Plashers Mead Part 38

Pauline had made up her mind, if possible, to avoid a meeting with Michael, but on Monday she relented, and they were introduced to each other. The colloquy on that turquoise morning, when the earth smelled fresh and the gra.s.s in the orchard was so vernally green, did not help Pauline to know much about Michael Fane, save that he was not so tall as Guy, and that somehow he gave the impression of regarding life more like a portrait by Vandyck than a human being. He was cold, she settled, and she, as usual shy and blushful, could only have seemed stupid to him.

That afternoon, when the disturbing friend had gone, Pauline and Guy went for a walk.

"He admired you tremendously."

"Did he?" she made listless answer.

"He said you were a fairy's child, and he also said you really were a wild rose."

"What an exaggerated way of talking about somebody whom he has seen for only a moment."

"Pauline," said Guy, affectionately rallying her, "aren't you being rather naughty--rather wilful, really? Didn't you like Michael?"

"Guy, you can't expect me to know whether I liked him in a minute. He made me feel shyer than even most people do."

"Well, let's talk about the book instead," said Guy, "What color shall the binding be?"

"What color did he suggest?"

"I see you're determined to be horrid about my poor, harmless Michael."

"Well, why must he be brought down like this to approve of your book?"

"Oh, he has good taste, and besides he's interested in you and me."

"What did you tell him about us?" Pauline asked, sharply.

"Nothing, my dearest, nothing," said Guy, flinging his stick for Bob to chase over the furrows. "At least," he added, turning and looking down at her with eyebrows arched in pretended despair of her unreasonableness, "I expect I bored him to death with singing your praises."

Still Pauline could not feel charitable, and still she could not smile at Guy.

"Ah, my rose," he said, tenderly. "Why will you droop? Why will you care about people who cannot matter to us? My own Pauline, can't you see that I called in a third person because I dare not trust myself now. All the day long, all the night long you are my care. I'm so dreadfully anxious to justify myself; I long for a.s.surance at every step; once I was self-confident, but I can't be self-confident any longer. Success is no responsibility in itself, but now...."

"It's my responsibility," cried Pauline, melting to him. "Oh, forgive me for being jealous. Darling boy, it's just my foolish ignorance that makes me jealous of some one who can give you more than I."

"But no one can!" he vowed. "I only asked Michael's advice because you are too kind a judge. My success is of such desperate importance to us two. What would it have mattered before I met you? Now my failure would.... Oh, Pauline, failure is too horrible to think of!"

"As if you could fail," she chided, gently. "And if you did fail, I would almost be glad, because I would love you all the more."

"Pauline, would you?"

"Ah no, I wouldn't," she whispered. "Because I could not love you more than I do now."

The dog, with a sigh, dropped his stick; he was become accustomed to these interludes.

"Bob gives us up as hopeless," Guy laughed.

"I'm not a bit sympathetic, you jealous dog," she said. "Because you have your master all day long."

The next time Guy came to the Rectory he brought with him the ma.n.u.script, so that Pauline could seal it for luck; and they sat in the nursery while Guy, for the last enumeration, turned over the pages one by one.

"It represents so much," he said, "and it looks so little. My father will be rather surprised. I told him I should wait another year. I wonder if I ought to have waited."

"Oh no," said Pauline. "Everything else is waiting and waiting. It makes me so happy to think of these pages flying away like birds."

"I hope they won't be like homing-pigeons," said Guy. "It will be rather a blow if William Worrall rejects them."

"Oh, but how could he be so foolish?"

"I don't think he will, really," said Guy. "After all, a good many people have indorsed the first half, and I'm positive that what I've written here is better than that. I rather wish I'd finished the Eclogues, though. Do you think perhaps I'd better wait, after all?"

"Oh no, Guy, don't wait."

So, very solicitously the poems were wrapped up, and when they were tied and sealed and the parcel lay addressed upon the table, Mrs. Grey with Monica and Margaret came in. They were so sympathetic about the possible adventures in sight for that parcel, and Guy was so much his rather self-conscious self, that the original relation between him and the family seemed perfectly restored. Pauline was glad to belong to them, and in her pride of Guy's achievement she basked in their simple affection, thrilling to every word or look or gesture that confirmed her desire of the cherished accord between Guy and the others.

"Now I'm sure you'd both like to go and post Guy's poems," Mrs. Grey exclaimed. "Yes ... charming ... to go and post them yourselves."

Pauline waited anxiously for a moment, because of late Guy had often seemed impatient of these permissions granted to him by her mother, but this afternoon he was himself and full of the shy grat.i.tude that made her wonder if indeed nearly a year could have flown by since their love had been declared. Dusk was falling when they reached the post-office.

"Will you register it, Mr. Hazlewood?" asked the post-mistress.

Guy nodded, and the parcel left their hands; in silence they watched it vanish into the company of other parcels that carried so much less; then back they came through the twilight to tea at the Rectory, both feeling as if the first really important step towards marriage had been taken.

"You see," said Guy, "if only these poems of mine are well received, my father must acknowledge my right to be here, and if he once admits that, what barrier can there be to our wedding?"

Pauline told him how much during the last month the distant prospect of their marriage had begun to weigh upon her, but now since that parcel had been left at the post-office, she said she would always talk of their wedding because that was such a much less remote word than marriage.

"Come out to-night," said Guy, suddenly.

She put her hand on his arm.

"Guy, don't ask me again."

He was penitent at once, and full of promises never to ask her again to do anything that might cause an instant's remorse. They had reached the hall of the Rectory, and in the shadows Pauline held him to her heart, suddenly caught in the flood of tenderness that a wife might have for a husband to whose faults she could be indulgent by the measure of his greater virtues kept, as it might be, for her alone.

JANUARY

Guy, as soon as he had sent off the poems to a publisher, was much less violently driven by the stress of love, which latterly had urged him along so wayward a course. He began to acquire a perspective and to lose some of that desperately clinging reliance upon present joys. The need of battling against an uncertain future had brought him to the pitch of madness at the thought of the hours of Pauline's company that must be wasted; but now when to his sanguine hopes marriage presented itself as at last within sight, sometimes even seeming as close as the Fall of this new year, he was anxious to set Pauline upon more tranquil waters, lest she too should like himself be the prey of wild imaginations that might destroy utterly one untempered by any except the gentler emotions of a secluded life. Her mother and sisters, whom he had come to regard as hostile interpreters of convention, took on again their old features of kindliness and grace; and he was able to see without jealous torments how reasonable their att.i.tude had been throughout; nay, more than reasonable, how unworldly and n.o.ble-hearted it had been in confiding Pauline to the care of one who had so few pretensions to deserve her. He upbraided himself for having by his selfishness involved Pauline in the complexities of regrets for having done something against her judgment; and in this dreary rain of January, free from the burden of uncompleted labor, he now felt a more light-hearted a.s.surance than he had known since the beginning of their love.

Bills came in by every post, but their ability to vex him had vanished in the promise his ma.n.u.script gave of a speedy defeat of all material difficulties. The reaction from the strain of decking his poems with the final touches that were to precede the trial of public judgment gave place to dreams. A dozen times Guy followed the ma.n.u.script step by step of its journey from the moment the insentient mail-cart carried it away from Wychford to the moment when Mr. William Worrall threw a first casual glance to where it lay waiting for his perusal on the desk in the Covent Garden office. Guy saw the office-boy send off the formal post-card of acknowledgment that he had already received; and in his dream he rather pitied the youth for his unconsciousness of what a treasure he was acknowledging merely in the ordinary routine of a morning's work. Perhaps the packet would lie unopened for two or three days--in fact, probably Mr. Worrall might not yet have resumed work, as they say, after a short Christmas vacation. Moreover, when he came back to business, although at Guy's request for sponsors the poems had been vouched for by one or two reputed friends of the publisher with whom he was acquainted; he would no doubt still be inclined to postpone their examination. Then one morning he would almost inadvertently cut the string and glance idly at a page, and then....

At this point the author's mental visions varied. Sometimes Worrall would be so deeply transfixed by the revelation of a new planet swimming into ken that he would sit spellbound at his own good fortune, not emerging from a trance of delight until he sent a telegram inviting the poet to come post-haste to town and discuss terms. In other dreams the publisher would distrust his own judgment and take the ma.n.u.script under his arm to a critic of taste, anxiously watching his face and, as an expression of admiration gradually diffused itself, knowing that his own wild surmise had been true. There were many other variations of the first reception of the poems, but they all ended in the expenditure of sixpence on a telegram. Here the dream would amplify itself; and proofs, binding, paper, danced before Guy's vision; while soon afterwards the first reviews were coming in. At this stage the poet's triumph a.s.sumed a hundred shapes and diversities, and ultimately he could never decide between a leader on his work in _The Times_ headed A NEW GENIUS or an eulogy on the princ.i.p.al page of _The Daily Mail_ that galloped neck and neck for a column alongside one of The Letters of an Englishman. The former would bestow the greater honor; the latter would be more profitable; therefore in moments of unbridled optimism he was apt to allot both proclamations to his fortune. With such an inauguration of fame the rest was easy dreaming. His father would take a train to Shipcot on the same morning; if he read _The Times_ at breakfast he would catch the eleven o'clock from Galton and, traveling by way of Basingstoke, reach Shipcot by half past two. Practically one might dream that before tea he would have settled 300 a year on his son, so that the pleasant news could be announced to the Rectory that very afternoon.

In that case he and Pauline could be married in April; and actually on her twenty-first birthday she would be his wife. They would not go to the Campagna this year, because these bills must be paid, unless his father, in an access of pride due to his having bought several more eulogies at bookstalls along the line, offered to pay all debts up to the day of his wedding; in which case they could go to the Campagna: