He saw matters with rather more reasonable eyes when he awoke after six hours of very refreshing sleep—more than his poor mother had during the whole night. He saw that all that passionate longing for her which had taken possession of him in the early night was of no effect. He could not possibly have her with him inside twenty-four hours, as was his desire.
In the new light that came to him he saw a good many things. He saw that there were such elements as delicacy and decency which were highly respected by all respectable young women, and that in his case the amalgamation of the two meant delay. Was she a girl, he asked himself, who would be likely to fall in love with such a fellow as he? He could not bring himself to answer this question without a certain sinking at heart. All the conceit had been knocked out of him with the broadening of the light of day. He no longer felt himself to be a conqueror. The brazen bucklers of the Trojan heroes were not for him. He felt that he was not brave enough even to be a suitor. He feared her eyes—they were beautiful eyes, but they were capable of expressing a pretty fair amount of derision when occasion arose, and he could not imagine them wearing any other expression when he thought of his standing before her and asking her if she would consent to love him.
What chance would he or any other man have with that particular girl? Even if she were well disposed in regard to him, what would that amount to in the face of the experience which had been hers? Had she not had enough experience of men, and of marrying, to last her for some time at any rate, if not for the rest of her life? And was he, Jack Wingfield, the sort of man who would tempt that girl into a second adventure? In spite of his recent successes—at tennis and in his own Augean dairy—he had not got out of his old habit of thinking slightingly of himself and the possibility of his reaching to any high level of attainment. What he had achieved the day before he had achieved through her. He placed it to her credit without any reservation—he did not deduct even the customary commission which should have accrued to him as an agent.
And when she had shown herself to be strong enough to make him do all that he had done, was she likely to be weak enough to listen to his prayer?
All this form of reflection was very disheartening to him. He was a very different man indeed from the one who had taken part in those fancy flights on the terrace before the dawn, when he had put his cheek down to that cushion where he had pictured her head to be lying.
“Lord, what a bounder!” was the thought that came to him from that reflection now.
In the course of his reflections he did not even get so far as his mother had gone, when she had thought that, let the worst come to the worst—the best to the best was how he would have put it—a full year was bound to pass before he could have her with him. There was no need for him to draw upon so distant a source of uneasiness when there were so many others to supply him close at hand.
His mother never came down to breakfast, but he invariably went to her room to bid her good morning. He thought that now she looked at him narrowly, and he had an intuition that by some means she had come to know of his late hours on the terrace, so like a sensible man, who confesses when he knows he has been found out, he said cheerily:
“I had rather a bad night. I went out upon the terrace when you left me, and, by George! it was dawn—almost daylight—before I got to bed.”
“That was very foolish of you, Jack,” said she. “But I suppose you were thinking about—about—something of importance.”
“That was it,” he assented, with the glibness of the accomplished liar, though he was not a liar but only a lover. “That was it: I was wondering if I had not been a bit too hasty with Verrall. Perhaps I should give him another chance. Well, well; a chap doesn’t like starting life at home by kicking out a man who has been about the place for so long as Verrall has been. Oh, yes; I had a lot to think over. Well, wish me luck.”
“Wish you luck, dear—how?” said the mother.
“How? Don’t you know that I am down to play some giants to-day, and won’t you wish your little Jack—Jack the giant killer—the best of luck?”
“With all my heart—with all my heart—the best of good luck,” said she, and he kissed her, and went away whistling like a successful dissembler.
And then there happened the best thing that could befall a man who is inclined to be weak-kneed and who stands in great need of a stiffening. Mr. Dunning, the agent whom he had taken over from the trustees when he had entered into possession of the estate, had had things his own way for something like eleven years; there had been no voice of authority but his own on the estate, and the result of two or three interviews which he had with Mr. Jack Wingfield had been of so pleasing a character that he felt that his voice would continue to give the word of command from the Dan of Dington at one end of the property to the Beersheba of Little Gaddlingworth at the other. He had communicated his estimate of young Wingfield to his enquiring wife by a shrewd shake of the head and a smile. He thought precious little of this young Wingfield.
He was therefore all the more surprised when he received a visit the previous day from Farmer Verrall, whom he had installed at the home farm, to acquaint him with the fact that young Mr. Wingfield had practically kicked him out of the place. Mr. Dunning felt that it would never do for him to stand such an insult from a fellow who was nothing more than the owner of the property. He saw clearly that now was the time for him to strike. If he were to submit to such high-handed action without protest he should have no end of trouble in the future. The owner might even go so far as to exercise some authority over his estate. Yes, he would show this young man what was his place.
He scarcely waited for young Wingfield to bid him good morning.
“Good morning. What’s this I hear about Verrall?” he said, all in a breath.
“What’s what you hear about Verrall?” said young Wingfield, after a pause.
“This about his being turned out of his farm at a moment’s notice?”
And then young Wingfield took the measure of his visitor, and saw with great clearness what was the object of his visit.
“Look here, Mr. Dunning,” he said, “if you know all about the matter, it seems hardly necessary for you to bother yourself coming to ask me about it?”
“Mr. Wingfield, I’m not accustomed to be treated in this cavalier fashion,” cried the agent. “I think an explanation is due to me.”
“Of course an explanation is due to you, Mr. Dunning. I was about to send you a message asking you when it would be convenient for you to drop in on me.”
“It would have been much better if you had sent for me in the first instance.” Mr. Dunning’s tone was now one of forgiveness, tempered by reproof. “So far as I can gather, you told Verrall to turn out of his farm, neck and crop. That was a bit high-handed, and not just the thing that one might expect, considering that you have scarcely found your feet on the property, Mr. Wingfield. The tenants are not accustomed to such high-handed treatment, and I must say that neither am I, Mr. Wingfield.”
“I place myself in your hands, Mr. Dunning,” said Jack. “You see, I’m new to this sort of thing, and you are not. What am I to do in the future?”
And then Mr. Dunning felt that his little plan had succeeded. Firmness—there was nothing like firmness with chaps like young Wingfield. Give them to understand at the outset that you’ll stand no dam nonsense. That was what he felt, and he spoke in the spirit of his philosophy.
“You don’t know the mischief you may do—the difficulties that you may place in my way,” he said. “In future you must leave these things to me. In case you see anything that you think needs explanation, just acquaint me with what you think should be done, and I’ll consider it.”
“That will be very kind of you, Mr. Dunning,” said young Wingfield. “Well, I may as well begin now. What I think should be done is to get a couple of first-class men from a first-class London accountant’s office to come down here on Monday and go over all the books of the estate—all the books, mind you; the farm books in particular. I suppose that although you haven’t been near the farm for the past eighteen months yourself, you know all about the expenditure, and will be able to say if it was I who paid for the feed of those greyhounds of Verrall’s and what has been done with the milk of that splendid herd of cows that I saw at the farm. The game books and the timber books will be gone through carefully by the accountants with me sitting at one side and you at the other, Mr. Dunning. Now I have acquainted you with my intentions as you told me I should, and I’ve no doubt that we’ll get on all right together in the future.”
“What do you mean, sir?” cried the agent. “Do you mean to suggest that I—that I—I have fallen under your suspicion? Do you suspect that I—I——”
“Good Lord! Is it me—suspect—suspect—you? Mr. Dunning, you have risen too early—you can’t be quite awake yet.”
“I think that your remarks can bear but one construction, Mr. Wingfield. They suggest that you have unworthy suspicions in regard to my integrity.”
“You never were further mistaken in your life, Mr. Dunning. All I suspect is your capacity. One of the most important of the farms has been vacant for over three years because you refused to allow a man who understood his business a year’s grace to carry out a scheme which a little consideration by a competent person would have shown to be a first-rate one. That meant some thousands of pounds out of my pocket, and you have shown your incapacity to judge character by allowing Verrall to have a free hand with the home farm, though he wasn’t a tenant but a paid manager. Wherever I go I see evidence of carelessness and incapacity.”
“I did not come here to be insulted, Mr. Wingfield.”
“No, you came here to do the insulting, Mr. Dunning. You came here thinking to browbeat me—assuming that I was a juggins—a juggins, Mr. Dunning—in other words, a mug. I saw what you thought of me the day you pretended to set before me the principles of the management of the property. But all the same I took a note of those matters which you waved your hands over, telling me that they were not in my line—that I should not understand them. I daresay I led you on to think poorly of me, Mr. Dunning, and to put your tongue in your cheek when I had gone out of your office and you were alone with your clerk; but though I may have been a juggins at heart I wasn’t one at head, you must know. Now will you stay and have some breakfast?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Wingfield. I must consider my position, after what you have said to me; I feel that it is necessary in justice to myself to consider my position. I should be very unwilling to resign the position of trust in which I was placed on the death of your grandfather.”
“I don’t doubt it, Mr. Dunning. Pray don’t let anything that I have said lead you to believe that I fail to appreciate how highly you value your position. I have expressed myself badly if I have said anything that suggested that to you. I think that Bacon and Tiddy are good enough accountants for my purpose; but I know that Farside, Kelly and Ransome have a big name for estate work. What do you think?”
“I shall have to consider my position, Mr. Wingfield. I shall have to do so very seriously.”
“I will give you till to-morrow morning to consider it. If I don’t hear from you by the morning I will conclude that you have sent me in your resignation, and act accordingly. Six months’ notice, I suppose? But of course you will go into the books with the accountants.”
“I shall have to consider that point seriously also. I wish a couple of strangers luck if they try to make anything out of the books without me.”
“Oh, you will not desert me—I think I know better of you than to fancy that, Mr. Dunning. You must know what impression would be produced if you were to clear off at such a time.”
“Sir, my position in the county—your grandfather—he was high sheriff that year—he headed the subscription list for the presentation to my father.”
“That was before I was born. Somebody told me that your father’s name was in the county family list. I daresay the Dunnings were a power in the land when the Wingfields were making money in the West Indies. You are still a power in the land, Mr. Dunning, and you’ll let me know by the first post to-morrow without fail.” Mr. Dunning went forth into the sunshine without a word. He had an impression of awaking from a singular dream. He scarcely knew how he came to be outside the house which he had entered so jauntily half an hour before. He now felt not jaunty, but dazed—queer. He could not understand how he had left the house without saying what he had meant to say. He had meant to be very plain with that young Wingfield and to give him to understand once and for all what were their relative positions, but he had had no notion that it would be necessary for him to take the extreme step of threatening to resign. He had really no wish to resign. His position as agent of the Wingfield estates was worth something over a thousand a year to him, but what was he not worth to the property? Of course, juggins though that young Wingfield was, he had still sense enough to recognize the value of such an agent, and to know that without such an agent, he and his property would be in the cart.
No, he never thought that he should have to play that trump card of his—the threat of resigning; all that he meant to do was to bring the young man to his senses and to let him know that when all was said and done he was only the owner, and as such, he had no right to make such a decisive move as the removal of Verrall behind his agent’s back.
And yet now he was walking away from the Manor House feeling that he and Farmer Verrall were practically in the same boat—that they had both got a shove off from the solid shore by the rude boot of a youth who was really little better than an interloper, and that they were now adrift on a choppy sea.
But how it had all come about he could not for the life of him understand. He had not been in the house for more than ten minutes; and surely he had brought the young man within measurable distance of an apology to him for his high-handed conduct, and yet—what had he said?—accountants from London—books of the estate—the farm—the milk—the pheasants—the timber—the underwood—and with all this he, Mr. Dunning, J.P., the agent of the estates, the man whose father had received a presentation of plate—whose name was in the only authentic list of County Families—was to make up his mind by the next morning whether he would remain and give the accountants from London his help in going through the books or clear off with Verrall!
The whole business was extraordinary and not to be fully realized in the course of a morning stroll. He had reached the end of the paddock before he was able to summarize his feelings up to that moment. His summary assumed the form of an exclamatory sentence:
“Who the devil would have thought that the chap had it in him?”
As for young Wingfield, he was nearly as much puzzled by the issue of his interview with Mr. Dunning as that gentleman was himself. When Dunning had left the house Jack hurried to the breakfast-room, whistling an uncertain air. The butler blew out the spirit lamp that heated the breakfast dishes, and laid the latter on the table, with the coffee. But the moment he had left the room, Jack Wingfield put his hands in his pockets and walked away from the breakfast table to one of the windows, and, standing with his legs apart, stared out, allowing his omelette to get chilled and the coffee milk to get a surface on it. Jack Wingfield was also puzzled to account for all that had occurred. Dunning had always occupied in his mind a place of the deepest respect; and his attainments he had been accustomed to think of with something little less than awe. And yet he had been able within twenty-four hours to discover his gross incompetence and, moreover, to tell him of it, and to send him away with no more ceremony than he had thought necessary to employ in clearing out Farmer Verrall and his greyhounds!
The whole thing was too wonderful to be grasped immediately by such an intellect as his. It required a deal of thinking out; so he stood at the window staring at the garden for several minutes.
At last he too thought that he might make a brief summary of the situation and its development up to that moment. He whirled round and gazed at the breakfast things. Then he removed his hands from his pockets, and doubling up his right struck the palm of his left vigorously, saying:
“By the Lord Harry! She has made a man of me!”
When he told her that his mother would be greatly pleased if she would pay her a visit, her face became roseate. She hesitated before answering him. She had usually her wits about her, and rarely failed to see in a moment the end of a matter of which the beginning was suggested to her; but now everything before her was blurred. She could not utter even the merest commonplace word in response.
Three days before she had seen that sudden light come into his eyes when she had been trying—and not without success—to make him think better of himself than he had been disposed to think, and she had felt startled. She had gone home with that look impressed upon her. What did it mean? She knew very well what it meant That is to say, she knew very well that it meant that he was in love with her—for the moment, yes, for the moment; and that was by no means the same as knowing all that it meant. For instance, she could not tell if it meant that he would be in love with her the next day and the day after. She did not know if it meant that he would ask her to marry him, in the face of the opposition of his family—she assumed the opposition of his family, just as she assumed also that it was unnecessary for her to take into consideration the possibility of his being influenced by what the people of Framsby would say. He would of course snap his fingers at Framsby, but his family was a very different matter. She wondered if he would be strong enough to ask her in the face of his family. She was not quite sure of him in this respect. One sees the effect that her experience of men and their professions of love had upon her. She had been made thoughtful, guarded, determined to refrain from allowing a second man to make a fool of her—determined to do her best to repress all her own feelings in the matter before it would be too late to attempt to do so—before she had seen what his falling in love with her would lead to. That was why she had gone away so suddenly on the first day they had met on the tennis ground, and that was why she had taken the trouble to keep beside her friends on the other days: she wished to give herself every chance—to keep herself perfectly free in regard to him, so that, should nothing come of the little flame which she saw flicker up behind the look that he had given her, she would not have a lasting disappointment.
At first she patted herself on the back, so to speak, for her circumspection. She was behaving with wisdom and discretion, and with a due sense of self-respect. But on the second day, when she had had no more than half-a-dozen words with him, she returned to her home with her heart full of him, and feeling the meanness of her circumspection—hating her caution and abhorring her discretion. When she was combing out her hair that night, she caught sight of herself, as she had done before upon one occasion that has been noticed, in the tall glass, but this time she seemed to have a glimpse of a strange girl in whom she was greatly interested. She looked at herself curiously through that fine network of hair that flowed around her, covering the white draping of her white shoulders with a miraculous lacework of silk. And then, in the impulse of a thought that suggested an instinct, she unfastened the button of her drapery and allowed it to fall down about her feet so that she stood there a warm white figure of a bather ready for the plunge into the water, the foam of which was coiled about her ankles.
She looked at her reflection shyly as though she had surprised a strange girl. But the strange shyness gave way to a strange interest in that figure before her. She seemed to have acquired an interest in her body from her head to her feet such as she had never known before, and she found herself actually posing before the glass. Only for a minute, however; with a little laugh that had something of maidenly merriment in it and the rest of maidenly passion, she flung her hair away from her figure and rushed to her bed.
She did not go to sleep for a long time. The window of her room was open and she could hear faintly the notes of the nightingale that was singing in a plantation beyond the orchard.
And somehow the song of the nightingale also seemed quite new to her. She could not understand how it was that she had ever thought of it as sad.
She turned rosy when he asked her if she would pay his mother a visit, and she did not answer him at once.
“Did you tell your mother who I am—what I am?” she enquired, without looking at him.
“She knows all about you,” he replied.
“And are you sure that she wishes to see me?”
He did not answer at once. At last he said,
“I don’t think that she wants particularly to see you. She doesn’t care a great deal for seeing strangers. But I wish her to see you, and I wish you to see her.”
“In the ordinary course of life I should not pay your mother a visit,” she said. “I know my place.”
He laughed at the humour of her demureness, and she laughed because he was laughing; but only for a second.
“There’s nothing to laugh at,” she said. “I made a plain statement. In the ordinary course of life social visits are not exchanged between the ladies of the Manor and the girls of the farm; but in this case, and if you will save me the trouble of explaining how it is that I go... and yet I don’t know that you can explain it or that I can explain it... oh, you had better not try to explain anything.”
“Is there anything to explain?” he asked.
“There is a great deal to explain, but nothing that can be explained,” she replied. “I will be pleased to pay Mrs. Wingfield a visit. That’s all that need be said on the matter. I am sure that she will be very nice to me, and I know that I will be as nice to her as I can be to any one. Haven’t I always been nice to you?”
“Nice—nice?” he repeated. “That’s hardly the word. You have been nicer to me than any one I ever met What have you been to me? There’s a word that just describes it, if I could only find it. Guardian—no—no—some other word?”
“Pupil-teacher?” she suggested with some more demure humour.
He paid no attention to her. He was not in the humour for humour at all.
“I know the word, if I could only find it,” he said, musingly. “By George! I have it—good angel—that’s the word. You have been my good angel. You have indeed.”
“That was a word worth waiting for,” she said gravely. “I don’t think that there is any word that I should like better to hear any man apply to me than that word—good angel. It simply means, of course, good influence; and that is woman’s mission in the world of men; it is not so much to do things herself as to influence men in the doing of things. And when you come to think of it, woman has played a rather important part in the history of the world by adopting this line. She hasn’t actually done much herself, but she has been a tremendous power for good or evil in her influence upon man. That is the sort of woman I should like to be—an influence for good.”
“A good angel—you have been my good angel,” he said in a low voice. “You have plucked me by the hair of my head out of—out of—of—well, out of myself; and—if you knew what I think of you—if you knew what I hope—what my heart is set on—what——”
“What your heart is set on just now is that I should visit your mother,” she said quickly. She had no notion of leading him to fancy that she had spoken to him of what was in her heart in order to induce him to speak to her of what he fancied was in his heart. If he had confessed to her there and then that his heart was set on marrying her she would have refused to listen to him further, and all might be over between them. But she had no idea of allowing this to come about. She cared far too much for him for this. She had read the instructive Bible story—the finest story that was ever written in the world—of a man being handed over by God for Satan to try to make what he pleased of him. She thought that God might be very much better employed in handing over a man to a woman to try what she could make of him. She wondered which of the witty Frenchmen would have replied that God, being merciful, would only make the transfer to Satan. Anyhow, leaving theology aside for the moment, the longing in her heart was that she might be given an opportunity of standing by this man while he worked out his own salvation, and she knew that the salvation of a man is the recognition by himself of his own manhood.
That was why she stopped him so quickly when he was going to say something that would have spoilt his chance—and hers.
“Your heart is set on my visit to your mother—at least I hope so, for mine is,” she cried quickly, with a nod to him. “Now tell me how and when I am to come.” For a moment he felt angry that she had checked his all too rapid flow of words; he was not quite sure that the trend of their conversation, and that accidental introduction of a word or two that gives a man his opportunity, if only he is on the look out for it, would ever be so favourable to him again. But he quickly perceived that he had been too impetuous, and that if he had been allowed to go on he would have ruined every chance that he had.
“May I say Saturday?” he asked. “This business”—they were close to the tennis courts, and had just arisen from lunch—“will be over by Saturday.”
“And you’ll have carried home the cup—don’t forget that,” she said. “Yes, Saturday would suit me very well, and I hope it will suit your mother.”
“You may be sure that it will,” he said. “I have a very good chance of the cup, haven’t I? There are only two lives between me and it. If Donovan is killed by a thunderbolt to-night and if a brigand stabs Jeffares with a poisoned stiletto in the course of the evening, to-morrow I’ll carry off the cup. It will be plain sailing after that.”
“No, you must win it,” she said.
“Wish me good luck, and—I suppose you don’t happen to have about you that ring which you habitually wear—the one with the monogram of Lucrezia Borgia done on it in fine rubies, and the secret spring that releases the hollow needle-point with the deadly fluid? No? Ah, just my luck! you could put it on and then offer your hand to Donovan.”
“I have left it at the chemists to be renewed,” she said, turning halfway round in speaking, for they were in the act of separating. “Yes, I have used up a lot of the fluid of late; I really must be more economical. If I’m not I’ll not have enough money left to get it recharged for Miss Metcalfe, who lost you the M.D.s.” And so they parted with smiles and fun.
And it so happened that he carried off the silver cup, for he beat Mr. Donovan the next day, and Mr. Jeffares, the holder, found that he had strained a tendon on the Saturday morning, and so declined to contest it and also Mr. Wingfield’s offer to play for it when the tendon should be in working order. (There were some people who said that it was very sporting of Mr. Wingfield to make such an offer, and others that it was very sporting of Mr. Jeffares to decline entertaining it. But in the inner circle there were whispers that Mr. Jeffares’ tendon was a most accommodating one, for it had been known to strain itself upon two previous occasions when he had to meet an opponent who was likely to give him some trouble.)
She did not allow him to drive her up to the Manor House on Saturday—indeed, he did not make the suggestion that she should do so. She walked up to that fine old Georgian porch at the right visiting hour, and she had already been talking to Mrs. Wingfield for some time before Jack put in an appearance.
Again she was dressed in white, but her garments were not those of the tennis meeting. They were simpler and consequently more expensive, for there is nothing more expensive than simplicity in a woman’s toilette if it is to be the best; and second-class simplicity is in worse taste than abject display. Mrs. Wingfield knew all that was to be known about lace of all lands and of all periods, and she saw in a moment that the Mechlin which made a sort of pelerine for her dress was a specimen. But she felt that it was not a bit to be worn by a farmer’s daughter at any time—that was her first impression. A little later, when she found how graceful and natural and well-mannered was this particular daughter of the farm, she came to the conclusion (reluctantly, it must be confessed) that that piece of Mechlin not merely suited her extremely well, but that it was exactly the right thing for her to wear.
She was greatly impressed by Priscilla’s beauty; but more by her way of speaking, and most of all by her manners. Manners with Mrs. Wingfield meant an absence of mannerisms, just as distinction meant nothing that could be seen distinctly, and good taste something that was only known when a breach of it took place. Mrs. Wingfield did not find her deviating from the straight paths of good taste when she referred to her position in relation to the best set of Framsby. She did not boast of not being “received” by these ladies; nor did she sneer at their want of appreciation of her merits. She did not refer to Lady Gainsforth as “the dear Countess” or to Lady Cynthia by her Christian name, to impress upon Mrs. Wingfield the intimacy existing between her and Lady Gainsforth’s daughter. Indeed it was Mrs. Wingfield who introduced these noble names, and Priscilla knew that Mrs. Wingfield’s son must have mentioned them in connection with her own; so she merely said that the skating at Ullerfield Court, the Ullerfields’ place in Norfolk, had been very good indeed when she had stayed there with Lady Cynthia and Katie Ullerfield.
And then—also in response to Mrs. Wingfield’s enquiry—she went on to speak of her dairy experience. She thought that on the whole there could be no more interesting work than dairy work. They were in the middle of the dairy when Jack put in an appearance.
When they had had tea he took her round the greenhouses. She could talk freely with him on this tour; she had no sense of being restrained by the looming of a grave question ahead. She knew that although two days ago he had been at the point of blurting out something that it would have been impossible for her to reply to satisfactorily then, he would never regard such an incident as the flowering of a yucca in a hothouse as a legitimate excuse for asking her the question which she had restrained.
She had no fault to find with him upon this occasion. He talked about the patience of his mother alternately with the bother of orchids and the merits of the Phoenix Barbonica for indoors; and brought her safely back to the drawing-room, where she put a crown upon the good impression she had already produced upon Mrs. Wingfield by showing more than a mere working knowledge of Wedgwood. It so happened that Priscilla had worked up Wedgwood every year to beguile the tedium of her visits to her aunt Emily. The town where her aunt lived contained a museum of the products of the English Etruria, and she had a visiting acquaintance with every piece in the collection. Thus was the good impression which she produced upon Mrs. Wingfield sealed with a Wedgwood medallion. A girl who could wear without reproach a Mechlin lace collar of the best period and who could detect Hackwood’s handiwork on a tiny vase which was attributed to somebody else, could not be far wrong.
When she had gone away and his mother had come out from the drawing-room and was about to take a turn round the garden, he lit a cigar and gave her his arm. He was talking rapidly, not of Miss Wadhurst, but of his approaching struggle with Mr. Dunning. His mother knew, from the persistency with which he rushed away from every chance she offered him of touching upon Miss Wadhurst, that he was anxious to an extraordinary degree to get her own opinion of their visitor.
It was not until he had led her to her favourite seat in the curve of an Italian balustrade overlooking the stonework of a pond with a fountain in the centre that she said, “I don’t wonder that you are in love with her, Jack.”
“Great Gloriana! I—in love—with—whom?” he cried. “She is, I think, the nicest girl I ever met,” continued his mother. “She has elegance, and that is the rarest quality among the girls of nowadays—the elegance of a picture by Sir Joshua; and her dress—there was not a single jarring note. I thought at first that that piece of Mechlin round her neck was rather overdone—it is worth sixty or seventy pounds—ah, now you perceive how outrageous is my taste—appraising the value of a visitor’s dress. Dreadful!”
“Monstrous! But you think——”
“I think that she is the only girl who could carry off such a thing without self-consciousness. She is a girl of the greatest taste.”
He shook his head.
“That’s bad news,” he said.
“Bad news?”
“Bad. If she has any taste what chance should I have?” His mother smiled. She knew girls a good deal better than did her son. She had come to think of her son as the one who chooses and the girl as the one who is chosen. She never thought of the girl as having any choice in the matter. It was hermetierto be chosen, and all the others stood by envying her.
It was no wonder that she smiled at his suggestion.
“I only wish—but it is too late now. After all, it is only people who have not seen her—who do not know her—that will sneer at her being only a farmer’s daughter,” she said.
“Only fools,” he cried. “Only—such fools—Framsby fools! Gloriana! What better can any one be than a farmer? I’m a farmer. Not that that settles the question once and for all,” he added, with a laugh. “Lord, how rotten is all this rot that one hears about family and trade and that! It’s a dreadful thing for a chap to have a shop, and, of course, society, as it’s called, shuns him; but if he multiplies his offence by a hundred he’s all right, and no matter what a bounder he may be, society opens its arms to him, and the bounder becomes a baronet. If a chap like me sets up a dairy and sells the milk, people say that it’s sporting; but if a real farmer—the right sort of man—runs a dairy of the highest order, he is called a dairyman, and is put on a level with gardeners and grooms. So far as family is concerned, the Wadhursts are as far above us and any of the rotters that control society at Framsby as our family is above the Gibman lot who are hand in glove with Royalty. The Wadhursts were in this neighbourhood at the time of the Heptarchy.”
“I think she is the nicest girl I ever met,” said his mother, when the smoke had time to clear away. “Poor girl! How could she have made such a fool of herself?”
“What do you mean? Who made a fool of herself?”
“You recalled the story—it was in all the papers. But I called her Miss Wadhurst.”
“There’s a difference between a girl making a fool of herself and being made a victim of, isn’t there?”
“But the notoriety—it is not her fault, I know, but still——”
“Still what?”
“I don’t know what. I don’t know anything. I only feel.” He looked at her for some time—at first with a frown creeping over his face, but it did not develop into a frown; on the contrary, it vanished in a smile. He took her hand and put his arm about her.
“Thank God that you can feel, mother, for it’s more than most women can do nowadays,” said he. “And what you should feel is that if that girl was a fool once she may be a fool again and marry me; and that if I have been a fool always I may be wise once and marry her, if I can. I tell you that she—she—by God! she has made a man of me, and that’s a big enough achievement for any girl. Thank God, my dear mother, that I’ve set my heart on a girl that can do this off her own bat.”
“I will, my son,” said she, quietly; and they walked back to the house without a word.
She never once looked back in any sense, when she had passed out of the gates of the Manor. She had known that it was laid upon her to go through this ordeal of standing before the mother whom he loved, to be approved by her. She had faced the ordeal without shrinking, because she loved him. She was as sure of him and his love for her as she had been certain of the deceit of the wretch with whom she had gone through the empty ceremony of marriage in order that her mother might die happy—though the result was that she died of her misery.
She knew that if Mrs. Wingfield were pleased with her, Jack would be delighted and ask her to marry him the next time they met, if he did not force a meeting with her for the purpose; but if his mother did not approve of her, and called her heartless because her dress was white instead of black, and flippant because she had appeared several days at a sporting meeting within a couple of months of her husband’s death, he would be greatly downcast, but he would ask her to marry him all the same.
But she had set forth to face the ordeal by visit as firmly as she would have gone to meet the ordeal by fire or the ordeal by water, had she lived in the days of such tests of faith. She knew that, whatever should happen her faith in him would not be shaken and his faith in her would remain unmoved. But she had made up her mind to find favour in the sight of his mother, and she now felt that she had succeeded in doing so. If she had failed, she would have been miserable, but she would have promised to marry him all the same.
The sense of exultation which was hers was due to her knowledge of the fact that she had found favour in the eyes of the mother of the man whom she loved, not to her feeling that she would, as the wife of Jack Wingfield, occupy a splendid position in the county—such a position as her poor mother had never dreamt of her filling. Beyond a doubt, she found it quite delightful to think of owning that beautiful park through which she had been allowed as a great privilege to stray while the house was empty. Every part of the grounds was a delight to her—the deep glen with its well-wooded sides sloping down to the little stream that twinkled among its ferns and mosses and primroses—the irregular meadow where stood the tawny haystacks like islands in the midst of a sea of brilliant green—the spacious avenues of elm and oak that made her feel when walking in their shadow, that she was going through the nave of a cathedral—she loved everything about the place, and it would be the greatest joy to her to live all her life there—with love; without love she would as soon spend the rest of her life in one of the cottages on her father’s farm.
She felt exultant only in the thought that he was to be her companion when she went to that place. She had all her life been looking forward to a life of love; and it had been puzzling to her when she found that year after year went by without bringing her any closer to love. She was not conscious of being fastidious in her association with men; but the fact remained the same: she never had the smallest feeling of love for any of the men who had told her that they loved her—and she never had a lack of such men about her.
For the months of her engagement to that man, Marcus Blaydon, her thought was that this was the punishment that was laid upon her for the hardness of her heart—this prospect of living with a man who could never be anything to her but an object of dislike. He never awoke in her a slumbering passion—not even the passion of hate. She merely disliked him as she disliked a foggy day; and yet she was condemned to spend the remainder of her life with him with love shut out. Was that to be her punishment for having rejected the many offers of love which had been laid at her feet by men whom she liked well but could not love?
And then with the suddenness with which a great blessing or a great calamity is sent by Heaven (according to the Teachers) there had been sent to her the two best things in the world—Freedom and Love. She knew that if this man had been one of her father’s shepherds and had asked her to love him she would have given herself to him. Her sense of being on the way to fill a splendid position socially was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was beloved by a man whom she loved as she never thought it would be given to her to love any man. That was her dominant thought—nay, her only thought—while she walked through the lanes to her home.
And it never occurred to her that she was reckoning among her possessions a great gift which had not yet been offered to her. It never occurred to her that she might be mistaken in taking his love for granted. Even if weeks and months were to pass without his coming to her, she would still not entertain so unworthy a thought as that he was not coming to her. But she was not subjected to the ordeal of his absence. He came to her on Monday morning, the first thing. It was surely ridiculous for him to set out on this mission before the workers in the fields had left their beds; but so he did. He went forth and wandered for miles across the Downs. He went within sight of the sea, by a curious impulse, and he sat on the turf in the early sunlight, listening to the great bass of the breaking waves beneath him and to the exquisite fluttering flutings, of a lark in the sky above him. Then he turned and found the road that led down to the snuggest of villages—he owned every house, though he did not know it—and up again to a region of ploughed fields—enormous spaces of purple-brown surrounded by great irregular hedges of yellow gorse.
It might have been fancied that, with his heart so full of the great intention, he would be walking like one in a dream, taking no thought of the things about him; but so far from his being like this, he looked upon everything that he came across with an affection such as he had never known before. He felt that these things of Nature were closer to him than they had ever been—in fact, for some of them he felt as would an explorer in a strange land who suddenly comes upon a number of people and recognizes in each a relation of his own. He had never been in such close touch with Nature before, and every step that he took was one of rejoicing.
He dallied so much in strange ways that it was actually as far on in the day as seven o’clock before he found himself in that narrow steep lane close to a narrower and steeper one, which led up to Athalsdean Farm—this was where his motor had broken down, and she had come upon him searching (by the aid of his chauffeur’s eyes) for the cause of the mischief. He had not yet reached the exact spot, when he saw her turning from the farm lane to the one through which he was walking; but she was not coming toward him; her turn took her in the opposite direction.
He shouted to her, and she glanced round, and then stood still. She was at that instant under an ash that was not yet fully clothed with leaves; the sunlight shone upon her bare head. Bare? Well, scarcely bare with that splendour of wreathed tresses crowning her; but she wore no hat, and carried no sunshade. Her dress was a print, made very short, so that her serviceable shoes and her ankles were fully exposed. Such leaves as were upon the boughs cast dark shadows upon her dress, but her head was altogether in the sunshine.
She waited for him, rosy and eager—she could not control her eagerness—she could not trust herself to speak a word of greeting in reply to his.
“I have been in search of you,” he said.
“For long?”
“For long? All my life, Priscilla. I want you, Priscilla—I never wanted anything so much. I need you. I cannot do without you.”
He had not released the hand that she gave him, but he did not hold it so tightly but that she could have taken it from him if she had been so minded; but it so happened that she was not so minded. She allowed him to keep it, and he drew her to him. He put his other hand on her waist, and then slipped it up to the back of her head. That was how he kissed her, with his hand at the back of her head; and that was how she allowed him to kiss her at 7.5 a.m. on that fresh June morning, when the hedgerows were giving in scent to the sun the dews that had lain upon them, keeping them fresh through the night.
“You do not say a word,” he complained, when he had kissed her and kissed her—on the cheeks, the chin, the eyes, and the mouth—when he had held her so close to him that she felt deliciously dishevelled, and for some seconds found it difficult to breathe. “Not a word!”
She gasped, and kept him away with one hand. He was holding the other so tightly by now that she had no chance of recovering it.
She laughed.
“A word? What word?” she gasped.
“Any word—the word that is in your heart.” There was no use talking loud. His arm was about her again.
“There is no word in my heart—you have squeezed it out,” she managed to say.
“You would not let me lay a finger on you if you did not love me—I know that,” said he.
“You know that, and yet you ask me to say something to you. Talking is a sinful waste of time.”
“So it is, my darling girl. You have said it: out of the fulness of the heart the mouth——”
“Kisses—that is what it does; it doesn’t speak—it cannot.”
“Since when has that knowledge come to you, Priscilla.”
“I confess that it is newly acquired. You make an excellent coach for a backward girl, my master.”
“You are not backward; it is only that your education has been neglected.”
“And you look on yourself as a successful crammer? Haven’t you seen the advertisements, ‘particular attention paid to neglected children’? You are paying me particular attention. Don’t you think that my education is pretty nearly complete, Jack?”
“Oh, you have a lot to learn yet; but you are coming on. You have learned that my name is Jack—that’s a distinct advance. Oh, my dear girl, the delight of teaching you all—all—all!”
“I had no idea that you were so ardent an educationist. Ah, I knew you would come to me! But what I have been asking myself for several days is, Were there no girls in your own station in life——”
She could not finish her question for laughter; the phrase which her father was very fond of using sounded very funny coming from her lips, which were—as she had found out—exactly on a level with his own.
“Station of life? Station of life? Your lips are the waiting room—a first-class waiting room in the station of life,” said he.
That was how he received her suggestion that he was ready to make what his relations would undoubtedly call amesalliancein asking her to be his wife; though, as a matter of fact, he had not yet asked her to be his wife. Perhaps she should have regarded his movements during the previous five minutes merely in the light of a friendly attention to enable him to see if she was amicably disposed toward him.
“Let that be the last word of frivolity between us,” she said. “I want to be serious. Be sure, my dear Jack, that this is the most serious moment that has come into our lives.”
“I know it—I know it, my beloved,” said he. “I know that meeting you was the most important thing in my life. And I know that marrying you will be the wisest. You are the first person in the world who gave me credit for having any backbone. You are the first person in the world to give me a sort of respect for myself. My mother is the dearest soul on earth; but she has never thought it necessary to help me on to anything. She was quite content that I should live and inherit the property, and follow her to the grave and then go there myself, doing as little as possible in the interim. It’s wonderful how little a country gentleman can do if he only puts his heart into the business of idling. I think it quite likely that I might have made a record in this way. But you came into my life, and—and you have become my life. That’s why I want you to stay with me—to stand by me, and you’ve promised to do it?”
“Have I?” she said. “Yes, I suppose I have; at any rate, whether I have or not you may be sure that I’ll do it. And don’t you doubt, Jack, that we’ll do something in the world before we are parted. A man without a woman beside him represents an imperfect scheme of life. Life—that does not mean a man, nor does it mean a woman; it means the man and the woman. So it was in the beginning, so it is to-day. Life—the man and the woman, each living for the other. That’s life, isn’t it?”
“It is; and we’ll do some living, you and I, Priscilla, if others have failed.”
“The failures are those who forget—the woman who forgets that she is a woman and seeks to do the man’s work—the man who forgets that he is a man and treats the woman as if she were the same as himself. Oh, here we are talking of the philosophy of life when we should be living. But that’s the way of philosophy: it keeps a man learning the best way to live, and by the time he has learnt it it is time for him to die.”
“Hang up philosophy and give us life, say I. Dear girl, you have made me happy and—hungry. I left my bed at four this morning, and now it’s past seven.”
“You will come with me and have breakfast. I wonder if any man up to this day ever asked a girl to marry him before breakfast.”
“I wonder. But a chap feels so much fresher in the early morning, I think it should be tried more frequently.”
“It was a bold experiment, Jack. But it might only succeed when carried out in connection with the dairy industry.”
“That is how you come to be up so early. Shall I have a chance of seeing your dad if I go with you? I suppose a dad has always to be reckoned with.”
“No one has to be reckoned with except myself in this matter. I am myself, and I know myself, and will obey myself and none other this time—this time.”
She spoke with some vehemence, and her last sentence was uttered with a touch of bitterness. He knew what she meant. Providence had come to her rescue once, but a second interposition on her behalf was too much to expect. He could appreciate her feeling.
“You will not have to meet my father until you please,” she said. “Just now he is miles away—at Galsworthy. We shall be alone.”
“I’ll not shudder at the prospect,” said he. “We can’t have everything in this world, can we?”
They went together up the lane to the farm with as much decorum as was consistent with the possibility of being discovered by some watcher in the fields, and they had breakfast face to face at an old Tudor table in one of the panelled rooms of the farmhouse, and beneath the old oak beams—a lovely room that had undergone no change in even the most trifling detail for three hundred years. The bowls of wallflowers on the table and on the lattice shelf were of blue delft, and the plate-rack on the wall held some dishes of the same colour.
“You suppose all this is old?” he said, looking around.
“Oh, no; but it wasn’t bought in my lifetime,” she replied. “I can show you in an account book exactly what was paid for everything. The date of the last entry in the book is the ‘Eve of the Feast of the Purification, 1604.’”
“Three hundred years ago. But that’s nothing in the history of your family. Have you a ledger that goes back to the Heptarchy?”
“I’m afraid that that one is mislaid. But the eggs are fresh; if we don’t boil them now they will be three hours old at nine.”
“You might have some relic of the Heptarchy, Priscilla.”
“Alas! nothing remains from that date except our name.”
“And yet you are content to submerge it in the mushroom-growth Wingfield? Have you no reverence for the past?”
“Just now I confess that I am thinking more of the future. Oh, the future, Jack, my boy—the future!”
She laid a hand upon his shoulder and stood in front of him in the attitude of a true comrade.
“My pal!” he cried, taking the note from her. “My pal, was there ever a time when we didn’t know each other?”