138
“A little ‘addition,’ was it, sir?” she moved smilingly to a drawer. “A few pin curls are very easily adjusted, or would our guinea switch––”
At this moment the boy and Robinette entered the shop. Lavendar was paying for the curling tongs, and not a muscle of his face relaxed. “Oh, here you are. I have just finished my business,” he said, turning round, “I thought we might encounter one another somewhere!”
Robinette and Carnaby exchanged knowing glances of which Lavendar was perfectly conscious, but he stood by while Mrs. Loring bought her hairpins, and Carnaby endeavoured to persuade her to invest in a few “pin curls.” “Not an hour before it is absolutely necessary, Middy dear,” she said; “then I shall bear it as bravely as I can. Come now, carry the hairpins for me, and let me take Mr. Lavendar out of this shop, or he will be tempted to buy more than he needs.”
139
“Oh, no!” Lavendar remarked pointedly. “I have what I came for!”
“Don’t forget your parcel,” Carnaby exclaimed, darting after Lavendar as they went into the street. “You’ve left it on the counter.”
“How careless!” said Mark. “It was for my sister.”
“You never told me you had a sister,” said Robinette, as they walked together, Lavendar wheeling his bicycle and Carnaby sulking behind them.
“I am blessed with two; one married now; the other, my sister Amy, lives at home.”
“Well, you see, in spite of all our questions the first time we met, we really know very little about each other,” she went on lightly. “It takes such a long time to get thoroughly acquainted in this country. Do they ever count you a friend if you do not know all their aunts and second cousins?”
Lavendar laughed. “Willingly would I introduce you to my aunts and my uttermost140cousins, and lay the map of my life before you, uneventful as it has been, if that would further our acquaintance.”
Even as he spoke a hateful memory darted into his thoughts, and he reddened to his temples, until Mrs. Loring wondered if she had said anything to annoy him.
Some fortunate accident at this point ordered that Carnaby should meet a friend, another middy about his own age, and they set off together in quest of a third boy who was supposed to be in the near neighbourhood.
As soon as the lads were out of sight Lavendar found the jests they had been bandying together die on his lips. “I’m going down deeper; I shall be out of my depth very soon,” he thought to himself, as he walked in silence by Robinette’s side.
“Let us come down to the beach again; we can’t go to the station for half an hour yet,” she said. “I like to look out to sea, and realize that if I sailed long enough I could step off that pier, and arrive in America.”
141
They stood by the sea-wall together with the fresh wind playing on their faces. “Isn’t it curious,” said Robinette, “how instinctively one always turns to look at the sea; inland may be ever so lovely, but if the sea is there we generally look in that direction.”
“Because it is unbounded, like the future,” said Lavendar. He was looking as he spoke at some children playing on the sands just beside them. There was a gallant little boy among them with a bare curly head, who refused help from older sisters and was toiling away at his sand castle, his whole soul in his work; throwing up spadefuls––tremendous ones for four years old––upon its ramparts, as if certain they could resist the advancing tide.
“What a noble little fellow!” exclaimed Robinette, catching the direction of Lavendar’s glance. “Isn’t he splendid? toiling like that; stumping about on those fat brown legs!”
“How beautiful to have a child like that, of142one’s own!” thought Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him at the moment.
Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair. Something in Robinette’s face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.
143
“What is it, darling?” she asked. “Oh, it’s the bright rose!” Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. “Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns,” she asked.
“The rose looked very charming where it was,” he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.
“It will look better still, presently,” she answered.
The child’s hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette’s face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove’s voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman’s plum tree. “If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this144wistful wraith, it would be hard,” she thought. “All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!”
Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. “Sweet woman!” he was saying to himself. “It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it’s a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil.”
Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. “A rose and a smile! that’s all we could give it,” she said; “and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could.” She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, “After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn’t be a living world at all.”
145
“Amen,” said Lavendar, “but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead.”
“Dead!” she echoed. “Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with.”
“Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I’ve known, was like that,” Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other’s past.
“She was a fine woman,” he went on, “with a certain comfortable breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens.”
Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in146retrospective silence, looking at the blue sea before them.
Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.
“I wonder if it’s a matter of size,” she said after a moment. “I wonder! Let’s be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father’s success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother’s helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy’s sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy’s niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father’s illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed147his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn’t enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother’s when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest.”
Lavendar had a strong desire to take those148same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man’s hands, fine and supple, but meant to work.
“I seem to have done nothing,” he exclaimed. “You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day’s work, Mrs. Loring, for they’ve been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid.” He paused, and went on slowly, “I’ve thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one’s whole heart into it, and that two people––” He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much.
149
“Can help each other. Indeed they can,” Mrs. Loring went on serenely, “if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don’t they help?”
“Not a great deal,” Lavendar confessed. “One would, but she’s married and in India, worse luck! The other is––well, she’s a candid sister.” He laughed, and looked up. “If my best friend could hear my sister Amy’s view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her.”
“Nonsense! my dear friend,” exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she sometimes affected,––a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; “we should never belittle the stuff that’s been put into us! My equipment isn’t particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of power from it before I die.”
150
“Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn’t it?”
“Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up your mind to squeeze it,” said Robinette, jumping off the wall. “There is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station.”
“Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally in evidence,” said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.
151XIILOVE IN THE MUD
The next day Robinette was once more sitting in the boat opposite to Lavendar as he rowed. They were going down the river this time, not across it. Somehow they had managed that afternoon to get out by themselves, which sounds very simple, but is a wonderfully difficult thing to accomplish when there is no special reason for it, and when there are several other people in the house.
Fortunately Mrs. de Tracy did not like to be alone, so that wherever she went Miss Smeardon had to go too, and there happened to be a sale of work at a neighbouring vicarage that afternoon where she considered her presence a necessity. Robinette had vanished soon after luncheon and the middy had been dull, so after loitering around for a while, he too had disappeared upon some errand152of his own. Lavendar walked very slowly toward the avenue gateway, then he turned and came back. He could scarcely believe his good fortune when he saw Mrs. Loring come out of the house, and pause at the door as if uncertain of her next movements. She looked uncommonly lovely in a white frock with touches of blue, while the ribbon in her hair brought out all its gold. She wore a flowery garden hat, and a pair of dainty most un-English shoes peeped from beneath her short skirt.
“Are you going out, or can I take you on the river?” Lavendar asked, trying without much success to conceal the eagerness that showed in his voice and eyes.
Robinette stood for a moment looking at him (it seemed as if she read him like a book) and then she said frankly, “Why yes, there is nothing I should like so much, but where is Carnaby?”
“Hang Carnaby! I mean I don’t know, or care. I’ve had too much of his society to-day to be pining for it now.”
153
“Well, he does chatter like a magpie, but I feel he must have such a dull time here with no one anywhere near his own age. Elderly as I am, I seem a bit nearer than Aunt de Tracy or Miss Smeardon. Aunt de Tracy, all the same, will never understand my relations with that boy, or with anyone else for that matter. I did try so hard,” she went on, “when I first arrived, just to strike the right note with her, and I’ve missed it all the time, by that very fact, no doubt. I’m so unused to trying––at home.”
“You mean in America?”
“Yes, of course; I don’t try there at all, and yet my friends seem to understand me.”
“Does it seem to you that you could ever call England ‘home’?”
“I could not have believed that England would so sink into my heart,” she said, sitting down in the doorway and arranging the flowers on her hat. “During those first dull wet days when I was still a stranger,154and when I looked out all the time at the dripping cedars, and felt whenever I opened my lips that I said the wrong thing, it seemed to me I should never be gay for an hour in this country; but the last enchanting sunny days have changed all that. I remember it’s my mother’s country, and if only I could have found a little affection waiting for me, all would have been perfect.”
“You may find it yet.” Lavendar could not for the life of him help saying the words, but there was nothing in the tone in which he said them to make Robinette conscious of his meaning.
“I’m afraid not,” she sighed, thinking of Mrs. de Tracy’s indifference. “I’m much more American than English, much more my father’s daughter than the Admiral’s niece; perhaps my aunt feels that instinctively. Now I must slip upstairs and change if we are going boating.”
“Never!” cried Lavendar. “If I don’t155snatch you this moment from the devouring crowd I shall lose you! I will keep you safe and dry, never fear, and we shall be back well before dark.”
They went down the river after leaving the little pier, passing the orchards heaped on the hillsides above Wittisham, and Lavendar wanted to row out to sea, but Robinette preferred the river; so he rowed nearer to the shore, where the current was less swift, and the boat rocked and drifted with scarcely a touch of the oars. They had talked for some time, and then a silence had fallen, which Robinette broke by saying, “I half wish you’d forsake the law and follow lines of lesser resistance, Mr. Lavendar. Do you know, you seem to me to be drifting, not rowing! I’ve been thinking ever since of what you said to me on the sands at Weston.”
“Ungrateful woman!” he exclaimed, trying to evade the subject, “when these two faithful arms have been at your service every day since we first met! Think of the156pennies you would have taken from that tiny gold purse of yours for the public ferry! However, I know what you mean; I never met anyone so plain-spoken as you, Mrs. Robin; I haven’t forgotten, I assure you!”
“How about the candid sister? Isn’t she plain-spoken?”
“Oh, she attacks the outside of the cup and platter; you question motive power and ideals. Well, I confess I have less of the former than I ought, and more of the latter than I’ve ever used.” Lavendar had rested on his oars now and was looking down, so that the twinkle of his eyes was lost. “I suppose I shall go on as I have done hitherto, doing my work in a sort of a way, and getting a certain amount of pleasure out of things,––unless––”
“Oh, but that’s not living!” she exclaimed; “that’s only existing. Don’t you remember:––
It is not growing like a treeIn bulk doth make man better be.
157
It’s reallylivingI mean, forgetting the things that are behind, and going on and on to something ahead, whatever one’s aim may be.”
“What are you going to do with yourself, if I may ask?” said Lavendar. “Don’t be too philanthropic, will you? You’re so delightfully symmetrical now!”
“I shall have plenty to do,” cried Robinette ardently. “I’ve told you before, I have so much motive power that I don’t know how to use it.”
“How about sharing a little of it with a friend!”
Lavendar’s voice was full of meaning, but Robinette refused to hear it. She had succumbed as quickly to his charm as he to hers, but while she still had command over her heart she did not intend parting with it unless she could give it wholly. She knew enough of her own nature to recognize that she longed for a rowing, not a drifting mate, and that nothing else would content her; but her instinct158urged that Lavendar’s indecisions and his uncertainties of aim were accidents rather than temperamental weaknesses. She suspected that his introspective moods and his occasional lack of spirits had a definite cause unknown to her.
“I haven’t a large income,” she said, after a moment’s silence, changing the subject arbitrarily, and thereby reducing her companion to a temporary state of silent rage.
“Yet no one would expect a woman like this to fall like a ripe plum into a man’s mouth,” he thought presently; “she will drop only when she has quite made up her mind, and the bough will need a good deal of shaking!”
“I haven’t a large income,” repeated Robinette, while Lavendar was silent, “only five thousand dollars a year, which is of course microscopic from the American standpoint and cost of living; so I can’t build free libraries and swimming baths and playgrounds, or do any big splendid things; but I can do dear159little nice ones, left undone by city governments and by the millionaires. I can sing, and read, and study; I can travel; and there are always people needing something wherever you are, if you have eyes to see them; one needn’t live a useless life even if one hasn’t any responsibilities. But”––she paused––“I’ve been talking all this time about my own plans and ambitions, and I began by asking yours! Isn’t it strange that the moment one feels conscious of friendship, one begins to want to know things?”
“My sister Amy would tell you I had no ambitions, except to buy as many books as I wish, and not to have to work too hard,” said Mark smiling, “but I think that would not be quite true. I have some, of a dull inferior kind, not beautiful ones like yours.”
“Do tell me what they are.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t; they’re not for show; shabby things like unsuccessful poor relations, who would rather not have too much notice taken of them. In a few160weeks I am going to drag them out of their retreat, brighten them up, inject some poetry into their veins, and then display them to your critical judgment.”
They were almost at a standstill now and neither of them was noticing it at all. As Mrs. Loring moved her seat the boat lurched somewhat to one side. Mark, to steady her, placed his hand over hers as it rested on the rail, and she did not withdraw it. Then he found the other hand that lay upon her knee, and took it in his own, scarcely knowing what he did. He looked into her face and found no anger there. “I wish to tell you more about myself,” he stammered, “something not altogether creditable to me; but perhaps you will understand. Perhaps even if you don’t understand you will forgive.”
She drew her hands gently away from his grasp. “I shall try to understand, you may rely on that!” she said.
“I’m not going to trouble you with any very dreadful confessions,” he said, “only161it’s better to hear things directly from the people concerned, and you are sure to hear a wrong version sooner or later.”––Then stopping suddenly he exclaimed, “Hullo! we’re stuck, I declare! look at that!”
Robinette turned and saw that their boat was now scarcely surrounded with water at all. On every side, as if the flanks of some great whale were upheaving from below, there appeared stretches of glistening mud. Just in front of them, where there still was a channel of water, was an upstanding rock. “Shall we row quickly there?” she cried. “Then perhaps we can get out and pull the boat to the other side, where there is more water. What has happened?”
“Oh, something not unusual,” said Lavendar grimly, “that I’m a fool, and the sea-tide has ebbed, as tides have been known to do before. I’m afraid a man doesn’t watch tides when he has a companion like you! Now we’re left high, but not at all dry, as you see, till the tide turns.”
162
By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant. Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the boat. “It’s all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!” she panted. “Now, what are we to do?” She spread out her hands in dismay, and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet, one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. “What an object I shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy’s eye, when, if ever, it does light on me again! Meanwhile163it seems as if we might be here for some hours. The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she couldn’t bear it.”
Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.
“It’s perfectly hopeless,” he said, “the best thing we can do is to beget some philosophy.”
“Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water,” she interpolated.
“We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat or on the rock?”
“I don’t see much difference, do you? Except that the passing boats, if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a boat in the mud.”
164
They landed on the rock for the second time. “For my part it’s no great punishment,” said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, “since the place is big enough for two and you’re one of them!”
“Wouldn’t this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess your faults as any?” asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as possible. “I’ll even offer a return of confidence upon my own weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:––
“What have you sought you should have shunned,And into what new follies run?”
“Oh, what a bad rhyme!” said Lavendar.
“It’s Pythagoras, any way,” she explained.
Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. “This is not merely a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of your friends I should165like you to know that––to put it plainly––my own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless jilt.”
“That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story.”
“In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for life when I, all too late, found out my mistake.”
There passed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.
Robinette stared at the stretches of ooze,166and then stole a look at Mark Lavendar. “The idea of calling that man a jilt,” she thought. “Look at his eyes; look at his mouth; listen to his voice; there is truth in them all. Oh for a sight of the girl he jilted! How much it would explain! No, not altogether, because the careless making of his engagement would have to be accounted for, as well as the breaking of it. Unless he did it merely to oblige her––and men are such idiots sometimes,––then he must have fancied he was in love with her. Perhaps he is continually troubled with those fancies. Nonsense! you believe in him, and you know you do.” Then aloud she said, sympathetically, “I’m afraid we are apt to make these little experimental journeys in youth, when the heart is full ofwanderlust. We start out on them so lightly, then they lead nowhere, and the walking back alone is wearisome and depressing.”
“My return journey was depressing enough at first,” said Lavendar, “because the particular167She was unkinder to me than I deserved even; but better counsels have prevailed and I shall soon be able to meet the reproachful gaze of stout matrons and sour spinsters more easily than I have for a year past; you see the two families were friends and each family had a large and interested connection!”
“If the opinion of a comparative stranger is of any use to you,” said Robinette, standing on the rock and scraping her stockinged foot free of mud, “Ibelieve in you, personally! You don’t seem a bit ‘jilty’ to me! I’d let you marry my sister to-morrow and no questions asked!”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” cried Lavendar.
“I haven’t; that’s only a figure of speech; just a phrase to show my confidence.”
“And isn’t it ungrateful to be obliged to say I can’t marry your sister, after you have given me permission to ask her!”
168
“Not only ungrateful but unreasonable,” said Robinette saucily, turning her head to look up the river and discovering from her point of vantage a moving object around the curve that led her to make hazardous remarks, knowing rescue was not far away. “What have you against my sister, pray?”
“Very little!” he said daringly, knowing well that she held him in her hand, and could make him dumb or let him speak at any moment she desired. “Almost nothing! only thatsheis not offering mehersister as a balm to my woes.”
“Shehasno sister; she is an only child!––There! there!” cried Robinette, “the tide is coming up again, and the mud banks off in that direction are all covered with water! I see somebody in a boat, rowing towards us with superhuman energy. Oh! if I hadn’t worn a white dress! It willnotcome smooth; and my lovely French hat is ruined by the dampness! My one shoe shows how inappropriately I was shod, and whoever is169coming will say it is because I am an American. He will never know you wouldn’t let me go upstairs and dress properly.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” rejoined Mark, “because it is only Carnaby coming. You might know he would find us even if we were at the bottom of the river.”
170XIIICARNABY TO THE RESCUE
At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o’clock. Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.
“Carnaby,” said his grandmother, “do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?”
“No, I don’t,” said Carnaby, sulkily.
“Your cousin Robinetta,”––with meaning,––“perhaps you know her whereabouts?”
“Not I!” replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. “I was ferreting with Wilson.” He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen171minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.
“Call Bates,” commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. “Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?”
“Mr. Lavendar, ma’am,” said Bates, “Mr. Lavendar and Mrs. Loring they went out in the boat after tea. Mr. Lavendar asked William for the key, and William he went down and got out the oars and rudder, ma’am.”
“Does William know where they went?” asked Mrs. de Tracy in high displeasure. “Was it to Wittisham?”
“No, ma’am, William says they went down stream. He thinks perhaps they were going to the Flag Rock, and he says the gentleman wouldn’t have a hard pull, as the tide was going out. But Mr. Lavendar knows the river well, ma’am, as well as Mr. Carnaby here.”
“Then I conclude there is no immediate cause for anxiety,” said Mrs. de Tracy with172satire. “You can serve dinner, Bates; there seems no reason why we should fast as yet! However, Carnaby,” she continued, “as the men cannot be spared at this hour, you had better go at once and see what has happened to our guests.”
“Right you are,” cried Carnaby with the utmost alacrity. He was hungry, but the prospect of escape was better than food. He rushed away, and his boat was in mid-river before Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon had finished their tepid soup.
A very slim young moon was just rising above the woods, but her tender light cast no shadows as yet, and there were no stars in the sky, for it was daylight still. The evening air was very fresh and cool; there was no wind, and the edges of the river were motionless and smooth, although in mid-stream the now in-coming tide clucked and swirled as it met the rush. Over at Wittisham one or two lights were beginning to twinkle, and there came drifting across the173water a smell of wood smoke that suggested evening fires. Carnaby handled a boat well, for he had been born a sailor, as it were, and his long, powerful strokes took him along at a fine pace. But although he was going to look for Robinette and Mark, he was rather angry with both of them, and in no hurry. He rested on his oars indifferently and let the tide carry him up as it liked, while, with infinite zest, he unearthed a cigarette case from the recesses of his person, lit a cigarette, and smoked it coolly. Under Carnaby’s apparent boyishness, there was a certain somewhat dangerous quality of precocity, which was stimulated rather than checked by his grandmother’s repressive system. His smoking now was less the monkey-trick of a boy, than an act of slightly cynical defiance. He was no novice in the art, and smoked slowly and daintily, throwing back his head and blowing the smoke sometimes through his lips and sometimes through his nose. He looked for the moment older than his years, and174a difficult young customer at that. His present sulky expression disappeared, however, under the influence of tobacco and adventure.
“Where the dickens are they?” he began to wonder, pulling harder.
A bend in the river presently solved the mystery. On a wide stretch of mud-bank, which the tide had left bare in going out, but was now beginning to cover again, a solitary boat was stranded.
With this clue to guide him, Carnaby’s bright eyes soon discovered the two dim forms in the distance.
“Ahoy!” he shouted, and received a joyous answer. Robinette and Mark were the two derelicts, and their rescuer skimmed towards them with all his strength.
He could get only within a few yards of the rock to which their boat was tied, and from that distance he surveyed them, expecting to find a dismal, ship-wrecked pair, very much ashamed of themselves and getting175quite weary of each other. On the contrary the faces he could just distinguish in the uncertain light, were radiant, and Robinette’s voice was as gay as ever he had heard it. He leaned upon his oars and looked at them with wonder.
“Angel cousin!” cried Robinette. “Have you a little roast mutton about you somewhere, we are so hungry!”
“Youarea pretty pair!” he remarked. “What have you been and done?”
“We just went for a row after tea, Middy dear,” said Robinette, “and look at the result.”
“You’re not rowing now,” observed Carnaby pointedly.
“No,” said Mark, “we gave up rowing when the water left us, Carnaby. Conversation is more interesting in the mud.”
“But how did you get here? I thought you were going to the Flag Rock?” demanded Carnaby.
“Is there a Flag Rock, Middy dear? I176didn’t know,” said Robinette innocently. “It shows we shouldn’t go anywhere without our first cousin once removed. We just began to talk, here in the boat, and the water went away and left us.” Then she laughed, and Mark laughed too, and Carnaby’s look of unutterable scorn seemed to have no effect upon them. They might almost have been laughing at him, their mirth was so senseless, viewed in any other light.
“It’s nearly eight o’clock,” he said solemnly. “Perhaps you can form some idea as to what grandmother’s saying, and Bates.”
“Well, you’re going to be our rescuer, Middy darling, so it doesn’t matter,” said Robinette. “Look! the water’s coming up.”
But Carnaby seemed in no mood for waiting. He had taken off his boots, and rolled up his trousers above his knees.
“I’d let Lavendar wade ashore the best way he could!” he said, “but I s’pose I’ve got to save you or there’d be a howl.”
“No one would howl any louder than you,177dear, and you know it. Don’t step in!” shrieked Robinette, “I’ve confided a shoe already to the river-mud! I just put my foot in a bit, to test it, and down the poor foot went and came up without its shoe. Oh, Middy dear, if your young life––”
“Blow my young life!” retorted Carnaby. He was performing gymnastics on the edge of his boat, letting himself down and heaving himself up, by the strength of his arms. His legs were covered with mud.
“No go!” he said. “It’s as deep as the pit here; sometimes you can find a rock or a hard bit. We must just wait.”
They had not long to wait after all, for presently a rush of the tide sent the water swirling round the stranded boat, and carried Carnaby’s craft to it.
“Now it’ll be all right,” said he. “You push with the boat-hook, Mark, and I’ll pull”; but it took a quarter of an hour’s pushing and pulling to get the boat free of the mud.
Except for the moon it would have been178quite dark when the party reached the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby’s arm. He was sulking still. There was something he felt, but could not understand, in the subtle atmosphere of happiness by which the truant couple seemed to be surrounded; a something through which he could not reach; that seemed to put Robinette at a distance from him, although her shoulder touched his and her hand was on his arm. Growing pangs of his manhood assailed him, the male’s jealousy of the other male. For the moment he hated Mark; Mark talking joyous nonsense in a way rather unlike himself, as if the night air had gone to his head.
“I am glad you had the ferrets to amuse you this afternoon,” said Robinette, in a propitiatory tone. “Ferrets are such darlings, aren’t they, with their pink eyes?”
“O!darlings,” assented Carnaby derisively.179“One of the darlings bit my finger to the bone, not that that’s anything to you.”
“Oh! Middy dear, I am sorry!” cried Robinette. “I’d kiss the place to make it well, if we weren’t in such a hurry!”
Carnaby began to find that a dignified reserve of manner was very difficult to keep up. His grandmother could manage it, he reflected, but he would need some practice. When they came to a place where there were sharp stones strewn on the road, he became a mere boy again quite suddenly, and proposed a “queen’s chair” for Robinette. And so he and Lavendar crossed hands, and one arm of Robinette encircled the boy’s head, while the other just touched Lavendar’s neck enough to be steadied by it. Their laughter frightened the sleepy birds that night. The demoralized remnant of a Bank Holiday party would have been, Lavendar observed, respectability itself in comparison with them; and certainly no such group had ever approached Stoke Revel before. They were to180enter by a back door, and Carnaby was to introduce them to the housekeeper’s room, where he undertook that Bates would feed them. Lavendar alone was to be ambassador to the drawing room.
“The only one of us with a boot on each foot, of course we appoint him by a unanimous vote,” said Robinette.
But the chief thing that Carnaby remembered, after all, of that evening’s adventure, was Robinette’s sudden impulsive kiss as she bade him good-night, Lavendar standing by. She had never kissed him before, for all her cousinliness, but she just brushed his cool, round cheek to-night as if with a swan’s-down puff.
“That’s a shabby thing to call a kiss!” said the embarrassed but exhilarated youth.
“Stop growling, you young cub, and be grateful; half a loaf is better than no bread,” was Lavendar’s comment as he watched the draggled and muddy but still charming Robinette up the stairway.
181XIVTHE EMPTY SHRINE
Lavendar had discovered, much to his dismay, that he must return to London upon important business; it was even a matter of uncertainty whether his father could spare him again or would consent to his returning to Stoke Revel to conclude Mrs. de Tracy’s arrangements about the sale of the land.
Affairs of the heart are like thunderstorms; the atmosphere may sometimes seem charged with electricity, and yet circumstances, like a sudden wind that sweeps the clouds away before they break, may cause the lovers to drift apart. Or all in a moment may come thunder, lightning, and rain from a clear sky, and there is nothing that is apt to precipitate matters like an unexpected parting.
When Lavendar announced that he had182to leave Stoke Revel, two pairs of eyes, Miss Smeardon’s and Carnaby’s, instantly looked at Robinette to see how she received the news, but she only smiled at the moment. She was just beginning her breakfast, and like the famous Charlotte, “went on cutting bread and butter,” without any sign of emotion.
“Hurrah!” thought the boy. “Now we can have some fun, and I’ll perhaps make her see that old Lavendar isn’t the only companion in the world.”
“She minds,” thought Miss Smeardon, “for she buttered that piece of bread on the one side a minute ago, and now she’s just done it on the other––and eaten it too.”
“She doesn’t care a bit,” thought Lavendar. “She’s not even changed colour; my going or staying is nothing to her; I needn’t come back.”
He had made up his mind to return just the same, if it were at all possible, and he told Mrs. de Tracy so. She remarked graciously that he was a welcome guest at any183time, and Carnaby, hearing this, pinched Lord Roberts till he howled like a fiend, and fled for comfort to his mistress’s lap.
“You little coward,” said Carnaby, “you should be ashamed to bear the name of a hero.”
“I’ve mentioned to you before, Carnaby, I think, that I dislike that jest,” said his grandmother, and Carnaby advancing to the injured beast said, “Yes, ma’am, and so does Bobs, doesn’t he, Bobs?” reducing the lap-dog to paroxysms of fury. “Would it be any better if I called himKitchener?” hissing the word into the animal’s face. “Jealous, Bobs? Eh?Kitchener.” This last word had a rasping sound that irritated the little creature more than ever; his teeth jibbered with anger, and Miss Smeardon had to offer him a saucer of cream before he could be calmed down enough for the rest of the party to hear themselves speak.
“Had you nice letters this morning? Mine were very uninteresting,” Robinette remarked184to Lavendar as they stood together at the doorway in the sunshine, while Carnaby chased the lap-dog round and round the lawn.
“I had only two letters; one was from my sister Amy, the candid one! her letters are not generally exhilarating.”
“Oh, I know, home letters are usually enough to send one straight to bed with a headache! They never sound a note of hope from first to last; although if you had no home, but only a house, like me, with no one but a caretaker in it, you’d be very thankful to get them, doleful or not.”
“I doubt it,” Mark answered, for Amy’s letter seemed to be burning a hole in his pocket at that moment. He had skimmed it hurriedly through, but parts of it were already only too plain.
When the others had gone into the house, he went off by himself, and jumping the low fence that divided the lawn from the fields beyond, he flung himself down under185a tree to read it over again. Carnaby, spying him there, came rushing from the house, and was soon pouring out a tale of something that had happened somewhere, and throwing stones as he talked, at the birds circling about the ivied tower of the little church.
The field was full of buttercups up to the very churchyard walls. “I must get away by myself for a bit,” Lavendar thought. “That boy’s chatter will drive me mad.” At this point Carnaby’s volatile attention was diverted by the sight of a gardener mounting a ladder to clear the sparrows’ nests from the water chutes, and he jumped up in a twinkling to take his part in this new joy. Lavendar rose, and strolled off with his hands in his pockets and his bare head bent. The grass he walked in was a very Field of the Cloth of Gold. His shoes were gilded by the pollen from the buttercups, his eyes dazzled by their colour; it was a relief to pass through the stone archway that led into the little churchyard. To his spirit at that moment186the chill was refreshing. He loitered about for a few minutes, and then seeing that the door was open, he entered the church, closing the door gently behind him.
It was very quiet in there and even the chirping of the sparrows was softened into a faint twitter. Here at last was a place set apart, a moment of stillness when he might think things out by himself.
He took out Amy’s letter, smoothing it flat on the prayer books before him, and forced himself to read it through. The early paragraphs dealt with some small item of family news which in his present state of mind mattered to Lavendar no more than the distant chirruping of the birds, out there in the sunshine. “You seem determined to stay for some time at Stoke Revel,” his sister wrote. “No doubt the pretty American is the attraction. She sounds charming from your description, but my dear man, that’s all froth! How many times have I heard this sort of187thing from you before! Remember I know everything about your former loves.”
“Youdon’t, then,” said Lavendar to himself. Down, down, down at the bottom of the well of the heart where truth lies, there is always some remembrance, generally a very little one, that can never be told to any confidant.
“You will find out faults in Mrs. Loring presently, just like the rest of them,” continued the pitiless writer. (Amy’s handwriting was painfully distinct.) “I must tell you that at the Cowleys’ the other day, I suddenly came face to face with Gertrude Meredithand Dolly! Dolly looks a good deal older already and fatter, I thought. I fear she is losing her looks, for her colour has become fixed, and shewillwear no collars still, although on a rather thick neck, it’s not at all becoming. I spoke to her for about three minutes, as it was less awkward, when we met suddenly face to face like that. She laughed a good deal, and asked for you188rather audaciously, I thought. They live near Winchester now, and since the Colonel’s death are pretty badly off, Gertrude says. Dolly is going to Devonshire to stay with the Cowleys; you may meet her there any day, remember. It does seem incredible to me that a man of your discrimination could have been won by the obvious devotion of a girl like Dolly; but having given your word I almost think you would better have kept it, rather than suffer all this criticism from a host of mutual friends.”
Lavendar groaned aloud. He had a good memory, and with all too great distinctness did he now remember Dolly Meredith’s laugh. How wretched it had all been; not a word had ever passed between them that had any value now. If he could have washed the thought of her forever from his memory, how greatly he would have rejoiced at that moment.
Well, it was over; written down against him, that he had been what the world called189a jilt and a fool; yes, certainly a fool, but not so great a one as to follow his folly to its ultimate conclusion, and tie himself for life to a woman he did not love.
Lavendar was extraordinarily sensitive about the breaking of his engagement; partly because Miss Meredith herself, in her first rage, had avowed his responsibility for her blighted future, giving him no chance for chivalrous behaviour; partly because in all his transient love affairs he had easily tired of the women who inspired them. He seemed thirsty for love, but weary of it almost as soon as the draught reached his lips.
And now had he a chance again?––or was it all to end in disappointment once more, in that cold disappointment of the heart that has received stones for bread? It was not entirely his own fault; he had expected much from life, and hitherto had received very little. But Robinette!
“Let me find all her faults now,” he said to himself, “or evermore keep silent; meantime190I hope I am not concealing too many of my own.”
He tried to force himself into criticism; to look at her as a cold observer from the outside would have done; for that curious Border country of Love which he had entered has not an equable climate at all. It is fire and frost alternate; and criticism is either roused almost to a morbid pitch, or else the faculty is drugged, and nothing, not even the enumeration of a hundred foibles will awaken it for a time.
When the cold fit had been upon him the evening before, Lavendar had said to himself that her manner was too free––that she had led him on too quickly; no, that expression was dishonourable and unjust; he repented it instantly; she had been too unself-conscious, too girlish, too unthinking, in what she said and did. “But she’s a widow after all, though she’s only two and twenty,” he went on to himself. “Hang it! I wish she were not! If her heart were in her husband’s191grave I should be moaning at that; and because I see that it is not, I become critical. There’s nothing quite perfect in life!”
He had begun by noticing some little defects in her personal appearance, but he was long past that now; what did such trifles matter, here or there? Then he remembered all that he had heard said about American women. Did those pretty clothes of hers mean that she would be extravagant and selfish to obtain them? Could a young man with no great fortune offer her the luxury that was necessary to her? and even so, what changes come with time! He had a full realization of what the boredom of family life can be, when passion has grown stale.
“At seventy, say, when I am palsied and she is old and fat, will romance be alive then? Will such feeling leave anything real behind it when it falls away, as the white blossoms on Mrs. Prettyman’s plum tree will shrink and fall a fortnight hence?”