Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 15

He did not have an opportunity of speaking with her alone till after tea. Then, when they had all gone into the garden--how it happened he did not know, for he would not have dared arrange it--he found himself walking down the path towards the copse with Miss Pickering, while behind them, quite far already behind them, Mrs. Pickering paused and exclaimed over the herbaceous border, Mr. Carew beside her. Mrs. Carew and Mrs. Pomfrey had sat down under the trees near the house.

"Would you like to see the pink foxgloves growing?" he asked her. "They are very beautiful growing--more beautiful, I think you'll feel, than in the house."

"I'd love to see them," said Miss Pickering.

They crossed the slip of meadow among the tall gra.s.ses and, "There,"

said Aubrey, pointing, with a faint smile, "there they are!"

"_How_ sweet!" said Miss Pickering, with her serene emphasis. They stood to look.

"Do you know," said Aubrey, wondering at himself, but he felt upborne, "that I find they look like you--the pink ones."

"Really?" She smiled now, turning her calm, blue eyes upon him. "That's very flattering."

"No, no; not flattering; not at all flattering," said Aubrey. "Not at all, not at all," he repeated under his breath. He could say no more just then. They walked on, his heart in a flutter.

"Have you ever heard a willow-wren, Miss Pickering?" he asked suddenly.

"A willow-wren? I don't think so. I don't know much about birds."

"It is usually singing in the wood at this hour. Would you care to come and see if we can hear it?"

"I'd love to. I wish you'd teach me all about birds," said Miss Pickering.

His heart was thumping now. They entered the copse. It seemed to him, as they pa.s.sed them, that the foxgloves were tall angels set about Paradise and welcoming him there. It was very still among the trees. Miss Pickering walked lightly beside him. She, too, looked like an angel.

They reached a clearing, where an old fallen log lay, and here they sat down. "We shall hear it, I think," said Aubrey, "if we sit here quietly."

Presently, in the stillness, the little bird began to sing its song, the descending chromatic chain of liquid notes, melancholy and happy; the song of his very soul, Aubrey felt, and that the bird said for him all that he could not say as, with head bent, he sat listening, the beloved presence beside him. She was part of the song; and in it, as they listened together, their very hearts were mingling. They knew each other, he felt sure, very well.

"How sweet!" she murmured, and he nodded, not able to look at her.

There was a silence, and then the bird sang again. He raises his eyes to hers now, and they turned to him and smiled. Her hand lay on the rough bark of the log, and his was near it. Was it her hand that responded to the unconscious appeal of his, or had he dared? He held it. That was the bewildering, the transcending fact.

"Oh, Miss Pickering! Miss Leila--Leila," he stammered. "May I tell you?

May I ask you? Can you care for me?"

Her eyes still smiled, if very gravely. "Do you really love me?" she murmured.

"Oh, Leila!" he repeated. The willow-wren still sang, but all the little chains of sound seemed to be woven into a mist about him, trembling, shining. He held her hand to his lips. He wished to kneel before her.

This was Paradise.

"It's so very sudden," said Leila Pickering. "I never dreamed you cared till just now."

"Ever since I saw you first--ever since I saw your eyes. It has been like the fragrance of my flowers at evening, like the moon rising on my flowers. I did not dare to hope--you so young, so lovely;--life before you."

"I think we can be very happy together," said Leila Pickering. "I knew you were a dear from the first moment I saw you, too."

The willow-wren stopped singing now and flew away. In the distance, then, he heard the liquid, dropping notes, and they sounded very sad.

His arm was around Leila Pickering, and she leaned her head on his shoulder, so that in an ecstasy of wonder he felt the warm brightness of her hair against his cheek. He had never heard her talk so much. She told him that she had had such a dull, horrid life, so poor, knowing such tiresome, second-rate people. And she did not get on at all well with her mother.

"n.o.body has ever really understood me--till you came," she said, sitting upright now beside him, the lovely colour in her cheeks delicately heightened, her eyes shining while she talked. She confided in him. She loved him. They were betrothed--this was the blissful, culminating thought that seemed to go in waves of music through him as he gazed at her. He had ceased to hear the willow-wren's melancholy little song. And then he heard her say:

"I don't want to live in the country, you know. You won't mind? Of course I love it; but we can pay week-end visits, always;--you must know such heaps of nice people; friends. And we'll travel too--I long to see the world. India doesn't count. Only think, I've never been to Paris except once--on a horrid, cheap trip, for a week. We never could afford to do anything really amusing or buy any really nice things. My life has been so frightfully dull, and I do want to stretch my wings and see lots of people and entertain and go to plays, you know. I adore London. I'm sure I shall be a good hostess."

It was as if a sword had transfixed him. He seemed to hear a great bell booming--a great London bell--Big Ben; he had always heard Big Ben from his office in Whitehall, and there had been a jangle of bells in Kensington, too, and a roar, a ceaseless roar. And he seemed to hear the words "Dangerous, dangerous." He had been too happy.

He kept his mild, kind eyes of a pastel blue upon her, and he told himself, while he wrestled, transfixed, that she must not guess; but, as if pressed from his anguish, he heard himself murmuring helplessly, though the gentle, fixed smile held his lips, "You don't care for my little place, then? You wouldn't care to go on living at Meadows? It's a nice little place, Meadows--a nice little place; we could make it very pretty, and we could have people here, as many as you wanted."

Had a note of pleading, almost desperate, crept in unawares? He saw her calm eyes harden slightly, fixed on him. And he saw, then, tears rise in them.

"Oh! it's so dull, so dull, down here!" she breathed. "It's a darling little place, Meadows--of course, of course I love it. I wish we could afford to keep it, just to run down to for a quiet week-end now and then; but you couldn't, could you? And it's far too small for entertaining, isn't it? And no one really smart cares to come and stay with one if one has no shooting, nothing to offer. One can really _live_ in London--I've always felt that. You do care more for me than you do for Meadows?" she finished with a smile, half appealing and half challenging.

And looking into the blue eyes, blurred and enlarged, like a child's, with their tears, he saw himself as mean and petty and selfish. He loved her, and was it only as another flower to place among his flowers, another treasure to place among his treasures, a possession of his own, without end or purpose for itself? He loved her, and, unimaginably, she loved him and would marry him. Love must know pain and sacrifice--"pain and sacrifice"--he seemed to hear himself repeating. This was a young life, with its rights to life, and it must stretch its wings.

He smiled at her and raised her hand again to his lips, saying, "Of course I care more for you than for Meadows, dear Leila. Of course we will live where you choose."

And very radiant now, rising and smiling down upon him, Leila Pickering said, "You _are_ a dear. I'm sure it's best for us both; we'd get so pokey here. I know we couldn't afford Mayfair--I wouldn't dream of that; but I think a house in one of those little new streets near Cadogan Square would be just right for us; don't you?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

CARNATIONS

I

RUPERT WILSON came into the studio where his wife, who had been out sketching all the morning, was washing her paint-brushes, carefully turning and rubbing them in a pot of turpentine. She wore her painting ap.r.o.n, for Marian in the midst of her artistic avocations was always neat and spotless; and, half turned from him as she was, she did not look round as he entered. Rupert carried his stick, a rustic, ashen stick of which he was very fond, and his Panama hat; he was going out and Marian probably knew that he was going out, and where; this made it more difficult to say in a sufficiently disengaged voice, "I'm just going down to see Mrs. Dallas for a little while."

"Oh! are you?" said Marian. She continued to stir her brushes, and though her wish, also, very evidently was to appear disengaged and indifferent, she was not able to carry it out, for she added, as if irrepressibly, "You need hardly have taken the trouble to come and tell me that."

Rupert looked at her, and since she did not look at him, it was very intently, as if to measure to the full the difference between this Marian and the Marian he had known and believed in. It was hard to realize that his wife should show a trivial and unworthy jealousy and should strike him such a blow; for that it was a blow he knew from the heat in his cheek and the quickening of his pulse; but, as he looked at her, standing there turned from him, her blue ap.r.o.n girt about her, her black hair bound so gracefully around her head, the realization uppermost in his mind was that Marian, since the second baby had come, had grown very stout and matronly. He seemed to see it to-day for the first time, as if his awareness of it came to emphasize his sudden consciousness of her spiritual deficiency.

When he had met and fallen so very deeply in love with Marian, she had been, if not slender, yet of a supple and shapely form, with just roundness and softness enough to contrast delightfully with her rather boyish head, her air, clear, fresh, frank, of efficiency and swiftness.

He had, of course, found her a great deal more than clear and fresh and frank; but, entangled as he had been in that wretched love-affair with Aimee Pollard,--the pretty, untalented young actress who had so shamefully misused him,--torn to pieces and sunken in quagmires as he had been, these qualities in Marian had reached him first like a draught of cold spring water, like dawn over valley hills. These were the metaphors he had very soon used to her when she had applied her firm, kind hands to the disentangling of his knots and her merry, steady mind to tracing out for him the path of honourable retreat. He had found her so wonderful and lovely and had fallen so much in love with her that his ardour, aided by her quiet fidelity, had overborne all the opposition of her people. Foolish, conventional people they were,--their opposition based, it appeared, almost unimaginably to his generous young mind, on the fact that Marian happened to have money and that he had none, except what he might make by his books; and also, though it was nearly as unimaginable, on the fact that a good many of these people were in the peerage. Marian, a year before he had met her, had broken away from the stereotyped routine of their country life and had come to London to study painting; and it was that Marian of the past who had seemed to share to the full all his idealisms. They had married within three months of their meeting.

From such a dawn, white, fresh, blissful, to this dull daylight! from such a Marian to this narrow-minded matron! Marian still had beauty. Her clear eyes were as blue, her wide, pale lips as sweet; but she was a matron. Her neck had grown shorter, her chin heavier; the girlish grace of glance and smile seemed muted, m.u.f.fled by their setting; there was no longer any poetry in her physique. And as Rupert stood looking at her and seeing all this, his sense of grievance, though he was unaware of this factor in it, grew deeper.

A little while pa.s.sed before he said,--and it was, he felt, with dignity,--"I really don't know what you mean by that, Marian."

She had now finished her brushes and had taken up her palette. She began to sc.r.a.pe the edges as she answered,--and her voice was not schooled, it was heavy with its irony and gloom,--"Don't you? I'm sorry."

"I trust indeed that it doesn't mean that you are jealous of my friendship for Mrs. Dallas?"

"Friendship? Oh, no; I'm not jealous of any friendship."

"Of my affection, then; of my love, if you like," said Rupert. "You know perfectly well what I feel about all that--and I thought you felt it, too. It's the very centre of my life, of my art; my books turn on it.