Plashers Mead Part 36

"Oh, but Guy...."

"To-night," he said. "You promise?"

"Guy, if I dare, if I dare."

There were footsteps in the pa.s.sage. He fled across the room, kissed her momentarily and hurried out, saying good-by to the cousins, as he pa.s.sed them, with a kind of exultant affection.

Outside, the November night hung humid and oppressive; Guy, looking up, felt rain falling softly yet with gathering intensity, and he lingered a few moments in the drive, held by the whispering blackness. Behind him the lamplight of the Rectory windows seemed for the moment sad and unattainable and gave him the fancy he was drifting away from a friendly sh.o.r.e. Then suddenly he marched away along the drive, content; for the thought of "to-night," which latterly had often brought such a presentiment of loneliness, now sounded upon his imagination like the rapture of a nightingale.

Plashers Mead had never appeared so desirable as now, when it was the prelude to such an enterprise as this of consecrating with a last embrace the rain and gloom of November. If he had any hesitation about the lightness or even, setting probity aside, about the prudence of such an action, he justified himself with romantic reasons; and if he was driven by conscience to an ultimate defense, he justified himself with the exceptional circ.u.mstances that gave him a sanction to accept from Pauline this sacrifice of her traditions. Impulses to consider what he was doing were easily dismissed; indeed, before he reached his house there was not one left. Inside, the warmth and comfort of Plashers Mead were additional incentives to prosecute his resolve; every gleaming book, the breathing of the dog upon the mat before the fire, the gentle purr of the lamp, all seemed to demand that voluptuous renunciation which would later urge him forth again into the night. That it would probably be raining was not to prove an obstacle; Pauline would be more sure to come if she thought he were standing outside in the rain. It was a second Eve of St. Agnes; and Guy went across to his shelf and took down Keats. He had come to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, when there was a knock at the front door, and his mind leaped to the thought that Pauline might have sent a note by Birdwood to prevent his coming to-night. The knock sounded again, and as Miss Peasey was evidently too deeply immersed in _The Pilgrim's Progress_, her vespertine lectionary, to pay heed to visitors at this hour of nine o'clock, he must go down and open the door himself.

"Are we disturbing you?"

It was the voice of Brydone, and with Willsher in his wake he came into the hall.

"Charlie and I have made several shots to find you in, but, of course, we know you're a busy man nowadays."

"Go on up-stairs, will you?" said Guy, making a tremendous effort to appear hospitable. "I'll dig out the whisky."

He went along and shouted in Miss Peasey's ear what was wanted. She looked up as if it were Apollyon himself come to affront her holy abstraction.

"I think there's some left from that bottle we got in August.... I shall lay it on the mat," she told him.

Guy nodded encouragingly and went up-stairs to join his guests.

"Well, I suppose you'll be soon having a missus in charge here," said Brydone, heartily.

Willsher hummed "Bachelor Boys" as a contributory echo of the question.

"Oh no; we're not getting married at once, you know," Guy explained.

"Well, you're quite right," Brydone declared, heartily. "After all, being close at hand like this, you're not much likely to draw a blank in the lottery."

"Marriage is a lottery, isn't it?" said Guy, with polite sarcasm.

"Rather," sighed Willsher. "Terrific!"

"I suppose I shall have to be looking round preparatory to getting married in two or three years' time," Brydone added. "Well, you see, after Christmas I shall be thinking about my finals, and then I'm going to come in as the old man's partner. Country people like it best if a doctor's married. No doubt about that, is there, Charlie?"

The solicitor's son agreed it was indubitable.

"Of course, if I had the cash to hang on in Harley Street for ten years as a specialist, it would be another matter. But I can't, so there it is."

Even this fellow had his dreams, Guy thought; even he would make acquaintance with thwarted ambitions.

"Been doing anything with a rod lately?" asked Willsher, whose pastime, when he could not be standing in action on the river's bank, was always to steer a conversation in the direction of anglers' gossip.

"No, not lately," said Guy, "though I knocked down a lot of apples with one last month."

"Ha-ha, that's good!" Brydone e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "That's very good, Hazlewood.

That's good, isn't it, Charlie?"

"Awfully good," agreed the angler.

Their appreciation seemed perfectly genuine, and Guy was touched by the readiness of them to be entertained by his lame wit.

"I mustn't forget to tell the old man that," Brydone chuckled. "He's always digging at me over the fish. Done anything with a rod lately? I knocked down a lot of apples last month. Your governor will like that, Charlie!"

Guy heard the clink of a tray deposited cautiously on the floor of the pa.s.sage outside. He allowed Miss Peasey time to retreat before he opened the door, because it was one of the clauses in her charter that she was never, as a lady housekeeper, to be asked to bring a tray into a room when any one but Guy was present. He hoped that after they had drunk his visitors would depart; but, alas! the unintended charm of his conversation seemed likely to prolong their stay.

"Rabelais," Brydone read slowly, as he saw the volumes on the shelves.

"That's a bit thick, isn't it?"

"In quant.i.ty or quality, do you mean?" asked Guy.

"I've heard that's the thickest book ever written," said Brydone.

"Do you read old French easily?" asked Guy.

"Oh, it's in old French, is it?" said Brydone, in a disappointed voice.

"That would biff me."

A silence fell upon the room, a silence that seemed to symbolize the "biffing" of the doctor's son by old French. Willsher took the opportunity to steer the conversation back to fish, and ten o'clock struck in the middle of an argument between him and his friend over the merits of two artificial flies. Guy must be on the Rectory lawn by eleven o'clock, and he began to be anxious, so animated was the discussion, about the departure of these well-meaning intruders. He did not want to plunge straight from their company into the glorious darkness that would hold Pauline; and he eyed the volume of Keats lying face downward on the table, hoping he would be allowed to come back to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, while he thought with a thrill of the moment when he should be able to read:

And they are gone; ay, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm.

"If you can't get a chub any other way, you can sometimes get him with a bit of bacon," Willsher was saying. "And I know a fellow who caught one of those whoppers under Marston's Mill with a cherry. Fact, I a.s.sure you."

"I know a man at Oldbridge who caught a four-pounder with a b.u.mblebee."

"I caught a six-pounder at Oxford with a mouse's head myself," Guy declared.

The friends looked at him in the admiration and envy with which anglers welcome a pleasant, companionable sort of lie. It was a bad move, for it seemed as if by that lie he had drawn closer the bonds of sympathy between himself and his guests. They visibly warmed to his company, for Brydone at once invited himself to another "tot" and was obviously settling down to a compet.i.tive talk about big fish; while Willsher's first shyness turned to familiarity, so completely indeed that he asked if Guy would mind his moving the furniture in order to try to explain to that fathead Brydone the exact promontory of the Greenrush where he had caught thirty trout in an hour when the mayfly was up two years ago.

Half past ten struck from the church tower, and Guy became desperate.

There was nothing he hated so much as asking people to go, which was one reason why he always discouraged them at the beginning; but it really seemed as if he must bring himself to the point of asking Brydone and Willsher to leave him to his work. He decided to allow them until a quarter to eleven. The minutes dragged along, and when the quarter sounded Guy said he was sorry, but that he was very much afraid he would have to work now.

"Right oh," said Brydone. "We'll tootle off." But it took ten minutes to get them out of the house, and when at last they disappeared into the mazy garden Guy was in a fume of anxiety about his tryst. He could not now go round by Rectory Lane, as he had intended at first. No doubt Brydone and Willsher would stay talking half an hour on the bridge, for the rain had stopped and they had given the impression of having the night before them. In fact, Brydone had once definitely announced that the night was still young. Yet in a way the fact of their nearness and of his having to avoid them added a zest to the adventure.

How dark it was and how heavily the trees dripped in the orchard! Guy pulled the canoe from the shed and dragged it squeaking over the wet gra.s.s; not even he in the exaltation of the moment was going to swim the h.e.l.lespont.

When he was in the canoe and driving it with silent strokes along the straight black stream; when the lantern was put out and the darkness was at first so thick that like the water it seemed to resist the sweep of his paddle, Guy could no longer imagine that Pauline would venture out.

He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to long for rain to fall as if it would rea.s.sure him that nature in such an annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes, grown accustomed to the darkness, discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church, and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory paddock. He was wet to the knees, and his feet, sagging in the gra.s.s, seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling.

Guy was too early when he crept over the lawn, for there were still lights in all the upper windows, and he withdrew to the plantation, where he waited in rapt patience while the branches dripped and pattered, dripped and pattered ceaselessly. One by one the lights had faded out, but still he must not signal to Pauline. How should he, after all, make known to her his presence on that dark lawn? Scarcely would she perceive from her window his shadowy form. He must not even whisper; he must not strike a match. Suddenly a light crossed his vision, and he started violently before he realized that it was only a glow-worm moving with laborious progress along the damp edge of the lawn. Black indeed was the hour when a glow-worm belated on this drear night of the year's decline could so alarm him. For a while he watched the creeping phosph.o.r.escence and wondered at it in kindly fellowship, thinking how like it was to a human lover, so small and solitary in this gigantic gloom. Then he began to pick it up and, as it moved across his hand and gave it with the wan fire a ghostly semblance, he resolved to signal with this lamp to Pauline.

Midnight crashed its tale from the belfry, and nowhere in the long house was there any light. There was nothing now in the world but himself and this glow-worm wandering across his hand. He moved nearer to the house and stood beneath Pauline's window; surely she was leaning out; surely that was her shadow tremulous on the insp.i.s.sate air. Guy waved, and the pale light moving to and fro seemed to exact an answer, for something fell at his feet, and by the glow-worm's melancholy radiance he read "_now_" on a piece of paper. Gratefully he set the insect down to vanish upon its own amorous path into the murk. Not a tree quivered, not a raindrop slipped from a blade of gra.s.s, but Guy held out his arms to clasp his long-awaited Pauline. The "now" prolonged its duration into hours, it seemed; and then when she did come she was in his arms before he knew by her step or by the rustle of her dress that she was coming.

She was in his arms as though like a moth she had floated upon a flower.