She handed him cherries out of her apron which was all stained with their juice. She was lucky to be married, she said; at home her mother would have fed her on bread and water for this. Here there was no one to scold but Nurse and Mr. Cork, and he was away. A sullen frightened look crossed her face as she spoke his name; it was as though she had not meant to do so. She hurried to hold out more cherries to him, to tell him how early this one tree had ripened in the hollow.
“You have earrings,” she said, “and I have none,” and she hung a bunch of cherries over each ear.
“Do you not want to know who I am and where I come from?”
“I know all about you.”
It was his turn to look anxious. He still did not know what had happened that night over six months ago.
“What do you know?”
“That you are a beggar.”
“That is true, but how did you know it?” He looked with hurt pride at his clothes.
“And that you live in a palace.”
“Why yes, at Whitehall. What else do you know?”
She would tell him no more of what the fortune grasses had told. It was his turn to surprise her. “The fellow clog to this one,” he said, holding it up, “was tied with a green thong instead of scarlet.” No, he had not seen it in the grass. He could not find it. Neither could, but they soon gave up the search.
He told her his name was Tarleton and Ned to his friends. She told him she was called Nan, not Anne, and that her father used to call her Nancy Pretty, which was the name in these parts of a flower that grew in the cottage gardens. None So Pretty it used to be, which might be a compliment, but not the way her brothers and sisters took it. “She’s none so pretty,” they would call to her, laughing at her. She described the cluster of tiny pink blossoms suspended so airily round their stalk that they seemed to be flying round it like a flock of doves round a dovecot—or the flock of little birds round the girl with white gloves that she had seen through the window of Stoking House. But she did not add that, for it would take time to explain it all to someone who had not seen it, and he was saying something far more interesting.
“Why, that flower is London Pride, and so would you be if you came to Court.”
“I! Oh! My mother would not say so.”
Unflattering descriptions of her person and manners raced through her head. She gave him some brief samples. He looked at her gravely and did not call her beautiful, as a gallant should, and for this she was in some odd way grateful. But he told her that mothers and manners were no longer the mode.
“Mr. Dryden has said that if a woman have but gaiety and good humour, she may be forgiven the lack of beauty.”
Yet as he said it he thought she stood in small need of such clemency. Certainly when he had seen her in the tree he had mistaken her for a beauty—or had he never thought about it? Never before had he looked at a woman without considering if she were beautiful or not, and now that he came to consider it, never before had he had such difficulty in deciding. For of course she was not beautiful, and most certainly not elegant, yet he could not take his eyes from her, he felt that if he did she might change into something else, and that at any moment he might find there was nothing but a squirrel or a bird on the branch beside him, or only the dazzle of the last sunbeam through the leaves.
At the same time he was telling her that to be natural and easy was all that mattered The world had grown franker and freer since the wars, and the people who counted were young and adventurous. Great ladies bawled Billingsgate jokes from their coaches in Hyde Park to young playwrights many yards away, or fell asleep in them with their mouths open. “The real queen just now is an orange-girl from Drury Lane, and a little like what you might be if you had been bred in a London gutter instead of the woods.” As an extreme example of natural manners he cited a countess who, dressed as a page, held the Duke of Buckingham’s horse while he killed her husband in a duel. “Would you do the same if I killed yours?”
He had said “husband,” yet she thought of Mr. Cork, and answered him with a sudden gleam of teeth and eyes: “Sure, sir, if I went to Court I would follow the mode.”
“You would not. You would make it. You should never listen to your mother. No one listens to old women now unless they are very scandalous. Now I come to think of it, there are very few to be seen.”
“Have they all died?”
“No, they have grown young. Youth is the fashion. London is full of old women newly painted, and young men newly promoted. There is a new young Government every time the King’s mistresses quarrel. When the last old man who governed left Whitehall, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, ran out into the aviary in her smock to laugh at his downfall, and all the young men came and talked to her in her bird-cage and told her she was the bird of Paradise.”
He looked at her as he spoke and thought of a wren. When she flapped her hands on the branch in her delight, they were like the fluttering of small brown wings. Such an audience could not fail to make for wit. He had never talked so much nor so fast, nor did he have even an instant’s regret that none at the Court had ever heard him to such advantage. He told her he was in disgrace there, and with laughter, for it now seemed the best stroke of fortune that had ever happened to him. Scandals soon blew over. The young Earl of Rochester was banished on an average of once a year and returned each time more in favour. No one could be troubled now to remember an affront or a pedigree or a debt or an obligation or an old love affair.
Ned’s crime was a play that was thought to touch too nearly on the comedies of the Royal ménage. The King had laughed heartily, in the unfailing Royal tradition, but added, “this is a good joke but bad policy,” and complained that it aided the erroneous impression that he was not the master of his mistresses. So it was taken off, and a ballet put on, at which the King yawned, and was heard to utter the cryptic statement that whatever the Royal Society might decide about the nature of the centipede, it was certain that women had too many legs.
“How my mother would agree with him,” cried Nan.
“The prude and the tired rake often agree,” said Ned sagely. “But I talk all the time. It is your turn.”
“I have nothing to tell. Yes I have. I once saw the King. It was very long ago. I will tell that later.”
“Yes, for I said I would return to supper and I must not offend your husband.”
“He would not notice it. But all the thousand things you have begun—will there ever be time enough to tell me?”
“There is all time,” said Ned gravely, and he laid his hand on hers.
“I will show you my house,” she said.
“What—Cricketts Manor—” he drew away his hand.
“No, no. My house. I made it. No one else knows of it, not Mr. Cork, nor even Nurse. Out of branches and bracken,” she went on hurriedly. “Down in the wood by the stream.”
“Who is Mr. Cork? You spoke of him before.”
“He is nobody. He is the chaplain. He is very grave and severe, but he has been very kind to me. He is old—old—” she had never known how old till she saw Ned.
“He is her lover,” thought Ned, and she saw him thinking it, and was glad, for she need not pretend.
The sun had slipped down, the fields had grown dark and the sky pale gold. They moved from the tree. She would go home apart from him and slip in by a back way, and when they met at supper they would pretend it was for the first time. He would say he had gone to look for his hostess but failed to find her.
Both had learned to lie from childhood; only, for a moment longer, they were still alone in a world where they need not lie. He took her hands in his. The dew clung round their feet, the wind had dropped, the birds were silent. The sickle of the new moon was now clear in the sky. She stood awaiting his kiss yet not wishing it. She gazed at him, seeing no longer the ribbons and laces of his Court clothes, seeing only the dimming face of her lover; and “oh,” she sighed deep in her heart, “if only it could be for the first time.”
>
The moment of suspense that had held them both as under a spell was shivered; a light breeze rose again and stirred the rustling grasses so that in the dusk the white heads of the daisies were all turned one way. And as though caught unawares by the wind their two heads also turned to look and then back again, seeing each other, and on a little cry moved together and met in a kiss.
Nan did not again remember Mr. Cork. Now that she had kissed Ned, she no longer remembered that it was not for the first time.
She left him to walk home a different way, and ran back to ask him one more question; started again, and this time it was he who called her back.
“Sweet, I must go,” and she went across the fields.
“Sweet, sweet, sweet.”
It was a blackbird calling. He had changed his tune.
Their caution was only for that first evening, a concession to Ned’s civilized sense of decorum in the conduct of such matters. He was cured of it by supper-time. Bess Tiddle was present. Nan sat opposite her and between Mr. Hambridge and Ned Tarleton. Ned averted his eyes whenever Bess ate, and that was most of the time. Nor did he enjoy the sight of his host. He dared not look sideways at Nan. She was curiously cool, he thought.
“It is only while Mr. Cork is away that Bess sups with us,” she had told him, “they are afraid when he is here.” She spoke so easily of her husband’s mistress that he might well have questioned her as to her own relations with him; yet he who had lived since a child in the two most profligate Courts of Europe found himself too bashful to approach so nauseous a subject. He had to remind himself at table that Nan could only be an unwilling victim, yet now that he was there on her other side, how could she hold her head so high and look so free? The repellent company affected his own feelings towards her, he could not bear to think her insensible to it.
But soon he was to see her wince though not from that cause. Mr. Hambridge had at once recalled Ned’s presence at the cock-fight among the others from Stoking Place, and welcomed him gladly. At supper some further memory impinged on his mind; he sat and stared at Ned; at last he said, “You were the one that stayed to supper. A rare game we had that night. Remember how Mrs. Anne here gave us the slip?”
Nan’s startled gaze penetrated even his heavy perceptions.
“Why,” said he, “no harm done then, nor meant. Can’t a man joke about a frolic more than half a year old?”
But none joked with him. Ned hastily explained how unaccustomed his head was to the country ways of drinking wine, mulled and sweetened, and then, as Mr. Hambridge began to lour upon him and mutter darkly concerning these thin white wines from France which he was told the fools at Court were content to drink, he had to assure him that his palate, though not his head, was all in favour of the country drinks, especially on a winter’s night.
His host was appeased, he declared he must stay the night and drink till late with him. Ned insisted that he must return. As soon as they had finished eating, Nan left the room. He soon contrived to follow her, and found her in the stable, sitting on the edge of the stall and stroking his horse’s nose.
“I cannot stay and drink with him,” he said, “and so I must go. I will come again tomorrow. But I cannot leave you here till then.”
He must rescue her at once from those sluggish monsters. He could not believe that she had been in that house close on ten months, “and with that—” his voice choked, and finished after a pause with the words, “your husband.”
“Was it you,” said Nan, “who said that about the pea under the nine mattresses?”
He did not know what she meant. She leaned her face against his horse’s neck so that he could not see it, and said, “Yes it was. And you lay on the floor and your ring had a face on it set about with diamonds. I saw it at supper.”
La Grande Mademoiselle had given him that ring but he did not tell her, knowing that now she would scarcely attend to what would have pleased her earlier.
He could not think why they had both grown so unhappy.
Then he remembered that night. She had been in the room. She was horrified at him, who had presumed to feel distaste because she was married to her husband.
“Seneca—” he began.
“I do not care to hear about Seneca,” said a miserable voice, muffled by the horse’s neck. She had heard far too much of Seneca from Mr. Cork.
“If you will let me finish you will see that he bears my apology, for he has said ‘as often as I go among men, I return the less a man,’ and I have often found it true and wished it were not. We get together and drink and think we are gods, and become brutes. Nan, forgive me, you must forgive me.”
“You? But it is myself. Well then, I’ll tell you. No I won’t. Oh, Ned, what shall I do? For it was you that I left lying on the floor, and if I had never seen you there I might never have gone, for I meant to go to Nurse, I remember that, and then I saw you and changed my mind, I don’t know why. But you were only a drunken man fallen down in my room. How could I tell it was you?”
“Where were you then and where did you go?”
But there she stopped, she looked round at him with her cheek still laid against his horse, and her eyes glanced strangely at him and then fell.
He saw that she was not angry with him. He could not then see why it should matter now. It had all happened so long ago and they had not met then. Everything was different since they met. A wind had blown their heads together in a kiss. A wind had caught them up and was carrying them they did not know where. Nothing that had happened before then could matter now. He caught at her hand, he told her the world was new, and they only born in it today. They were young. All their lives lay before them for them to love each other.
But she hardly heard his eager stammering words though she heard his voice and knew that he loved her. She felt that she could never look at him, never think of him, without remembering how she had left him to go to Mr. Cork.
They met on the common or in the woods, and she took him to her house by the stream.
Foxgloves stood sentinel round it and bees buzzed in and out of the bells. She put her fingers in them and walked them up as on ladders. She cut a bracken stalk and showed him the tiny picture of an oak-tree that God has put in every one as a sign and a remembrance ever since King Charles escaped his enemies by climbing into an oak.
She had forgotten her sadness with him. He remembered, but only that he might enjoy her present enchanting happiness the more. The shadows that had troubled his own mind in that dreadful house sped away as fast as he now touched on them. Mr. Hambridge had never made her his wife; it was a miracle especially appointed for his sake.
There was an island about two feet long in the stream just opposite the house under the chestnut-tree, and here they made a garden in the approved modern Dutch fashion. They waded in and out of the water and mud, they called to each other in low, serious voices, intent on their work. The summer-house and statues were of white clay mud. They made clipped trees from bits of holly and box, chopped them into fantastic shapes and stuck them in the ground as hedges round the moss lawns. They took twigs and stripped them bare and bound them together with threads pulled from Nan’s linen dress. These were the gates of wrought iron into their miniature Paradise. Ned christened it Versailles in honour of the amazing new gardens King Louis had begun to build first for his La Vallière, a mistress better pleased with a cottage or a convent than a palace.
Mr. Cork’s conversation had cast shadows from the world across her mind, of doubts and discontents and plotting troubled heads. Now Ned’s talk gave her reflections of it as bright as those of the bubbles in the stream. A few big thunder raindrops fell, and made fountains in it the size of thimbles; the long rays of the setting sun painted in each a minute rainbow which they could see for an instant only. The fountains at Versailles were as tall as houses, the rain at Versailles, according to one fanatical flatterer, “did not wet.”
“I once tried to make a play of such a garden,” Ned told her. “The
re was a statue in it so beautiful that the King commanded it should come to life for one night for his pleasure. But the sculptor who made her also loved her, and wished to prevent it.”
“Which of them did she love when she came to life?”
“The King of course. All women would. So will you when you come to Court.”
“I will never love anyone but you.”
“A princess once told me that all who are in love believe that love lasts for ever.”
“Has yours for her lasted?”
“Yes, for she is dead.”
“Then I do not mind.”
They both laughed. They clung to each other. It was exquisite folly to pretend even for an instant they could part.
She lay back on the grass with her eyes shut, as still as if she had been thrown there, yet how quickly she would spring into life when she moved again. He had compared her with Cockney Nelly; now he thought that if she had been bred in a court she might have been a little like Madame Henriette, but he did not say so.
Madame was a face seen in the wood when he was a boy. He had promised to write a tragedy for her. She had died young, and his mother had said he would have his love safe now for ever. These things were too sad and remote to tell Nan.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Is it true that however far you walk you will never come to the edge of the world and look over into nothing?”
“Yes, for I have watched a ship come up over the edge of the sea, and first of all come the masts and sails, and last the hulk, just as though it were climbing a hill. That proves it. People have always seen that but they did not think before.”
She had never seen the sea. So the world was round, he said, and had a little flat place at top and bottom, just like an orange.
But she had never seen an orange. He would give her one, he would give her the world if he could. She was made for the world and it for her.
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