“You have promised it to me,” she cried, and clapped her hands, for so had her father, and now she knew the promises would come true. The first time she had seen the world it had been out of her reach, a fruit unripe for her. Now it was ready for her plucking. With a flashing movement of her head into the sunlight, she turned and kissed him, and he caught her to him.
A bird with fluttering heart lay under his hand. A gipsy flung her arms round him and laughed. A wood nymph slid from his embrace and placed a foxglove bell between his lips when he thought to kiss her again. For a little time there was no world outside them and their love.
He came only once again to Cricketts, as a concession to Mr. Hambridge’s importunities. He was served with a barbarous country drink called birch wine, surprisingly potent. Ned contrived to spill most of his, and had the pleasure of seeing his host asleep before long. As he tiptoed out into the hall, Nan’s voice called low to him over the stairs. He saw her face peering down above the heavy banisters in the dusk; there was something strange and lovely in her appearance.
“Why do you stare so?” she asked as he approached her. “Do you like this old dress I found in the lumber-room?”
“I thought you were a ghost,” he said; “you looked like it, for no one wears a dress like that now.”
“A ghost? I do not want to be that.” A chill fell on their thoughts, that one day they must die.
“Sweet,” he said, “so should I appear a ghost if someone were to see me in this dress fifty years hence.”
“Fifty years hence. That is a long time. What dress shall we wear then? But what dance shall I learn now?”
For he had promised to teach her, and no place in the house could be quieter and better to their purpose than this long gallery, where the seven windows still showed a faint reflection of rose colour from the sunset. They stepped in and out of the squares of faint light between the shadow. But Ned was nervous. His dislike of the house returned to him. He would take her some day to Stoking Place on his horse and show her what was still there, and play the harpsichord for her to dance. There were so many things to do and say, there would never be time for them all.
She thought of the bright crowded room that she had seen, now lying nearly empty in the dusk, and she and Ned stepping up and down opposite each other, bowing and curtsying, seeing every movement that they made in the mirror with the green frame. She wanted so much to be there that she could not believe she would ever go again to Stoking.
But she went. They ran in and out of the rooms and up and down the corridors and numerous staircases; she saw a bed of crimson Genoa velvet, a rich and grotesque screen from Japan, bowls of brittle porcelain from the palace of an Emperor whose fingernails were a yard long, brought across the world to hold the English roses from the terrace outside. She took within her hand a twisted cone of paper covered with characters in red and black like no writing she had ever seen. Ned told her it was that of a Chinese tea merchant who wrote from left to right, as witches cross themselves. But the Chinese were not necessarily magicians, and magic was one of the things no longer à la mode, now that science was proving the real world as marvellous as a sorcerer’s dream. In all the centuries behind her, no one could ever have lived at so perfect a moment as this.
“And now let us see Old Rowley’s crown in the cellar,” said Ned.
He told her of his disappointment over that and how it had stung him to write his most imprudent play and so get him exiled here. “Towser bit me badly, but I can thank him for it now.”
Towser and Old Rowley and Mrs. B. or Mrs. Bitch, it must be a gay town, Nan thought, where everyone, even the King, was known by his or her nickname. But Towser was the name of a dog.
“And so he is, a snarling brute of a dog. That must have been the elderly long-nosed fellow you saw in the mirror playing the fiddle. He is Sir Roger L’Estrange who gives so much trouble by purifying the Press. Why did you not tap at the window that day?”
“I had no stockings.”
“Nor have half the maids of honour. It is a new economical fashion for those who cannot afford silk to show skin.”
She was not attending. He was surprised to see that she had grown absent since his mention of Sir Roger, and wondered what memory he could have roused with that name.
The memory was that of Mr. Cork. He had already been gone far longer than he had thought. And a fish had leapt into the air to promise her she should be happy.
“Please God wherever he is, oh don’t let him come back,” she prayed in her heart, and then she thought, “it would be better if he were dead. Yes, if only he were dead it would all be so easy,” but she did not dare put that into the form of a prayer. Not unless she said it backwards as the witches do, and said it to the devil. It was as though a flash of lightning had disclosed her black and stormy heart. She ran to Ned and clung to him.
“Ned, dear Ned, you said that witches are no longer à là mode, did you not? Does that mean that there are much fewer of them now, that soon there may not be any?”
“Dear Heart, what is troubling you? I do not know if there are witches or not. Many learned doctors say there are, and some deny it. Since the Royal Society was started, only two old women have been burnt as witches, instead of the many hundreds in the Commonwealth, I think unjustly myself. But, Nan, why do you tremble? Do you fear that someone has bewitched you?”
She shook her head. She could not tell her terror of herself. She looked on Ned and drew comfort from his candid and sensitive face. He seemed to her to stand in a clearer and lighter world, a world of large windows, wax candles, polished floors, smooth silks, of scientific knowledge, of common sense, easy love and toleration, where darkness and error and old, unreasonable fears would all grope away. He would help her to reach this world where there would be no need either to hate or fear poor Mr. Cork. She knelt and hugged his knees, looking up into his face.
He was shocked, he tried to raise her. “It is I should kneel to you,” he said.
“But oh!” she cried, “I want to be like you. I wish I were you yourself, inside you, then I should be safe with you for ever. Why do you love me, you who know so many lovely ladies?”
He could find no compliments as when he had stood in this airy spot and watched Illa Lesbia feed her sparrows.
All the things that he had been busy on for years, the competition for success and favour, the danger of giving offence, the friendships of a few months, the love affairs of a few weeks or nights, were now of idle importance. He had known that desire for pleasures more than human that impels men towards religion or sorcery, drink or crime or madness, the love of danger or strangeness or wild nature. In this smooth bright room where he had sat and talked scandal with others, he had grown uneasily aware of the wind and growing night outside, and had fancied he saw the face of his desire.
It had not been fancy, it was Nan who had looked in on his glittering world, just as he had looked out on hers and longed for its dark freedom. Twice they had been within touching distance of each other and not known it.
He took both her hands and looking into the face that he had thought was a trick of light and shadow, a flying bird, or a leaf blown in the wind, he told her the words of the old poet:
Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapelesse flame,
Angells affect us oft and worship’d bee.
And she, caught by the inspiration of their love and his poetic fire, saw for the first time a form and meaning in her life. For this she was born, for this did she listen to her father’s tales, watch by the roadside long ago in order to see the King come home and ride away over the hill, and wait and wait but never see him come back, for this did she look on the fire of London in the sky, marry, and go to Cricketts, near to Stoking, all that she might meet Ned and lie in his arms in the house that she had made, all unknowing, down by the stream.
She had forgotten Mr. Cork in her preliminaries. N
ow that Ned was her lover, she forgot that she had ever had another.
And he too thought their love had been planned from the beginning of their lives, perhaps of the world. He said, “Eternity is not just a continuance of life. It is something round us and within us. If we have nothing of it here, we can have nothing of it hereafter. I think when I saw you through the window I saw all I have ever looked for, but I cannot tell you what that is.”
She drew back from him, her arms above her head. Her happiness was too great for her to hold. She did not wonder what he meant, he was speaking to her out of his heart, as he had never spoken to anyone, and her heart answered him without words, or knowledge of what he said.
She left him at the roadside; she climbed the wall of the vegetable garden and looked down the long path through the archway on to the lawn. She saw a tall black figure walking there, his eyes bent on the square black bows of his square black shoes as they went up and down, up and down, on the dim and shining grass. That was why she had thought of him. She had known all along that he would come back, that he would come back this evening.
She ran back behind the wall to the parsley bed, and pulled a sprig and munched it, saying to herself, “There he is. There he is. Now what will you do?” She thought she would climb over the wall again and go round and enter the house from the front, and so meet him only when she came in to supper, when there would be Mr. Hambridge and perhaps Bess to protect her.
But she heard his steps going up and down, up and down, on the soft and dewy grass.
She stole up to the path again and peeped down through the arch just when his head was turned a little sideways as if looking through the arch. She did not know if he had seen her or not, but she dared not risk it. If he had caught sight of her there in the glimmering dusk among the gooseberry bushes, and she had not come forward, then he would know for sure that she had found her younger gayer lover as he had bidden her. And whatever happened, he must not know that.
She ran forward through the arch, throwing up her arms in the air.
“You have come back at last,” she cried. “Why were you so long away? Did you amuse yourself or was it very serious all the time? Oh, I have so much to tell you.”
Each word rang with a silly tinkling sound in her ears. She could hear it ringing false. She looked up at him with bright eager eyes and saw him looking through them, through her, seeing everything she sought to conceal. She held her hands against her heart. She kept back the words that rose stammering and sobbing within her, but dared find no speech.
He was holding out to her a black box between his hands. Little pieces of mother-of-pearl were inlaid in it in the shape of butterflies and strange insects. In the deep twilight they shone as though bits from the new risen moon had been chipped off and embedded in the smooth black surface.
He was still looking at her. His eyes seemed deeper than ever in his head. She could not distinguish their expression. They were two pits of darkness beneath his brow.
“I have brought you a box of tea.” His voice sounded dry and dead, as though it had long been disused.
She took the box in her arms and bent her head over it so that he should not see her tears. She had never cried before except for fear or anger or her father’s death. But now she was crying for Mr. Cork, because he had not brought the box before, while she still loved him.
Bess said to her lord and lover, “The chaplain’s nose is out of joint and he don’t know it.”
His answer was a smack across her mouth. About half an hour later he added, “Why must women meddle? Leave him to smell out his own nose.”
She had already taken the hint given by his immediate response, and did not speak to Mr. Cork, much as she would have liked to revenge herself for being sent back to the Lodge at supper time now he was again at home.
Nor did any of the household give him any information that might, as they well knew, bring harm to Mrs. Anne.
But at his first sight of her, Mr. Cork had known that she had found her younger, gayer lover.
He hurried the knowledge underground, he watched and argued with himself, he carefully amassed a hundred proofs against it that only tortured him with uncertainty, giving him excuse to lie awake night after night to ask himself what he already knew.
He made a few tentative inquiries in the village, and learned that a strange gentleman had ridden over from Stoking once or twice to supper, but no one gave him any description of him, or told him if Nan had been present or not. His relations with the villagers were not such as to help him to ask. He mentioned it to Nan in an elaborately careless fashion and a voice hoarse with nervousness, and she answered him in the same manner and a chirping falsetto.
“Oh yes, he and Mr. Hambridge pared the claws of a fighting-cock together and Mr. Hambridge said he did it vilely.”
They were both posturing and mumming. He would not submit himself to such indignity. He would not pry into her heart. She should open it of her own accord to him or not at all. For a moment he felt himself free to love her truly. The error and falsity of others were not his doing and should not therefore hurt him; his only part in the matter should be to help and heal where he could. Such love was as the love of God. He had failed as a man, he might still aspire to that.
He noticed that she was gentler with him, kinder and more concerned. She was more mature. His absence, perhaps even the presence of that popinjay, had taught her a greater regard for his qualities. Yes, he thought, her real love was for him, and only her lighter and unworthy fancy had gone out for a little time to some decked maypole, and now that he had long ago ridden back to Court, to a hundred other loves, she would forget him almost as fast as he had forgotten her.
It was necessary to tell himself this, to say amid his crumbling hopes, “At least I have not lived in vain. There is one creature that loves me.”
And looking on her face, he could believe it, for her eyes looked wistful, and he saw regret in them, the self-reproach that can mean the birth of a soul.
With this new and tenderer assurance, he could afford to be gentle. He asked nothing of her and did not even seek out her company too much. The scenes of recrimination and explanation that he had formerly courted, he now avoided as much as herself. Dread kept them both dumb.
She brought him tea in a glass goblet since they had no china dishes, and coaxed him to drink it, declaring it the most delicious, refreshing drink she had ever tasted, but she could not be sure that she had made it correctly. A Jesuit from China had said the hot water must not stay upon the tea-leaves any longer than you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely, but it proved too tedious a test. Nobody but she liked the tea. Mr. Hambridge spat it out, having scalded his tongue, and called it poison.
“How angry my mother would be if she saw me,” she said as she sipped and exclaimed in delight, “though I am sure she would take a sup of it fast enough if no one were looking.”
It sounded like someone else speaking. He had never heard her talk so much like other women. She for her part felt herself stifling. She had to go on being merry, being like herself, lest he should notice the difference; she had to force herself to keep still when he laid his hand on hers instead of jerking it away; she had to look into his sad and solemn face and know that she had of her own accord spoilt the gay plan of her life that had led her to Ned’s arms. Mr. Cork had never been for her, and all she had had to do was to wait for Ned who had been coming towards her all the time. She did not see that that too was part of the plan, for it was not in her to wait.
She wished to tell all this to Ned, who understood everything so well that she had said more difficult and perplexing things to him than she had ever thought to herself. But as soon as she met him again, she forgot everything but that they were together. Even their plans for the future, for the lodging he would find for her in London as soon as he was able to return to Court, were a troublesome though necessary intrusion.
The present moment lasted all the hot summer, ripened into the
fruits and mists of autumn, endured the early morning frosts, and still they did not realize that time was slipping from them, bringing the future to them.
Bess looked at Mr. Cork with a leer in her sleepy eyes. He knew that she had something to tell him but he would not ask her. Whatever he dreaded to hear would be doubly loathsome from such a source. He saw her standing in the doorway of the Lodge every time he came through the gates. He took to avoiding them and going round another way.
But her unspoken news had its effect. He found he could wait no longer in patience; he dared not question Nan but he began to urge his claims as a lover once again.
“You promised,” she said. “That last night you said it should be for the last time. And you wished it too. I cannot change all over again just because you have done so.”
He noticed a wild and hysterical note in her pleading.
Suspicion again reared its ugly head.
From now on a monster bore him company, whispered in his ear when he was alone, pointed at Nan when she spoke, bidding him note the thousand different airs and turns of speech she had acquired, and not from him; above all, her distaste for his near presence. At night he would wake suddenly, not knowing what had roused him, nor what it was that lay in wait for him in the dark region of his conscious mind. Then the memory would spring at him, he knew that he had been deserted, and wished that he had never woken.
“Speak to me,” he cried at last to her. “Tell me what it is that makes you different.”
He had met her in the garden. The dead leaves were falling fast, for it was already November. This time last year the fall of each leaf had brought them nearer to each other. The sparse beech-trees at the end of the churchyard had shone like gold that Sunday morning when he had preached his love to her, and she had listened to him as to an angel. It was on a night in December that she had come to him.
Now the turn of the year was separating them so fast that they seemed to be standing on either side of a flood which every moment grew wider, sweeping them apart.
None So Pretty Page 18