Chapter 3

CHAPTER XIt's a whole month since I wrote a chapter of my book. I don't seem to have had much time lately, although I know we all have all the time there is, as the Bishop reminded the lady who complained that she had not had enough in which to say her prayers!And now it is full spring and the woods are a pageant of flowers, and there is a glory of green over the garden. It is warm like summer and the nights are still, and that wondrous thing called 'Love' has come to me.I wish that I could get its fragrance down and put into my book something of its perfection.My father twinkles at me and says that although I have got in William I., and 'the strong love interest' has turned up, William II. and the fauna of the South Pole have still to be inserted.I think it's difficult to write of love, but Nannie says,—'Oh, no. Just tell about the time you saw him first, and what he said to you, and you to him.'But that first time, in church, he only looked at me, and the second time, out in the woods, I ran away! But two days after that, Aunt Constance had a dinner party, and the Foxhills came, and with them—Michael. I saw that same glow of adoration on his face, and I was afraid to let him see my eyes lest he should catch an answering look in them.After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone.He followed me and said,—'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the right to go since he had asked it.Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in India—of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in the grayness of the wall behind.''I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day—I love you now.'And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman—out in the warm darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India, that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet again. Perhaps—perhaps——'But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.As father and I went home I spoke to him with subtlety and with guile.'Daddy, how old was mother when you married her?''Eighteen. Why, darling?''Just my age now.''Oh, nonsense, Meg, I quite decline to have a grown up daughter, you're only eight!''Have you ever felt it was too young for her to marry.''Never,' said father with great vigour, 'it was just the right age.''Do you believe in love at first sight, daddy?''Why, yes, I think I do in some cases. I loved your mother the moment I saw her, and then there's your friend Dante, little 'un, and——''Then, father, may I marry Captain Ellsley, please?'But my father was not consistent, neither was he humble. He behaved like a man who not only desired the office of a Bishop, but was actually a whole bench of them at that moment, and intended therefore to 'have his children in subjection with all gravity.' He said he'd never in all his life heard anything quite so preposterous, he'd hardly seen the hulking chap (we do not see ourselves as others see us. Michael is an inch and a half shorter than father), never even noticed if he ate with his knife or not, so was it likely that——''But, father, Dante——''Yes, but he didn't marry the girl, as you've often said, Meg.'Thus did I fall into my own pit, and in the net which I had spread for another were my own feet taken. The Bench of Bishops preferred not to discuss the subject further, so I went upstairs to bed in utter desolation, because I couldn't give up Michael even though father was so displeased with me.But when he came upstairs ages afterwards he scratched on my door and said,—'Are you Meg?''Oh, daddy, of course I am.'He came in then. 'How many?' he asked.'Four.''Oh, darling! never in all the years do I remember any tragedy that took more than three, even when you were so worried about "Adam-and-Eve's" family!'He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,—'We can't have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.'So I told him.'Oh, Meg,' he said when I had done, 'so love, that very perfect thing, has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man who will want to take you away to India, my darling?'And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes which I can't understand.'My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.''Whatdoyou mean, daddy.''Perhaps I'll tell you some day, little 'un,' and he sighed and kissed me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love, so I said,—'Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante——''Why, experience, darling,' father said, and came back and kissed me again, smiling with faint amusement.When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time were still waiting in the garden—waiting for Michael. In the bright moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers. Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle, some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with dewdrops and threw in more flowers—daffodils and gorse-blooms (the thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated, round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth, and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and laughed.'It will last till he comes in the morning.'And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie came to wake me she said,—'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'But I knew better!Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops, but found—my father—who remarked later in the day,—'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he—um—seems to know his own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked her.'Now how on earth did father guess that?And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.When I told Ross that I was going to marry Captain Ellsley in the summer, he said coldly,—'Never heard of the chap.''But,' I said, 'you must have heard of him, he's——''You don't meantheEllsley; that man that climbs in the Himalayas?''Yes, I do, Ross.''My hat,' he exclaimed, 'why he might have married anybody,' and then he stared at me as if he had suddenly seen me in quite a new light and put an arm round me and called me 'Jonathan' and said,—'Oh, Meg, I'll have to change into the Indian Army so that I can murder him if he isn't good to you!'Funny old 'David.'CHAPTER XIHere's more than half the summer slipped away. The house has buzzed and overflowed with the boys whom Ross brings home.Every day for eight whole weeks I have been out, riding or walking in the Hickley woods, sometimes with father, many times alone with Michael.I love this man I'm going to marry very deeply, but I wouldn't let him know it. He dislikes 'the truest form of kindness' even more than all my other male things do!Sometimes after a day of delight together he says as he goes home,—'I've hardly seen you, darling.''Why, I've let you stayallday,' I say reproachfully.'Yes, but I haven't really had you; you've eluded me. You drive me mad, Meg, with your little air of cool aloofness.'But what would he? Is a woman to be done out of her wooing because a man chose once to be a caveman and talked of things belonging to him, before he'd even got them? So naturally I tilt my chin a little when he talks like that, and hold out my hand to say good-night, and watch out of the tail of my eye to see how he is liking it! But sometimes it's——''No, I won't standanymore of it to-night.' and then follows that mastering kiss which makes me really his for just that moment, and sends my thoughts and feelings whirling so that I try the harder to elude him afterwards!One day this week I felt unusually romantic, so I read the Sonnets from the Portuguese.'Oh, beautiful, Elizabeth,' I said, 'but simple, when you come to think of it. I'm sure that I could write one just as good, and I love my man every bit as much as you did Robert.'So here is my Maiden Effort and probably my Swan Song:—'At night I think of you, beloved.Dream that I see your face,Fancy I feel you kiss meAs I rest in your embrace.But at the rose glow of morningYou fade like a summer mist,And I wake, and longFor a dream that has gone,For a face that I fancied I kissed.'Of course it is not strictly accurate, for I never have the luck to dream of Michael, 'but aPoet,' I observed as I wrote the last lines down, 'is not expected to be verbally truthful in aPoem.''What, still slinging ink, little 'un?' said father, coming into my room at this point, 'why, you've got a blob on your neck!'And then he picked up this chapter in that impertinent way he has and read it, with his eyes all curled up at the corners.'Might one criticise the poem, Meg?' he asked diffidently.'Oh, do,' I replied, conscious that it was beyond all criticism.'Your "poem,"' he said, getting the word out with difficulty, 'has defective rhymes, darling. "Long" does not rhyme with "gone," nor is the—um—"poem" a sonnet.''But I never said it was, daddy.''No, Meg?''Oh, father,' I said, shaking his arm, 'it would look deliriously beautiful printed on good paper with wide margins and rough edges?'Nannie said, 'You give it to Master Michael, dearie. He'll like it, and as to rhymes, why the stuff your father reads never has any.'So I presented it to Michael, and I had no illusions then as to whether I were kissed or not.Later, at tea, father had just observed that, like the Ephesians, we were 'in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar,' when a telegram was brought to him.'The tone of this household will have to buck up a bit,' he remarked as he read it.'It will after to-morrow,' grinned Charlie Foxhill, 'when Meg's gone, sir.'(For oh, to-morrow is my wedding day, just fancy.)'It's got to buck up before that,' father replied; 'this wire is from the new Bishop of Ligeria, he's coming here this afternoon and wants to stop the night. He'll have to stay on for the wedding, of course.''Oh, daddy,' I exclaimed in great disgust, 'we can't have this Ligerian fossil here to-morrow, it'll spoil everything, besides, there isn't a bed.''He'll have to sleep in his suit-case then, and his chaplain in the lid, Meg; there's no time to put him off, anddotry to behave like 'a clergyman's daughter' while he's here, little 'un! Why, good gracious!'For there was the Bishop of Ligeria, and a livid kind of chaplain who looked like a limp curl-paper, alighting at the front door from a motor-car.Daddy rushed out into the hall and I after him. I wished I had had time to change into something black, as father seemed so anxious to make a good impression on the Bishop, but I managed to part my hair in the middle by the hall glass and I turned the collar of my blouse up instead of down.And then one of those terrible delusions came over me, for I thought father seized the Bishop by the hand and shook it violently, exclaiming,—'Hallo, Porky, what priceless luck.''What about that ten bob, old bean?' said Porky.Then father turned and sawmewith my hair parted down the middle, and thechaplain, partially paralysed with horror.'My daughter, me lud,' he said, and led the Bishop and his attendant into the drawing-room for a belated tea.I got away as soon as I could. I felt I must have quiet to think things out. Is this another delusion, or did father really call a Bishop 'Porky'? Nannie said once that putting the feet in hot water draws the blood from the head and eases mental strain, so I decided to have a bath before dinner.I ran into daddy in the corridor.'Meg, you've torn the lace on your dressing-gown; I told you so yesterday. Why isn't it mended?''Cotton,' I wailed, 'is threepence a reel.''Bad as that, Meg?''Worse, my honoured parent, worse.''Wild oats, Meg?''Sacks.''Debts?'I nodded.'Tell me the uttermost, my erring child.''Fourpence to Nannie, and five and threepence to Ross.'I escaped into the bathroom and slammed the door. I sang a hymn as I bathed; it was that one the children love so, 'Days and Moments Quickly Flying.' I thought it might help to restore the tone of the household.Daddy shoved five and sevenpence under the door with a note to say that a lady in the house was very ill and would I either sing something else, or go in the next street, as that hymn made her nervous, so I chanted (being always anxious to oblige)—'Beer, beer, glorious beer,Drink till you're made of it,Don't be afraid of it,Glorious, glorious beer.'Another note was pushed under the door then to say that the lady was dead now, and the Bishop thought it would be well for me to sign the pledge (enclosed).The Bishop took me into dinner. I behaved just like a clergyman's daughter.'Sorry,' said Michael, suddenly dropping his fish fork, 'but I can't, after all.''Can't what?''Marry the girl, sir.''De'ah me,' said the Bishop, 'this is most distressing, very.''What would your ludship advise,' said father, looking at me hopelessly, 'you see, I can't keep her here either, for the sake of the parish.''There is a home for Decayed Gentlewomen at Putney,' the Bishop began; 'I should be very happy if my vote and influence would be of any help, but I doubt'—he continued surveying me solemnly—'whether they would take her. She is so ah—er—um—soexceedinglydecayed.'After dinner the Bishop nodded in the direction of his chaplain and whispered to me,—'It sings. Most painful. Very.'So of course I asked it to. Aunt Constance accompanied its impassioned wail.'If I should dieTo-night,My friends would look upon my faceWith tears,And kissing me, lay snow-white flowers againstMy hair.Keep not your kisses for my cold,Dead face,But let me feel themNow.'(Unknown author).Father looked round the congregation with a cold eye. He has views about guests.'Thank you very much, Mr Williams. Won't you sing something else?'And Mr Williams went upstairs to get another.'Oh,' sobbed Charlie Foxhill, laying his head down on Ross's shoulder, 'keep not your kisses for my cold——''No one,' my brother giggled, 'can look uponyourfacewithouttears, old thing, but you shall have snow-white flowers all right; here, can you feel them now?' and he shoved a camellia and several wet carnations down Charlie's collar, and the Bishop mopped his eyes and remarked in his best Oxford drawl,—'Such a good chap, really, if he only wouldn't. Top-hole, very.'At nine-thirty father said to Michael, 'You can go away now.''Where, sir.''Anywhere you jolly well like so long as it's far enough. I'm going to take my only daughter for a last walk in the woods. Of course, if you thought it worth while to be at the park gates at ten-thirty to say good-night I might——''If you could make it twenty to eleven I could bear it better,' said Michael, 'it would be ten minutes less——''Ten-thirty isthevery latest, Michael. An hour is as much as I can stand of her myself,' said father firmly, shoving him out into the hall.'Oh, daddy,' I giggled, as we wandered out into the summer night, 'I haven't laughed so much for years.Whois Porky, and why and when did you bet him ten bob?''He was my fag at Eton, Meg, and I bet him ten bob he'd never be a Bishop.''Have you paid him yet?''I've given him six and tenpence on account, little 'un. Why, he's only a colonial.''Oh, daddy! you really are a poppet; you're much too nice to be a parson; whatever made you want to go into the Church?''I didn't want to, Meg. He made me.''What, that man, the Bishop of Ligeria?''No,The Man, the Bishop of my soul, darling.''Oh, father!''Didn't you know that I was once going into the army, Meg? It seemed to me then, as now, the only conceivable thing to do, as the Fotheringhams have always been soldiers. But I found that HE had other views about it, and I had to chuck it up at the last minute. My father was so furious with me that he chucked me out.''Oh, daddy!''And I have felt lately that there is something else I am required to do, and I don't want to do it. Sometimes I think that this pleasant Devonshire life is not the one to which I am to be allowed to 'settle down.''And yet you like Him, father?''And yet I "like Him," Meg, but, oh, I really don't think I can let you be married in the morning. I shall have to get Porky to say the bit of the service that really matters, for I shall be tempted to leave it out.'And although father laughed as he said it, yet, from the struggle in his face, I seemed to understand suddenly that my marriage was for him only another 'bit of harness' which had been 'hewn' away. But why?'Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.''How interesting,' I said.'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.''Oh, really?''And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'—(butwillit?)—'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me,and thenthe mountains for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart.No, there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young men, I mayevengo up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all depends!'Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by the gate, but Michael'sthenunveiled my eyes. I understood all in a moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men—his bride. The cottage and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?—less than the rust that never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally conducted) to his bride—his two young men—his mountains—his honeymoon—his Paradiso.But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's tour!'All is over, Captain Ellsley.''No, it has not yet begun, Meg.''Oh, Michael! Oh,please, Michael.''And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of your own accord, just once, my darling?'And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the poorer. He might not have written hisInfernoor said:—'My wifeOf savage temper, more than aught besideHath to this evil brought me.'What?Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I willnotbe reproved for ignorance of Dante by—the General Public.FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'CHAPTER XIIAt other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now—though the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly. I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty ofthisthing I know about. For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all.For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as that old home.When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless, magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,—'You can't send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.'But there was something in the quality of his kiss that frightened me, something almost ruthless in the finality of the words, so that I fled away upstairs in wild rebellion, because the summer's dalliance was over. I might elude the man no more. I must say like all the other women,—'Meet, if thou require itBoth demands,Laying flesh and spiritIn thy hands.'Oh, if it only might be 'to-morrow, not to-night,' and when to-morrow came? why then again—to-morrow. Thus Mother Eve passed on to me that fear which caught her once when she, perhaps, was walking in the garden.I went over to my window and leaned out. The sleeping world lay at my feet. I looked across the cliffs to where the quiet beauty of the sky met the wide splendour of the sea, and the great moon flooded the water, luring me to adventure out upon that rippling, shining pathway, which seemed to lead to God.And as I looked I realised that all the natural world responded always to the natural laws, and, because of that obedience, there was that restfulness and harmony that had always soothed and quietened me, and the old 'washed' feeling came and swept away rebellion. So—when that time came that Michael shut the door, and there was no one in the room but him and me—he found 'duty' waiting, and that primeval fear that Eve passed down the ages to her daughter.I suppose some of my thoughts were painted in my face, for I saw all that was dogged and ruthless in the man rise up—directed against himself, not me. I watched him beat down and back that ache and longing that was in his eyes when he came in, till there was nothing left but a vast, comprehending tenderness and the strength to wait, until such time as that frightened look had passed from his ladye's eyes.And in the quiet shelter of his arms I listened to the very perfect things he chose to say. That by reason of the 'worship' he had sworn to give me, there could be no 'demands,' only a lovely gift most urgently desired if I could give a thing, so priceless, willingly.And then at something wistful in his face, my love rose up and cast out fear—that craven thing. And there was a little kiss upon my husband's lips, so small and light, he hardly knew it there till it had gone—that little first one that I ever gave him 'of my own accord.' He took my hands and with the worship deepening in his eyes he asked,—'Is my beloved mine?'There flashed into my mind those words which, I suppose, express most fully the completeness and the glory and perfection of our human love, and which convey, so perfectly, the utter rest and peace and sweet contentment which both should find in marriage, when they love.So I leaned against my husband and he stooped to hear the whispered words,—'I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me.'So I gave. And in the old surrender of the woman to the man's exultant mastery, I, too, found love's consummation—and lo!—there was bread and wine—a chalice and a sacrament.I have been married, really, such a very little while, yet in these fifteen months in India I have learned that sometimes women do not give ungrudgingly—that people speak and write of marriage as if its sweet abandonment were a thing of which to be ashamed. But if it were, would Christ have used it as a type of that other union—mystic and wonderful—between His Church and Him?And so it seems to me that first should come the 'marriage of the minds.' If he 'demands' and she gives grudgingly or of necessity, or with regret, as if for something spoiled—they too are 'wasteful' and have 'cheapened Paradise.' They have not discerned the Sacrament, but have'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wineWhich, spent with due respective thriftHad made brutes men, and men divine.'And, by the way, I'm sure it's time I got in all those other bits I know about. Those poor birds of the South Pole, still waiting on the ice for me to bring them fame! And then that other king, but oh! he was so dull. He missed the best of everything in life: for William II., 1087, never married; and so of course he never knew what we shall know in four more weeks, that 'A child's kiss, set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad.'And when the labour and the travail are all done, and my baby rests in my arms, I shall have more 'experience.' I shall be linked up with all the other mothers of the world. Oh, dare I say it? Humbly I do. I shall be linked up, faintly and far off, even with Mary.PART IIFOUR YEARS LATERCHAPTER I'I start life on my own account and don't like it.'Grammar is not my strong point, and I never could quote correctly, but my geography is hopeless. I always remember, however, when I am at sea that the earth revolves around the sun, and on its axis, too, for I can feel the double motion in every fibre of my being.Now that I am once more on dry land and the universe has ceased to rock I have gone back to my childish and comfortable belief that the world is a nice, firm, square thing fixed on four legs like a dining-room table.I really am a shocking sailor, though 'the Gidger'[#]—my small daughter—loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me, yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the chance of being saved. One great advantage ofmal de meris that all other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all forgotten—swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps take a little iced champagne, 'for my stomach's sake,' like poor darling Timothy.[#]Rethe nick-name Gidger, the first 'G' is pronounced as in Gideon and the second 'g' as in German.Over four whole years of life I've 'drawn a veil,' and, oh, so much has happened since I finished the last chapter.I've got to know my husband, that's one thing. A woman never really knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village used to say 'the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,' and she ought to know, she was 'thrice widowed.'So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive, old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people about 'work' and 'duty'; and because he never had a sister (and a mother only for an hour), he's rather apt to think any woman who powders her nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious, natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the social hall and said to her friend,—'Say, Sadie, why didn't you tell me I'd got a nose like a headlight?'And his expression! when I told him thatof courseI had the same things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn't powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on thicker than they need.Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands. Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But now. he says 'two in a family can't talk, there aren't enough words to go round.' So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly positive yet how much less I like him.One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the lover struggling in his face.'Oh, Meg, I'm going, so I shan't miss it after all, but howcanI leave you?'Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men's souls has driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed with a burning desire that men's bodies should be clean and their souls washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly unable to comprehend 'the church passive,' or to see why a man can't shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used to say, 'Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.' I have sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things 'farther than my nose,' whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did not contain an element of truth,i.e.'that the chaps in the pews are more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if they know he's a good shot and rides as straight as they do.'But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy's bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that mediæval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on their churches) says 'Emily's parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!'At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the godly bird forhisdiocese, but there was that in his eyes which made her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now like the parrot, 'continually given to all good works together!The paralytic chaplain's health has given out. The strain of one of the annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay those 'snow-white flowers' against his hair! And talking of England reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France.Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat. He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.When I got to Tilbury I was limper than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'damp rag hung over the back of a chair.' I don't know what I should have done without the dear little stewardess to pack for me, and Captain Everard to help me and the Gidger through the customs, and all the other nightmare horrors of a landing in England in war time. I suppose I said I was 'British' when the Aliens Officer asked me my nationality, but I felt like a disembowelled spirit. (No, I don't mean disembodied!) Captain Everard could not come to London with me, but got me a corner seat in a carriage with only three men in it, nice chaps in the Pioneers, one of whom Captain Everard knew slightly.

CHAPTER X

It's a whole month since I wrote a chapter of my book. I don't seem to have had much time lately, although I know we all have all the time there is, as the Bishop reminded the lady who complained that she had not had enough in which to say her prayers!

And now it is full spring and the woods are a pageant of flowers, and there is a glory of green over the garden. It is warm like summer and the nights are still, and that wondrous thing called 'Love' has come to me.

I wish that I could get its fragrance down and put into my book something of its perfection.

My father twinkles at me and says that although I have got in William I., and 'the strong love interest' has turned up, William II. and the fauna of the South Pole have still to be inserted.

I think it's difficult to write of love, but Nannie says,—

'Oh, no. Just tell about the time you saw him first, and what he said to you, and you to him.'

But that first time, in church, he only looked at me, and the second time, out in the woods, I ran away! But two days after that, Aunt Constance had a dinner party, and the Foxhills came, and with them—Michael. I saw that same glow of adoration on his face, and I was afraid to let him see my eyes lest he should catch an answering look in them.

After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone.

He followed me and said,—

'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'

It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the right to go since he had asked it.

Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in India—of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'

And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in the grayness of the wall behind.'

'I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day—I love you now.'

And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman—out in the warm darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India, that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet again. Perhaps—perhaps——'

But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.

It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.

As father and I went home I spoke to him with subtlety and with guile.

'Daddy, how old was mother when you married her?'

'Eighteen. Why, darling?'

'Just my age now.'

'Oh, nonsense, Meg, I quite decline to have a grown up daughter, you're only eight!'

'Have you ever felt it was too young for her to marry.'

'Never,' said father with great vigour, 'it was just the right age.'

'Do you believe in love at first sight, daddy?'

'Why, yes, I think I do in some cases. I loved your mother the moment I saw her, and then there's your friend Dante, little 'un, and——'

'Then, father, may I marry Captain Ellsley, please?'

But my father was not consistent, neither was he humble. He behaved like a man who not only desired the office of a Bishop, but was actually a whole bench of them at that moment, and intended therefore to 'have his children in subjection with all gravity.' He said he'd never in all his life heard anything quite so preposterous, he'd hardly seen the hulking chap (we do not see ourselves as others see us. Michael is an inch and a half shorter than father), never even noticed if he ate with his knife or not, so was it likely that——'

'But, father, Dante——'

'Yes, but he didn't marry the girl, as you've often said, Meg.'

Thus did I fall into my own pit, and in the net which I had spread for another were my own feet taken. The Bench of Bishops preferred not to discuss the subject further, so I went upstairs to bed in utter desolation, because I couldn't give up Michael even though father was so displeased with me.

But when he came upstairs ages afterwards he scratched on my door and said,—

'Are you Meg?'

'Oh, daddy, of course I am.'

He came in then. 'How many?' he asked.

'Four.'

'Oh, darling! never in all the years do I remember any tragedy that took more than three, even when you were so worried about "Adam-and-Eve's" family!'

He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,—

'We can't have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.'

So I told him.

'Oh, Meg,' he said when I had done, 'so love, that very perfect thing, has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man who will want to take you away to India, my darling?'

And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes which I can't understand.

'My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.'

'Whatdoyou mean, daddy.'

'Perhaps I'll tell you some day, little 'un,' and he sighed and kissed me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love, so I said,—

'Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante——'

'Why, experience, darling,' father said, and came back and kissed me again, smiling with faint amusement.

When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time were still waiting in the garden—waiting for Michael. In the bright moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.

'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers. Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle, some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with dewdrops and threw in more flowers—daffodils and gorse-blooms (the thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated, round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth, and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and laughed.

'It will last till he comes in the morning.'

And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie came to wake me she said,—

'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'

But I knew better!

Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops, but found—my father—who remarked later in the day,—

'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he—um—seems to know his own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked her.'

Now how on earth did father guess that?

And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.

When I told Ross that I was going to marry Captain Ellsley in the summer, he said coldly,—

'Never heard of the chap.'

'But,' I said, 'you must have heard of him, he's——'

'You don't meantheEllsley; that man that climbs in the Himalayas?'

'Yes, I do, Ross.'

'My hat,' he exclaimed, 'why he might have married anybody,' and then he stared at me as if he had suddenly seen me in quite a new light and put an arm round me and called me 'Jonathan' and said,—

'Oh, Meg, I'll have to change into the Indian Army so that I can murder him if he isn't good to you!'

Funny old 'David.'

CHAPTER XI

Here's more than half the summer slipped away. The house has buzzed and overflowed with the boys whom Ross brings home.

Every day for eight whole weeks I have been out, riding or walking in the Hickley woods, sometimes with father, many times alone with Michael.

I love this man I'm going to marry very deeply, but I wouldn't let him know it. He dislikes 'the truest form of kindness' even more than all my other male things do!

Sometimes after a day of delight together he says as he goes home,—

'I've hardly seen you, darling.'

'Why, I've let you stayallday,' I say reproachfully.

'Yes, but I haven't really had you; you've eluded me. You drive me mad, Meg, with your little air of cool aloofness.'

But what would he? Is a woman to be done out of her wooing because a man chose once to be a caveman and talked of things belonging to him, before he'd even got them? So naturally I tilt my chin a little when he talks like that, and hold out my hand to say good-night, and watch out of the tail of my eye to see how he is liking it! But sometimes it's——'

'No, I won't standanymore of it to-night.' and then follows that mastering kiss which makes me really his for just that moment, and sends my thoughts and feelings whirling so that I try the harder to elude him afterwards!

One day this week I felt unusually romantic, so I read the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

'Oh, beautiful, Elizabeth,' I said, 'but simple, when you come to think of it. I'm sure that I could write one just as good, and I love my man every bit as much as you did Robert.'

So here is my Maiden Effort and probably my Swan Song:—

'At night I think of you, beloved.Dream that I see your face,Fancy I feel you kiss meAs I rest in your embrace.But at the rose glow of morningYou fade like a summer mist,And I wake, and longFor a dream that has gone,For a face that I fancied I kissed.'

'At night I think of you, beloved.

Dream that I see your face,

Fancy I feel you kiss me

As I rest in your embrace.

But at the rose glow of morning

You fade like a summer mist,

And I wake, and long

For a dream that has gone,

For a face that I fancied I kissed.'

Of course it is not strictly accurate, for I never have the luck to dream of Michael, 'but aPoet,' I observed as I wrote the last lines down, 'is not expected to be verbally truthful in aPoem.'

'What, still slinging ink, little 'un?' said father, coming into my room at this point, 'why, you've got a blob on your neck!'

And then he picked up this chapter in that impertinent way he has and read it, with his eyes all curled up at the corners.

'Might one criticise the poem, Meg?' he asked diffidently.

'Oh, do,' I replied, conscious that it was beyond all criticism.

'Your "poem,"' he said, getting the word out with difficulty, 'has defective rhymes, darling. "Long" does not rhyme with "gone," nor is the—um—"poem" a sonnet.'

'But I never said it was, daddy.'

'No, Meg?'

'Oh, father,' I said, shaking his arm, 'it would look deliriously beautiful printed on good paper with wide margins and rough edges?'

Nannie said, 'You give it to Master Michael, dearie. He'll like it, and as to rhymes, why the stuff your father reads never has any.'

So I presented it to Michael, and I had no illusions then as to whether I were kissed or not.

Later, at tea, father had just observed that, like the Ephesians, we were 'in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar,' when a telegram was brought to him.

'The tone of this household will have to buck up a bit,' he remarked as he read it.

'It will after to-morrow,' grinned Charlie Foxhill, 'when Meg's gone, sir.'

(For oh, to-morrow is my wedding day, just fancy.)

'It's got to buck up before that,' father replied; 'this wire is from the new Bishop of Ligeria, he's coming here this afternoon and wants to stop the night. He'll have to stay on for the wedding, of course.'

'Oh, daddy,' I exclaimed in great disgust, 'we can't have this Ligerian fossil here to-morrow, it'll spoil everything, besides, there isn't a bed.'

'He'll have to sleep in his suit-case then, and his chaplain in the lid, Meg; there's no time to put him off, anddotry to behave like 'a clergyman's daughter' while he's here, little 'un! Why, good gracious!'

For there was the Bishop of Ligeria, and a livid kind of chaplain who looked like a limp curl-paper, alighting at the front door from a motor-car.

Daddy rushed out into the hall and I after him. I wished I had had time to change into something black, as father seemed so anxious to make a good impression on the Bishop, but I managed to part my hair in the middle by the hall glass and I turned the collar of my blouse up instead of down.

And then one of those terrible delusions came over me, for I thought father seized the Bishop by the hand and shook it violently, exclaiming,—

'Hallo, Porky, what priceless luck.'

'What about that ten bob, old bean?' said Porky.

Then father turned and sawmewith my hair parted down the middle, and thechaplain, partially paralysed with horror.

'My daughter, me lud,' he said, and led the Bishop and his attendant into the drawing-room for a belated tea.

I got away as soon as I could. I felt I must have quiet to think things out. Is this another delusion, or did father really call a Bishop 'Porky'? Nannie said once that putting the feet in hot water draws the blood from the head and eases mental strain, so I decided to have a bath before dinner.

I ran into daddy in the corridor.

'Meg, you've torn the lace on your dressing-gown; I told you so yesterday. Why isn't it mended?'

'Cotton,' I wailed, 'is threepence a reel.'

'Bad as that, Meg?'

'Worse, my honoured parent, worse.'

'Wild oats, Meg?'

'Sacks.'

'Debts?'

I nodded.

'Tell me the uttermost, my erring child.'

'Fourpence to Nannie, and five and threepence to Ross.'

I escaped into the bathroom and slammed the door. I sang a hymn as I bathed; it was that one the children love so, 'Days and Moments Quickly Flying.' I thought it might help to restore the tone of the household.

Daddy shoved five and sevenpence under the door with a note to say that a lady in the house was very ill and would I either sing something else, or go in the next street, as that hymn made her nervous, so I chanted (being always anxious to oblige)—

'Beer, beer, glorious beer,Drink till you're made of it,Don't be afraid of it,Glorious, glorious beer.'

'Beer, beer, glorious beer,

Drink till you're made of it,

Don't be afraid of it,

Glorious, glorious beer.'

Another note was pushed under the door then to say that the lady was dead now, and the Bishop thought it would be well for me to sign the pledge (enclosed).

The Bishop took me into dinner. I behaved just like a clergyman's daughter.

'Sorry,' said Michael, suddenly dropping his fish fork, 'but I can't, after all.'

'Can't what?'

'Marry the girl, sir.'

'De'ah me,' said the Bishop, 'this is most distressing, very.'

'What would your ludship advise,' said father, looking at me hopelessly, 'you see, I can't keep her here either, for the sake of the parish.'

'There is a home for Decayed Gentlewomen at Putney,' the Bishop began; 'I should be very happy if my vote and influence would be of any help, but I doubt'—he continued surveying me solemnly—'whether they would take her. She is so ah—er—um—soexceedinglydecayed.'

After dinner the Bishop nodded in the direction of his chaplain and whispered to me,—

'It sings. Most painful. Very.'

So of course I asked it to. Aunt Constance accompanied its impassioned wail.

'If I should dieTo-night,My friends would look upon my faceWith tears,And kissing me, lay snow-white flowers againstMy hair.Keep not your kisses for my cold,Dead face,But let me feel themNow.'(Unknown author).

'If I should die

To-night,

My friends would look upon my face

With tears,

And kissing me, lay snow-white flowers against

My hair.

Keep not your kisses for my cold,

Dead face,

But let me feel them

Now.'(Unknown author).

Now.'

(Unknown author).

Father looked round the congregation with a cold eye. He has views about guests.

'Thank you very much, Mr Williams. Won't you sing something else?'

And Mr Williams went upstairs to get another.

'Oh,' sobbed Charlie Foxhill, laying his head down on Ross's shoulder, 'keep not your kisses for my cold——'

'No one,' my brother giggled, 'can look uponyourfacewithouttears, old thing, but you shall have snow-white flowers all right; here, can you feel them now?' and he shoved a camellia and several wet carnations down Charlie's collar, and the Bishop mopped his eyes and remarked in his best Oxford drawl,—

'Such a good chap, really, if he only wouldn't. Top-hole, very.'

At nine-thirty father said to Michael, 'You can go away now.'

'Where, sir.'

'Anywhere you jolly well like so long as it's far enough. I'm going to take my only daughter for a last walk in the woods. Of course, if you thought it worth while to be at the park gates at ten-thirty to say good-night I might——'

'If you could make it twenty to eleven I could bear it better,' said Michael, 'it would be ten minutes less——'

'Ten-thirty isthevery latest, Michael. An hour is as much as I can stand of her myself,' said father firmly, shoving him out into the hall.

'Oh, daddy,' I giggled, as we wandered out into the summer night, 'I haven't laughed so much for years.Whois Porky, and why and when did you bet him ten bob?'

'He was my fag at Eton, Meg, and I bet him ten bob he'd never be a Bishop.'

'Have you paid him yet?'

'I've given him six and tenpence on account, little 'un. Why, he's only a colonial.'

'Oh, daddy! you really are a poppet; you're much too nice to be a parson; whatever made you want to go into the Church?'

'I didn't want to, Meg. He made me.'

'What, that man, the Bishop of Ligeria?'

'No,The Man, the Bishop of my soul, darling.'

'Oh, father!'

'Didn't you know that I was once going into the army, Meg? It seemed to me then, as now, the only conceivable thing to do, as the Fotheringhams have always been soldiers. But I found that HE had other views about it, and I had to chuck it up at the last minute. My father was so furious with me that he chucked me out.'

'Oh, daddy!'

'And I have felt lately that there is something else I am required to do, and I don't want to do it. Sometimes I think that this pleasant Devonshire life is not the one to which I am to be allowed to 'settle down.'

'And yet you like Him, father?'

'And yet I "like Him," Meg, but, oh, I really don't think I can let you be married in the morning. I shall have to get Porky to say the bit of the service that really matters, for I shall be tempted to leave it out.'

And although father laughed as he said it, yet, from the struggle in his face, I seemed to understand suddenly that my marriage was for him only another 'bit of harness' which had been 'hewn' away. But why?'

Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.

'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.'

'How interesting,' I said.

'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.'

'Oh, really?'

'And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'—(butwillit?)—'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me,and thenthe mountains for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'

You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart.No, there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young men, I mayevengo up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all depends!'

Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by the gate, but Michael'sthenunveiled my eyes. I understood all in a moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men—his bride. The cottage and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?—less than the rust that never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally conducted) to his bride—his two young men—his mountains—his honeymoon—his Paradiso.

But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's tour!

'All is over, Captain Ellsley.'

'No, it has not yet begun, Meg.'

'Oh, Michael! Oh,please, Michael.'

'And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of your own accord, just once, my darling?'

And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the poorer. He might not have written hisInfernoor said:—

'My wifeOf savage temper, more than aught besideHath to this evil brought me.'

'My wife

Of savage temper, more than aught beside

Hath to this evil brought me.'

What?

Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I willnotbe reproved for ignorance of Dante by—the General Public.

FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER

'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'

CHAPTER XII

At other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now—though the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly. I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty ofthisthing I know about. For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all.

For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as that old home.

When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless, magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,—

'You can't send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.'

But there was something in the quality of his kiss that frightened me, something almost ruthless in the finality of the words, so that I fled away upstairs in wild rebellion, because the summer's dalliance was over. I might elude the man no more. I must say like all the other women,—

'Meet, if thou require itBoth demands,Laying flesh and spiritIn thy hands.'

'Meet, if thou require it

Both demands,

Laying flesh and spirit

In thy hands.'

Oh, if it only might be 'to-morrow, not to-night,' and when to-morrow came? why then again—to-morrow. Thus Mother Eve passed on to me that fear which caught her once when she, perhaps, was walking in the garden.

I went over to my window and leaned out. The sleeping world lay at my feet. I looked across the cliffs to where the quiet beauty of the sky met the wide splendour of the sea, and the great moon flooded the water, luring me to adventure out upon that rippling, shining pathway, which seemed to lead to God.

And as I looked I realised that all the natural world responded always to the natural laws, and, because of that obedience, there was that restfulness and harmony that had always soothed and quietened me, and the old 'washed' feeling came and swept away rebellion. So—when that time came that Michael shut the door, and there was no one in the room but him and me—he found 'duty' waiting, and that primeval fear that Eve passed down the ages to her daughter.

I suppose some of my thoughts were painted in my face, for I saw all that was dogged and ruthless in the man rise up—directed against himself, not me. I watched him beat down and back that ache and longing that was in his eyes when he came in, till there was nothing left but a vast, comprehending tenderness and the strength to wait, until such time as that frightened look had passed from his ladye's eyes.

And in the quiet shelter of his arms I listened to the very perfect things he chose to say. That by reason of the 'worship' he had sworn to give me, there could be no 'demands,' only a lovely gift most urgently desired if I could give a thing, so priceless, willingly.

And then at something wistful in his face, my love rose up and cast out fear—that craven thing. And there was a little kiss upon my husband's lips, so small and light, he hardly knew it there till it had gone—that little first one that I ever gave him 'of my own accord.' He took my hands and with the worship deepening in his eyes he asked,—

'Is my beloved mine?'

There flashed into my mind those words which, I suppose, express most fully the completeness and the glory and perfection of our human love, and which convey, so perfectly, the utter rest and peace and sweet contentment which both should find in marriage, when they love.

So I leaned against my husband and he stooped to hear the whispered words,—

'I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me.'

So I gave. And in the old surrender of the woman to the man's exultant mastery, I, too, found love's consummation—and lo!—there was bread and wine—a chalice and a sacrament.

I have been married, really, such a very little while, yet in these fifteen months in India I have learned that sometimes women do not give ungrudgingly—that people speak and write of marriage as if its sweet abandonment were a thing of which to be ashamed. But if it were, would Christ have used it as a type of that other union—mystic and wonderful—between His Church and Him?

And so it seems to me that first should come the 'marriage of the minds.' If he 'demands' and she gives grudgingly or of necessity, or with regret, as if for something spoiled—they too are 'wasteful' and have 'cheapened Paradise.' They have not discerned the Sacrament, but have

'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wineWhich, spent with due respective thriftHad made brutes men, and men divine.'

'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wine

Which, spent with due respective thrift

Had made brutes men, and men divine.'

And, by the way, I'm sure it's time I got in all those other bits I know about. Those poor birds of the South Pole, still waiting on the ice for me to bring them fame! And then that other king, but oh! he was so dull. He missed the best of everything in life: for William II., 1087, never married; and so of course he never knew what we shall know in four more weeks, that 'A child's kiss, set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad.'

And when the labour and the travail are all done, and my baby rests in my arms, I shall have more 'experience.' I shall be linked up with all the other mothers of the world. Oh, dare I say it? Humbly I do. I shall be linked up, faintly and far off, even with Mary.

PART II

FOUR YEARS LATER

CHAPTER I

'I start life on my own account and don't like it.'

Grammar is not my strong point, and I never could quote correctly, but my geography is hopeless. I always remember, however, when I am at sea that the earth revolves around the sun, and on its axis, too, for I can feel the double motion in every fibre of my being.

Now that I am once more on dry land and the universe has ceased to rock I have gone back to my childish and comfortable belief that the world is a nice, firm, square thing fixed on four legs like a dining-room table.

I really am a shocking sailor, though 'the Gidger'[#]—my small daughter—loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me, yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the chance of being saved. One great advantage ofmal de meris that all other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all forgotten—swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps take a little iced champagne, 'for my stomach's sake,' like poor darling Timothy.

[#]Rethe nick-name Gidger, the first 'G' is pronounced as in Gideon and the second 'g' as in German.

Over four whole years of life I've 'drawn a veil,' and, oh, so much has happened since I finished the last chapter.

I've got to know my husband, that's one thing. A woman never really knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village used to say 'the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,' and she ought to know, she was 'thrice widowed.'

So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive, old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people about 'work' and 'duty'; and because he never had a sister (and a mother only for an hour), he's rather apt to think any woman who powders her nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious, natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the social hall and said to her friend,—

'Say, Sadie, why didn't you tell me I'd got a nose like a headlight?'

And his expression! when I told him thatof courseI had the same things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn't powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on thicker than they need.

Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands. Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But now. he says 'two in a family can't talk, there aren't enough words to go round.' So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly positive yet how much less I like him.

One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the lover struggling in his face.

'Oh, Meg, I'm going, so I shan't miss it after all, but howcanI leave you?'

Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men's souls has driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed with a burning desire that men's bodies should be clean and their souls washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly unable to comprehend 'the church passive,' or to see why a man can't shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used to say, 'Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.' I have sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things 'farther than my nose,' whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did not contain an element of truth,i.e.'that the chaps in the pews are more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if they know he's a good shot and rides as straight as they do.'

But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy's bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that mediæval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on their churches) says 'Emily's parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!'

At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the godly bird forhisdiocese, but there was that in his eyes which made her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now like the parrot, 'continually given to all good works together!

The paralytic chaplain's health has given out. The strain of one of the annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay those 'snow-white flowers' against his hair! And talking of England reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France.

Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat. He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.

When I got to Tilbury I was limper than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'damp rag hung over the back of a chair.' I don't know what I should have done without the dear little stewardess to pack for me, and Captain Everard to help me and the Gidger through the customs, and all the other nightmare horrors of a landing in England in war time. I suppose I said I was 'British' when the Aliens Officer asked me my nationality, but I felt like a disembowelled spirit. (No, I don't mean disembodied!) Captain Everard could not come to London with me, but got me a corner seat in a carriage with only three men in it, nice chaps in the Pioneers, one of whom Captain Everard knew slightly.

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