Plashers Mead Part 44

"I've always been to Confession," Pauline answered, coldly.

In a flash Guy visualized her religious life as one long creeping towards a gloomy Confessional, where lurked a smooth-faced priest who poured his poison into her ears.

"You shall go no more," he vowed. "What right have you to drag the holiness of love in the mud of a priest's mind?"

"You don't know how stupidly you're talking," said Pauline. "You say I exaggerate. You don't know how much you are exaggerating. You don't understand."

"I thought you wanted me to have faith! How can I have faith when I hear of priests degrading our love? What right had you to go to a priest?

What does he know of you or me? What has he suffered? What does he understand? Why do you listen to him and pay no heed to me? What did you say?"

Pauline looked at him in silence.

"What did you say?" he repeated, angrily. He was caring for nothing at that moment but to tear from her the history of the scene that made a furnace of his brain. "He must have tried to put the idea into your head that you've been doing wrong. I say you have done nothing wrong. I suppose you told him you came out at night with me on the river, and I suppose he concluded from that.... Oh, Pauline, I cannot let you be a prey to the mind of a priest. You don't realize what it means to me. You don't realise the raging jealousy it rouses."

"Guy," she moaned, "love is too much for me. I can't bear the uncertainty. Your debts ... the sending back of your poems ... the fear that we shall never be married ... the doubts ... the thought that I've deceived my family ... the misery I bring to you because I can't think everything is right...."

"I don't want you always to agree with me. I've promised never to ask you again to come out with me at night. I'll even promise never to kiss you again until we are married. But you must promise me never again to go to Confession."

"I can't give up what I believe is right," she said.

"Then I won't give up what I believe is right."

He strained her to him and kissed her lips so closely that they were white instead of red. Then he went from her in an impulse to let her, if she would, break off the engagement. If he had stayed he must have blasphemed the religion which was soiling with its murk their love. He must have hurt her so deeply that he would have compelled her to bid him never come back. It was for her now, the responsibility of going on, and she should find what religion would do for her when she was left alone to battle with the infamous suggestions the fiction was giving to her mind. She should find that beside his love religion was nothing, that the folly would topple down and betray her at this very moment. When next he saw her, she would have forgotten her priests and their mummery; she would think only of him and live only for him.

"Blow, you d.a.m.ned wind," he shouted to the brilliant and tranquil March day. "Blow, blow, can't you? You've blown all these days, and now when I want you in my face you lie still."

But the weather stayed serene, and Guy had to run in order to tire the fury in his mind. He did not stop until he realized by the scampering of the March hares to right and left of his path how very absurd he must appear even to the blind heavens.

"Why," he exclaimed, suddenly standing still and addressing a thorn-tree on the green down. "Why, of course, now I realize the Reformation!"

This sudden apprehension of a tremendous historical fact was rather disconcerting in the way it brought home to him the uselessness of all the information that he had for years absorbed without any real response of recognition. It brought home to him how much he would have to discover for himself and appalled him with the mockery it made of his confidence hitherto. How if all those poems he had written were merely external emotion like his conception of religion until this moment? He really hoped the ma.n.u.script would come back this evening from whatever publisher had last eyed it disdainfully, so that in the light of this revelation of his youthfulness he could judge his life's achievement afresh. It was indeed frightening that in one moment all his comfortable standards could be struck away from beneath his feet, for if an outburst of jealousy on account of a priest's interference could suddenly reshape his conception of history, what fundamental changes in his conception of art might not be waiting for him a little way ahead?

The spectacle of Pauline's simple creed had hitherto pleasantly affected his senses; and she had taken her place with the heroines of romantic poets and painters. It had been pleasant to murmur:

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, Think but one thought of me up in the stars:

and to compare himself with the lover of The Blessed Damozel had been a luxurious melancholy. Pauline and he had worshiped together in chapels of Lyonesse, where, if he had knelt beside her with a rather tender condescension towards her prayers, he had always been moved sincerely by the decorative appeal they made to him. He had felt a sentimental awe of her hushed approach to the altar, and he had derived a kind of sentimental satisfaction from the perfection of her att.i.tude, perhaps, even more, he had placed upon it a sentimental reliance. Her faith had been the decorative adjunct of a great deal of his verse, and he flushed hotly to remember lines that now appeared as d.a.m.nable insincerities with which he had allowed his pen to play. All that piety of hers he had sung so prettily was real and possessed an intrinsic power to injure him, so that what he had patronized and encouraged could rise up and pit itself deliberately against him. Pauline actually believed in her religion, believed in it to the extent of dishonoring their love to appease the mumbo-jumbo. That something so monstrously inexistent could have any such power was barely comprehensible, and yet here he was faced with what easily might prove to be a force powerful enough to annihilate their love. He remembered how in reading of Christina Rossetti's renunciation of a lover who did not believe as she believed, he had thought of the incident as a poet's exaggeration. And it might well have happened. Now, indeed, he could see why she was so much the greatest poetess of them all; her faith had been real. Lines from that Sonnet of sonnets came back to him, broken lines but full of dread:

I love ... G.o.d the most; Would lose not Him but you, must one be lost:

And if Pauline should speak so to him, if Pauline should disown him at the bidding of her phantom G.o.ds? How the thought swept into oblivion all his pitiful achievement, all his fretful emotions set down in rhyme.

Either he must convince her that she was affrighted by vain fancies or he must bow before this reality of belief and seek humbly the truth where she discovered it. Yet if he took that course it held no pledge of faith for him. Shamefacedly and scarcely able to bear even the thorn-tree's presence, Guy knelt down and prayed that he might be given Pauline's single heart. The song of the innumerable larks rose into the crystalline, but all the prayers tumbled down from that stuffy pavilion of sky. The moment that the first emotional aspiration was thus defeated Guy was only conscious of his lapse into superst.i.tion, and, furious with the surrender, he went walking over the downs in a determination to shake Pauline's faith at whatever the cost temporarily to the beautiful appearance of their love.

He wrote that evening in a fine frenzy of declamation against G.o.d, affirming in his verse the rights of man; but on reading the lines through next morning they seemed like the first vapors of adolescence; and when he turned for consolation to Sh.e.l.ley he found that even a great poet's rage on behalf of man against G.o.d was often turgid enough. It was, however, a hopeful sign that he could still perceive what puddles these aerial fountains of song often left behind them, and he was glad to find that not all the value of critical experience had been destroyed by the imperative need to readjust his values of reality.

Birdwood brought a note from Pauline just when Guy had burned his effusion of the night before and come to the conclusion that as a polemical and atheistic rhymester he was of the very poorest quality.

The gardener was inclined to be chatty, and when the weather and the dowers in season had been discussed at length, he observed that Miss Pauline was not looking so well as she ought to look.

"You'll have to speak to her about it, Mr. Hazlenut."

Birdwood had never learned to give Guy his proper name, and there had been many jokes between him and Pauline about this, and many vows by Guy that one day he would address the gardener as Birdseed. How far away such foolish little jokes were seeming now.

"It's been a tiring Spring," said Guy. "The east wind...."

"Her cheeks isn't nothing like so rosy as they was," said the gardener.

"You'll excuse the liberty I'm taking in mentioning them, but having known Miss Pauline since she couldn't walk.... Why I happen to mention it is that there was a certain somebody up in the town who pa.s.sed the remark to me and, I having to give him a piece of my mind pretty sharp on account of him talking so free, it sort of stuck in my memory and....

You don't think she's middling?"

"Oh no, I think she's quite well," said Guy.

"Well, as long as you aren't worrited, I don't suppose I've got any call to be worrited; only any one can't help it a bit when they see witches'

cheeks on a young lady. She certainly does look middling, but maybe, as you say, it is this unnatural east wind."

Birdwood touched his cap and retired, but his words had struck at Guy remorsefully while he walked away to a corner of the orchard reading Pauline's letter. The starlings were piping a sweet monotony of Spring, and daffodils, that he and she had planted last Summer when they came back from Ladingford, haunted his path.

MY DARLING,--Why haven't you been to see me this morning? Why weren't you in the orchard? I stayed such a long while in the churchyard, but you never came. If I said anything yesterday that hurt your feelings, forgive me. You mustn't think that I was angry with you because perhaps I spoke angrily. Darling, darling Guy, I adore you so, and nothing else but you matters to my happiness. I should not have spoken about religion-- I don't know how we came to argue about it. It was unkind of me to be depressed and sad when my dearest was sad. Truly, truly I am so anxious about your poems only because I want you to be happy. Sometimes I must seem selfish, but you know that before anything it is your work I think of. I'm not really a bit worried about our being married. I have these fits of depression which are really very wrong. I'm not worried about anything really, only I had a dream about you last month which frightened me. Oh, Guy, come this afternoon and tell me you're not angry. I promise you that I won't make you miserable with my stupid depression. Guy, if I could only tell you how I love you. If you only knew how never, never for an instant do I care for anything but your happiness. You don't really want me to give up believing in anything, do you? It doesn't really make you angry, does it? Come and tell me this afternoon that you've forgiven

Your PAULINE.

I love you. I love you.

Gently the daffodils swayed in this light breeze of dying March, and the gra.s.s was already tall enough to sigh forth its transitory Summer tune.

Guy, in a flood of penitence, hastened at once to the Rectory to accuse himself to Pauline, and when he saw her watching for him at the nursery window he had no regrets that could stab to wound him as deeply as he deserved to be wounded. She was very tender and still that afternoon, and as he held her in his arms there seemed to him nothing more worth while in life than her cherishing. For them sitting in that nursery the hours swung lazily to and fro in felicity, and all the time there was n.o.body to disturb the reconciliation. They talked only of the future and allowed recent despairs and foreboding agitations to slink away disgraced. Janet, coming to take away the tea-things, beamed at their happiness and through a filigree of bare jasmine twigs the slanting sun touched with new life the faded wall-paper, opening wider, it seemed, the daisies' eyes, mellowing the berries, and tinting the birds with brighter plumes for their immutable and immemorial courtship.

Plunged deep in such a peace, Guy, prompted by d.a.m.nable discord, asked idly what had been that dream of which Pauline had spoken in her letter.

She was unwilling for a long while to tell him, but he, spurred on by mischief itself, persuaded her in the end, and she recounted that experience of waking to find herself p.r.o.ne upon the floor of her room.

"No wonder you're looking pale," he exclaimed. "Now you see the result of exciting yourself unnecessarily."

"But it was so vivid," she protested, "and really the light was blinding, and it thought so terribly all the time."

"I shall think very terribly that you've been reading some spiritualistic rot in a novel," said Guy, "if you talk like that. Your religion may be true, but I'm quite sure these conjuring tricks of your fancy are a sign of hysteria. And this poor speck that was me? How did you know it was me if it was a speck? Did that think, too? My foolish Pauline, you encouraged your morbid ideas when you were awake, and when you were asleep you paid the penalty."

She had gone away from him and was standing by the window.

"Guy, if you talk like that, it means you don't really love me. It means you have no sympathy, that you're cold and cruel and cynical."

He sighed with elaborate compa.s.sion for her state of mind.

"And what else? I wonder how you ever managed to fall in love with me."

"Sometimes I wonder, too," she said, slowly.

He turned quickly and went out of the room.

Guy regretted before he was half-way down the pa.s.sage what he had done, but he steeled himself against going back by persuading himself that Pauline's hysteria must be remorselessly checked. All the way back to Plashers Mead he had excuses for his behavior, and all the way he was wondering if he had done right. Supposing that she were to persist in this exaggeration of everything, who could say into what extravagance of att.i.tude she might not find herself driven? Rage seized him against this malady that was sapping the foundations of their love, and all his affection for her was obscured in the contemplation of that overwrought Pauline who sacrificed herself to baseless doubts and alarms. If he once admitted her right to dream ridiculously about him, he would be encouraging her upon the road to madness. Had she not already fondled the notion of going mad, just as she would often fondle the picture of himself as the heroine of an unhappy love-affair? If he were severe now, she would surely come to see the absurdity of these religious fears, this heart-searching and morbid sensitiveness. It was curious that he was able to keep his idea of Pauline herself quite apart from Pauline as the subject of nervous depression. He was practically ascribing to her a double personality, so distinct were this two views of her in his mind.

When he got home he found the ma.n.u.script had been sent back by a seventh publisher, and on top of the packet lay a letter from his friend Comeragh.