Plashers Mead Part 25

Your own adoring PAULINE.

Guy wrote the little note to Pauline, and to his father he wrote a long letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to be a schoolmaster.

It was peerless weather when they set out in G.o.dbold's wagonette on the nine miles to Ladingford. Guy was thrilled to be traveling like this with Mrs. Grey, Margaret, and Pauline. The girls were in flowered muslin dresses, seeming more airy than he had ever thought them; and the luggage piled up beside G.o.dbold had the same exquisite lightness, so that it appeared less like luggage than a store of birds' feathers. The thought of nearly having missed this summery pilgrimage made Guy catch his breath.

They arrived at Ladington towards tea-time and found the barge lying by an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of that flat, green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended, with here and there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless as the young Thames itself.

The _Naiad_ was painted peac.o.c.k-blue; owing to the turreted p.o.o.ps the owner had superimposed and the bal.u.s.trade with rail of gilt gadroons, it almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.

"Anything more you'll want?" G.o.dbold inquired.

"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. G.o.dbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ...

charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. G.o.dbold."

The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had died away there was silence except where the stream lapped against the barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.

Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed, it remained ultimately unimaginable, this dream-life on the _Naiad_. A pleasant woman in a sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted spinet. It served, however, for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while she played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on the deck and count the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards; then from the silence that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the dewfall, to sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour while the moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their hunting. And as the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall asleep with the knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had ever slept before.

"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be interesting for him."

Guy was thrilled by the notion of visiting Ladingford Manor, which had been one of the great fortresses of romance held against the devastating commercial morality of the Victorian prime with its science and sciolism, and which possessed already some of the fabulous appeal of the medieval songs and tapestries John Lambert had created there. An invitation came presently to walk over any afternoon. Margaret said at first she would not go; but Guy, who was in a condition of excited reverence, declared she must come; and so the three of them set out across a path in the meads that Guy populated with romantic figures of the mid-Victorian days. On this stile Swinburne may have sat; here Burne-Jones may have looked back at the sky; and surely it were reasonable to suppose that Rossetti might have tied up his shoe on this big stone by this brook, even as Guy was tying up his shoe now. Soon they saw a group of elms and the smoke of cl.u.s.tered chimneys; there golden-gray in front of them stood Ladingford Manor.

"There's the sort of stillness of fame about it," Guy whispered.

He wondered if Mrs. Lambert would now resemble at all the famous pictures of her he had seen. And would she talk familiarly of the famous people she had known? They came to the gate, entering the garden along a flagged path on either side of which runnels flowed between borders of trim box. Mrs. Lambert was sitting in a yew parlor under a blue-silk umbrella that was almost a pavilion, and she received them with many comments upon the energy of walking so far on this hot afternoon.

"You would like some beer, I'm sure. There is a bell in that mulberry-tree. If you toll the bell Charlotte will bring you beer."

Guy tolled the bell, and Charlotte arrived with a pewter tray and pewter mugs of beer. Margaret would not be thirsty, but Pauline was afraid of hurting Mrs. Lambert's feelings, and she pretended to drink, lancing blue eyes at Guy over the rim of her mug.

"It's home-brewed beer," said Mrs. Lambert, placidly, and then she leaned back and sighed at the dome of her blue-silk umbrella. She was still very beautiful, and Guy had a sensation that he was sitting at the feet of Helen or Lady Flora the lovely Roman. She was old now, but she wore about her like an aureole the dignity of all those inspirations of famous dead painters.

"Home-brewed beer," Mrs. Lambert repeated, dreamily, and seemed to fall asleep in the past; while in the bee-drowsed yew parlor Pauline, Margaret, and Guy sat watching her. The throat of Sidonia the sorceress was hers; the heavy lids of Hipparchia were hers; the wrist of Ermengarde or Queen Blanche was hers; and the pewter tray on the gra.s.s at her feet held Circe's wine.

Then Mrs. Lambert woke up and asked if they would like to see the house.

"Toll the bell in the mulberry-tree, and Charlotte will come. You must excuse my getting up."

They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there were the tapestries even more beautiful that himself had woven. On the tables were the books John Lambert had printed, which gave positively the aspect of being treasures by the discretion of their external appearance. In other rooms hung the original pictures of hackneyed mezzotints; and how rare they looked now with their velvety pigments of emerald and purple, of orange, cinnabar and scarlet glowing in the tempered sunlight! Margaret, as she moved from room to room, seemed with her weight of dusky hair and fastidious remoteness to belong to the company of lovely women whose romances filled these splendid scenes; but Pauline was life, irradiating with her joy each picture and giving to it the complement of its own still beauty.

"Mrs. Lambert keeps very well, miss," said Charlotte, as they came out again from the house. "But, of course, she doesn't get about much now.

Yet we can't really complain, especially with this fine weather."

"Would you like some more beer?" Mrs. Lambert asked, when they joined her again in the yew parlor.

They said they were no longer thirsty; and, having thanked her for the pleasures of the visit, they left her in the past, returning by the pale-green path across the meadows to where the _Naiad_ lay by the old bridge.

"Oh, I did want some tea," sighed Margaret.

"I love Mrs. Lambert," cried Pauline, dancing through the meads. "Wasn't it touching of her to offer Margaret beer? Oh, Guy, when we're married and when you die and I receive young poets at Plashers Mead, shall I offer their future sisters-in-law home-brewed beer? Oh, but I'm sure I shall forget to offer them anything."

Was there any reason, thought Guy, why Plashers Mead should not become a second Ladingford Manor? Friends long ago took that house together; perhaps Michael Fane would, after all, see the necessity of a second Ladingford Manor and share Plashers Mead with himself and Pauline. After this visit it was impossible to contemplate the prospect of being a schoolmaster; it was impossible to imagine Pauline as a schoolmaster's wife. At all costs their love must be sustained on the pinnacle of romance where now it stood. Margaret would sympathize with his desire to set Pauline in beauty; she, dreading the idea of marrying an Indian engineer, would understand how impossible it was to make Pauline the wife of a schoolmaster. Such a declaration must somehow be avoided. It were better they should wait three years for marriage, five years, fourteen years as Tennyson had waited, rather than that he should make the monstrous surrender he had been so near to making. At least he would put himself and his work to the test, and in a year he would be able to publish his first volume of poems. Perhaps his father would realize then that he deserved to marry Pauline. After all, they were together; there were maddening restrictions, of course, but they were together. This visit to Ladingford Manor must be accepted as an omen to persevere in his original intention; for he had been granted the vision of a perfected beauty, which he knew, by reading the lives of the men who made it, had only been achieved after desperate struggles and disappointments. This enchanted time on the _Naiad_ must be the antic.i.p.ated reward of a tremendous industry when he got back to Wychford. He would no more break the rules and fret at the restrictions made for him and Pauline. Every hour when they were together should henceforth be doubled in the intensity of its capacity for being enjoyed. One thing only he would demand, that in August they should be formally and openly engaged. Otherwise when Autumn came and made it impossible to go on the river, they would be kept to the Rectory; and the few hours of her company he would have must at least be free. He would talk to Margaret about it, so that she might use her influence to procure this favor. Then he would write and tell his father. All would be easy; Ladingford had inspired him. He beheld the visit in retrospect more and more clearly as an exhortation to endure against whatever the world should offer him to betray his ambition. Yet was Pauline the world? No, certainly Pauline had no kinship with the world, and therefore he was the more straitly bound to disregard the voice of material prosperity. She had joked about herself as a Mrs. Lambert of the future; but behind the lightness of her jest had stood confidence in himself and in his fame. Should he imprison that spirit of mirth and fire in the husk of a schoolmaster's wife?

The second week pa.s.sed; the time at Ladingford was over, and early in the morning they must start for the journey of thirty miles down to Oxford. The dapple-gray horse that would tow the barge was already arrived, and now stood munching the long gra.s.s in the shade of the bridge; the swallows were high in the golden air of the afternoon; the long-purples on the banks of the young river seemed to await reproachfully the disturbance of their tranquillity. To-morrow came; the dapple-gray horse was harnessed to the rope; and then slowly, slowly the _Naiad_ glided forward, leaving astern the gray bridge, the long-purples on the bank, and the swallows high in the silver air of the morning.

There was not yet any poignancy of parting; for the spire of Ladingford church remained so long in sight that scarcely did they notice the slow recession; and often, when they thought it was gone, the winding river would show it to them again; and in the end, when really it seemed to have vanished, by standing on the p.o.o.p they could still make out where now it pierced thinly the huge sky. Moreover, the contentment of that imperceptible evanescence and of their dreaming progress down the young Thames was plenary, lulling all regrets for a peace that seemed not yet truly to be lost. The hay in the meadows along the banks was mostly carried, and the cattle were magically fused with the July sunlight, curiously dematerialized like the creatures of a mirage. If a human voice was audible, it was audible deep in the green distance and belonged to the landscape as gently as the murmurous water scalloping the bows. Sometimes, indeed, they would pa.s.s late mowers who leaned upon their scythes and waved good fortune to the journey, but mostly it was all an emptiness of air and gra.s.s.

"If only this young Thames flowed on for ever!" said Guy.

He and Pauline were leaning over the rail of the barge, and Guy felt a sudden impulse to s.n.a.t.c.h at the bank rich in that moment with yellow loosestrife, and by his action arrest for ever the progress of the barge, so that for ever they would stay like the lovers on a Grecian urn.

"And really," Guy went on, as already the banks of yellow loosestrife were become banks of long-purples, "there is no reason why for us in a way this river should not flow on for ever. Dear, everything had seemed so perishable before I found you. Pauline, you don't think I ought to surrender my intention, do you? I mean, you don't think I ought to go away from Plashers Mead?"

Guy went on to tell her about the decision he had taken on the day the visit to Ladingford was arranged.

"But it would have been dreadful to miss this time," Pauline declared.

"Oh, I felt it would be impossible," he agreed. "But even if our marriage is postponed for another year, you do think I ought to stick it out here, don't you? And really, you know, few lovers can have such wonderful hours as the hours we do have."

Easily she rea.s.sured him with her confidence in the rightness of his decision; easily she a.s.suaged the ache of any lingering doubt with the proclamation of that inevitable triumph in the end.

"But we must be engaged openly," said Guy. "You know I shall be twenty-three next month. Do you think we can be engaged properly in August?"

"Mother promised in Spring," said Pauline. "Why don't you talk to her about it? Why don't you talk to her about it now? She loves you to talk to her."

He looked round to where Mrs. Grey was sitting in a deck-chair; evidently by the rhythmic motion of her fingers she was restating to herself a tune which had formerly pleased her, as the barge glided on past a scene that changed perceptibly only in details of flowers and trees, while the great sky and the green hollow land and the blue distances rested immutable. Guy came and sat beside her.

"I've never enjoyed a fortnight so much in my life," he said.

She smiled at him but did not speak, for whatever quartet she was restating had to be finished first. Soon the last noiseless bars played themselves and she turned round to his conversation.

"Mrs. Grey, do you think that Pauline and I can be engaged openly next month? It won't mean, if we are, that I shall be worrying to see her more often. In fact, I'm sure I shall worry less. But I want to tell my father, so that when he comes here he'll be able to see Pauline. He's a conventional sort of man, and I don't think he'd grasp an engagement such as ours is at present. Besides, I want to talk to the Rector, because I feel that now he regards the whole thing as a childish game.

So can it be formal next month?"

Mrs. Grey sat back, so silent that Guy wondered if she had listened to a word he had been saying. He paused for a moment, and then, as she did not reply, he went on:

"I also want to say how sorry I am that I asked Pauline to come into Plashers Mead to say good night to me last month. I didn't realize, until she told me you were angry about it, what a foolish thing I'd done. I don't want you to think that, if we are formally engaged, I shall be doing stupid things like that all the time. Really, Mrs. Grey, I would always be very thoughtful."

"Oh yes," she answered in her nervous way. "Oh yes. I understood it to have been a kind of carelessness. But I had to speak to Pauline about it, because she is so very impulsive. It's the sort of thing I might have done myself when I was a girl. At least, of course, I shouldn't, because the Rector.... Yes ... charming ... charming ... yes ... I really think you might be engaged next month. It's your birthday next month, isn't it?"

"Thank you more than I can thank you," said Guy.

Mrs. Grey waved to Pauline, who drew close.

"Pauline darling, I've thought of such a nice birthday present for Guy ... yes ... charming, charming birthday present ... yes ... for you two to be engaged."

Pauline threw her arms round her mother's neck; and Guy in his happiness noticed at that moment how Margaret was sitting by herself on the p.o.o.p in the stern. He was wrenched by a sudden compunction, and asked Pauline if he should not go and tell Margaret.

"Charming of Guy ... yes ... charming," Mrs. Grey enthusiastically exclaimed. "Now I call that really charming, and Pauline stays with me."