet the ordeal by fire or the ordeal by water, had she lived in the days of such tests of faith. She knew that, whatever should happen her faith in him would not be shaken and his faith in her would remain unmoved. But she had made up her mind to find favour in the sight of his mother, and she now felt that she had succeeded in doing so. If she had failed, she would have been miserable, but she would have promised to marry him all the same.

The sense of exultation which was hers was due to her knowledge of the fact that she had found favour in the eyes of the mother of the man whom she loved, not to her feeling that she would, as the wife of Jack Wingfield, occupy a splendid position in the county—such a position as her poor mother had never dreamt of her filling. Beyond a doubt, she found it quite delightful to think of owning that beautiful park through which she had been allowed as a great privilege to stray while the house was empty. Every part of the grounds was a delight to her—the deep glen with its well-wooded sides sloping down to the little stream that twinkled among its ferns and mosses and primroses—the irregular meadow where stood the tawny haystacks like islands in the midst of a sea of brilliant green—the spacious avenues of elm and oak that made her feel when walking in their shadow, that she was going through the nave of a cathedral—she loved everything about the place, and it would be the greatest joy to her to live all her life there—with love; without love she would as soon spend the rest of her life in one of the cottages on her father’s farm.

She felt exultant only in the thought that he was to be her companion when she went to that place. She had all her life been looking forward to a life of love; and it had been puzzling to her when she found that year after year went by without bringing her any closer to love. She was not conscious of being fastidious in her association with men; but the fact remained the same: she never had the smallest feeling of love for any of the men who had told her that they loved her—and she never had a lack of such men about her.

For the months of her engagement to that man, Marcus Blaydon, her thought was that this was the punishment that was laid upon her for the hardness of her heart—this prospect of living with a man who could never be anything to her but an object of dislike. He never awoke in her a slumbering passion—not even the passion of hate. She merely disliked him as she disliked a foggy day; and yet she was condemned to spend the remainder of her life with him with love shut out. Was that to be her punishment for having rejected the many offers of love which had been laid at her feet by men whom she liked well but could not love?

And then with the suddenness with which a great blessing or a great calamity is sent by Heaven (according to the Teachers) there had been sent to her the two best things in the world—Freedom and Love. She knew that if this man had been one of her father’s shepherds and had asked her to love him she would have given herself to him. Her sense of being on the way to fill a splendid position socially was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was beloved by a man whom she loved as she never thought it would be given to her to love any man. That was her dominant thought—nay, her only thought—while she walked through the lanes to her home.

And it never occurred to her that she was reckoning among her possessions a great gift which had not yet been offered to her. It never occurred to her that she might be mistaken in taking his love for granted. Even if weeks and months were to pass without his coming to her, she would still not entertain so unworthy a thought as that he was not coming to her. But she was not subjected to the ordeal of his absence. He came to her on Monday morning, the first thing. It was surely ridiculous for him to set out on this mission before the workers in the fields had left their beds; but so he did. He went forth and wandered for miles across the Downs. He went within sight of the sea, by a curious impulse, and he sat on the turf in the early sunlight, listening to the great bass of the breaking waves beneath him and to the exquisite fluttering flutings, of a lark in the sky above him. Then he turned and found the road that led down to the snuggest of villages—he owned every house, though he did not know it—and up again to a region of ploughed fields—enormous spaces of purple-brown surrounded by great irregular hedges of yellow gorse.

It might have been fancied that, with his heart so full of the great intention, he would be walking like one in a dream, taking no thought of the things about him; but so far from his being like this, he looked upon everything that he came across with an affection such as he had never known before. He felt that these things of Nature were closer to him than they had ever been—in fact, for some of them he felt as would an explorer in a strange land who suddenly comes upon a number of people and recognizes in each a relation of his own. He had never been in such close touch with Nature before, and every step that he took was one of rejoicing.

He dallied so much in strange ways that it was actually as far on in the day as seven o’clock before he found himself in that narrow steep lane close to a narrower and steeper one, which led up to Athalsdean Farm—this was where his motor had broken down, and she had come upon him searching (by the aid of his chauffeur’s eyes) for the cause of the mischief. He had not yet reached the exact spot, when he saw her turning from the farm lane to the one through which he was walking; but she was not coming toward him; her turn took her in the opposite direction.

He shouted to her, and she glanced round, and then stood still. She was at that instant under an ash that was not yet fully clothed with leaves; the sunlight shone upon her bare head. Bare? Well, scarcely bare with that splendour of wreathed tresses crowning her; but she wore no hat, and carried no sunshade. Her dress was a print, made very short, so that her serviceable shoes and her ankles were fully exposed. Such leaves as were upon the boughs cast dark shadows upon her dress, but her head was altogether in the sunshine.

She waited for him, rosy and eager—she could not control her eagerness—she could not trust herself to speak a word of greeting in reply to his.

“I have been in search of you,” he said.

“For long?”

“For long? All my life, Priscilla. I want you, Priscilla—I never wanted anything so much. I need you. I cannot do without you.”

He had not released the hand that she gave him, but he did not hold it so tightly but that she could have taken it from him if she had been so minded; but it so happened that she was not so minded. She allowed him to keep it, and he drew her to him. He put his other hand on her waist, and then slipped it up to the back of her head. That was how he kissed her, with his hand at the back of her head; and that was how she allowed him to kiss her at 7.5 a.m. on that fresh June morning, when the hedgerows were giving in scent to the sun the dews that had lain upon them, keeping them fresh through the night.

“You do not say a word,” he complained, when he had kissed her and kissed her—on the cheeks, the chin, the eyes, and the mouth—when he had held her so close to him that she felt deliciously dishevelled, and for some seconds found it difficult to breathe. “Not a word!”

She gasped, and kept him away with one hand. He was holding the other so tightly by now that she had no chance of recovering it.

She laughed.

“A word? What word?” she gasped.

“Any word—the word that is in your heart.” There was no use talking loud. His arm was about her again.

“There is no word in my heart—you have squeezed it out,” she managed to say.

“You would not let me lay a finger on you if you did not love me—I know that,” said he.

“You know that, and yet you ask me to say something to you. Talking is a sinful waste of time.”

“So it is, my darling girl. You have said it: out of the fulness of the heart the mouth——”

“Kisses—that is what it does; it doesn’t speak—it cannot.”

“Since when has that knowledge come to you, Priscilla.”

“I confess that it is newly acquired. You make an excellent coach for a backward girl, my master.”

“You are not backward; it is only that your education has been neglected.”

“And you look on yourself as a successful crammer? Haven’t you seen the advertisements, ‘particular attention paid to neglected children’? You are paying me particular attention. Don’t you think that my education is pretty nearly complete, Jack?”

“Oh, you have a lot to learn yet; but you are coming on. You have learned that my name is Jack—that’s a distinct advance. Oh, my dear girl, the delight of teaching you all—all—all!”

“I had no idea that you were so ardent an educationist. Ah, I knew you would come to me! But what I have been asking myself for several days is, Were there no girls in your own station in life——”

She could not finish her question for laughter; the phrase which her father was very fond of using sounded very funny coming from her lips, which were—as she had found out—exactly on a level with his own.

“Station of life? Station of life? Your lips are the waiting room—a first-class waiting room in the station of life,” said he.

That was how he received her suggestion that he was ready to make what his relations would undoubtedly call a mesalliance in asking her to be his wife; though, as a matter of fact, he had not yet asked her to be his wife. Perhaps she should have regarded his movements during the previous five minutes merely in the light of a friendly attention to enable him to see if she was amicably disposed toward him.

“Let that be the last word of frivolity between us,” she said. “I want to be serious. Be sure, my dear Jack, that this is the most serious moment that has come into our lives.”

“I know it—I know it, my beloved,” said he. “I know that meeting you was the most important thing in my life. And I know that marrying you will be the wisest. You are the first person in the world who gave me credit for having any backbone. You are the first person in the world to give me a sort of respect for myself. My mother is the dearest soul on earth; but she has never thought it necessary to help me on to anything. She was quite content that I should live and inherit the property, and follow her to the grave and then go there myself, doing as little as possible in the interim. It’s wonderful how little a country gentleman can do if he only puts his heart into the business of idling. I think it quite likely that I might have made a record in this way. But you came into my life, and—and you have become my life. That’s why I want you to stay with me—to stand by me, and you’ve promised to do it?”

“Have I?” she said. “Yes, I suppose I have; at any rate, whether I have or not you may be sure that I’ll do it. And don’t you doubt, Jack, that we’ll do something in the world before we are parted. A man without a woman beside him represents an imperfect scheme of life. Life—that does not mean a man, nor does it mean a woman; it means the man and the woman. So it was in the beginning, so it is to-day. Life—the man and the woman, each living for the other. That’s life, isn’t it?”

“It is; and we’ll do some living, you and I, Priscilla, if others have failed.”

“The failures are those who forget—the woman who forgets that she is a woman and seeks to do the man’s work—the man who forgets that he is a man and treats the woman as if she were the same as himself. Oh, here we are talking of the philosophy of life when we should be living. But that’s the way of philosophy: it keeps a man learning the best way to live, and by the time he has learnt it it is time for him to die.”

“Hang up philosophy and give us life, say I. Dear girl, you have made me happy and—hungry. I left my bed at four this morning, and now it’s past seven.”

“You will come with me and have breakfast. I wonder if any man up to this day ever asked a girl to marry him before breakfast.”

“I wonder. But a chap feels so much fresher in the early morning, I think it should be tried more frequently.”

“It was a bold experiment, Jack. But it might only succeed when carried out in connection with the dairy industry.”

“That is how you come to be up so early. Shall I have a chance of seeing your dad if I go with you? I suppose a dad has always to be reckoned with.”

“No one has to be reckoned with except myself in this matter. I am myself, and I know myself, and will obey myself and none other this time—this time.”

She spoke with some vehemence, and her last sentence was uttered with a touch of bitterness. He knew what she meant. Providence had come to her rescue once, but a second interposition on her behalf was too much to expect. He could appreciate her feeling.

“You will not have to meet my father until you please,” she said. “Just now he is miles away—at Galsworthy. We shall be alone.”

“I’ll not shudder at the prospect,” said he. “We can’t have everything in this world, can we?”

They went together up the lane to the farm with as much decorum as was consistent with the possibility of being discovered by some watcher in the fields, and they had breakfast face to face at an old Tudor table in one of the panelled rooms of the farmhouse, and beneath the old oak beams—a lovely room that had undergone no change in even the most trifling detail for three hundred years. The bowls of wallflowers on the table and on the lattice shelf were of blue delft, and the plate-rack on the wall held some dishes of the same colour.

“You suppose all this is old?” he said, looking around.

“Oh, no; but it wasn’t bought in my lifetime,” she replied. “I can show you in an account book exactly what was paid for everything. The date of the last entry in the book is the ‘Eve of the Feast of the Purification, 1604.’”

“Three hundred years ago. But that’s nothing in the history of your family. Have you a ledger that goes back to the Heptarchy?”

“I’m afraid that that one is mislaid. But the eggs are fresh; if we don’t boil them now they will be three hours old at nine.”

“You might have some relic of the Heptarchy, Priscilla.”

“Alas! nothing remains from that date except our name.”

“And yet you are content to submerge it in the mushroom-growth Wingfield? Have you no reverence for the past?”

“Just now I confess that I am thinking more of the future. Oh, the future, Jack, my boy—the future!”

She laid a hand upon his shoulder and stood in front of him in the attitude of a true comrade.

“My pal!” he cried, taking the note from her. “My pal, was there ever a time when we didn’t know each other?”