Despair's Last Journey Part 8

'Oh, yes, you did, though,' she retorted. 'And I'm not going to be friends with a boy as talks like that.'

'Not friends!' said Paul. 'Why, May?' He spoke in an accent of incredulous reproach.

'No,' she said. 'I'm properly shocked, I tell ee. I'm never going to be friends again.'

'If I thought that was goin' to be true,' said Paul, 'do you know what I'd do?'

'No, I don't,' she answered, 'and I don't want to.'

'I'd hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.'

'You'd do what? she asked.

To 'hull' is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was strange to her.

'I'd throw myself into that brook this minute, and never come out again.'

'Oh, you wicked boy!' she cried, but her eyes sparkled with triumph. She quenched the sparkle. 'It _is_ true; and after that piece of wickedness, it's truer than ever.'

Paul rose to his feet; his face was white, and his eyes stared as they had done when she had just rescued him.

'Good-bye, May,' he said.

'Good-bye,' she answered coolly.

'You're never goin' to be friends any more, May?'

'No,' she said, but rose to her feet with a shriek, for Paul had taken two swift paces, and had plunged back into the brook, clothes and all.

'Paul!' she shrilled after him. 'Paul! Don't ee drown. Don't ee now.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't ee!'

Paul stood shoulder-deep in the stream, and she besought him from the bank with clasped hands and frightened eyes.

'Goin' to be friends,' said Paul grimly.

'Yes, yes, yes!' she cried. 'Come out, do, there's a dear!'

Paul reached the bank in a stroke, and climbed back into the meadow.

The instant he gained his feet she rushed at him and boxed his ears furiously. Paul laughed with pleasure. He had had his head punched by every fighting peer within a mile of home, and the soft little hands fell like a sort of fairy snowflakes.

'Oh, you wicked, wicked, wicked boy!' she raged, stamping her foot at him. 'You can go in again as soon as ee want to. _I_ won't be so fullish as to call ee out.'

'D'ye mean it?' asked Paul, suddenly grim again.

'No,' she said, fawning on him with her hands, but doing it at a distance for fear of his wet clothes. 'But, Paul, child, you'll catch your death. Run home.'

'I'm not a child,' said Paul. 'I'm within two years as old as you are, May. I say, May------'

'Oh, do run home!' she coaxed him. 'Do ee, now, Paul, for my sake.'

'I'm off,' said Paul. 'Ask me anything like that, and I'll walk into fire _or_ water.'

'Why, Paul,' said the little Vanity, turning her face down, and looking up at him past her beautiful lashes and arched brows, 'whatever makes you talk like that?'

'Because it's the simple truth,' said Paul 'You try me, May.'

'But why is it the simple truth?' she asked.

'Because----' said Paul fiercely, and then stopped dead.

'Oh, that's no answer,' she said, with a little sway of her hips. She kept her eye upon him, but turned her head slightly aside. She might have practised glance and posture all her life and made them no more telling. But Paul's teeth were beginning to chatter, and she was alarmed. 'Don't stop to tell me now,' she said, and seeing that he was about to protest, she added swiftly: 'Come and tell me to-night, Paul, won't ee, now? And run home now, Paul, do, there's a dear. Run, and then you won't catch cold--to please me, Paul.'

So Paul ran, and ran himself into a glow, and felt as if the fire of comfort in his heart would have warmed the Polar regions. Until time and experience taught him better, he always wanted a big word for even the least of themes.

'Man,' said old Armstrong once (but that was years later), 'ye'd borrow the lungs of Gargantua to sing the epic of a house-fly.'

'Yes, dad,' said Paul; 'that's a capital imitation of my style,' and they both chuckled affectionately.

But now his mind was a mere firework of interjections--squibs, bombs, and rockets of 'Oh!' and 'Ah!' and 'Now!' and 'She'll listen! and 'She'll despise me!' He was within a month of sixteen, and he was in receipt of sixpence a week as pocket-money, but the second fact was to be no more durable than the first. He could neither stay at sixteen nor at the sixpence. Time would take care of the one event, and Paul of the other. An immediate marriage, perhaps even an early marriage, was out of question. It might be necessary to wait for years. There was a fortune to be made, of course, and though it might come by some rare chance to-morrow, it might, on the other hand, take time.

'We've got to be practical,' said Paul.

Whether Paul were a greater a.s.s than most imaginative boys of his years may be a question, but he was as serious about this matter as if he had been eight-and-twenty, and when he reached home he had been rejected and had died of it, and accepted and married many times over. He got into his working clothes after a thorough rub down, and, except for a touch of languor, was none the worse for his morning's adventure. Armstrong was out on business for the day, and in the drowsy afternoon Paul laid an old press blanket on the office floor, took a ream of printing-paper for a pillow, and slept like a top. This made an end of languor, and when the hour of freedom struck, he ran down the weedy garden and raced upstairs to his attic-chamber, and there attired himself in his best.

These were days when the cheapest of cheap dandies wore paper cuffs and collars, then newly discovered, and Paul made himself trim in this inexpensive fas.h.i.+on. He had spent half an hour at his ablutions before leaving the office, and walked towards his rendezvous all neat and s.h.i.+ning.

May met him at the door with a finger on her lips and a pretty air of mystery.

'I've had to fib about ee. Uncle Dan saw you run past all wet this morning, and he asked. I had to tell him something. I said you fell in trying to reach them watter-lilies. I didn't want your own uncle to know your wickedness.'

There was not time for more, for Uncle Dan himself appeared at this moment.

'None the worse for your duckin', eh, Paul?'

'Not a bit.'

'We're goin' to have a bit of music, lad. Come in and sit down, if you've a mind to it.'

Paul half welcomed and half resented the putting off of the decisive moment He was in a dreadful nervous flutter, his hopes alternately flying like a flag in a high wind, and drooping in a sick abandonment of everything. And May was more ravis.h.i.+ng than ever. She had stuck the stem of a rose in one little ear like a pen, and the full flower itself nestled drooping at her cheek. There was never anything in the world more demure than her face and her manner, but the frolic eye betrayed her mood now and then, and Paul was half beside himself at every furtive smile she shot at him. A local tenor, the pride of the church choir, was there, and May and he sang duets together, amongst them 'Come where my love lies dreaming.' Paul's heart obeyed the call with a virgin coyness, and his thoughts stole into some dim-seen shadowed sanctuary, some place of silence where the feet fell soft, and a pale curtain gleamed, and where behind the curtain lay something so sacred that he dared not draw the veil, even in fancy. 'Her beauty beaming,' sang the local tenor.

'Her beauty beaming,' May's voice carolled. Heaven, how it beamed! The boy's emotion choked him. If shame had not lent him self-control, he would have broken into tears before them all.

The musical hour wore away, and the local tenor had a supper engagement, and must go. May slid from the room, and soon after her voice was heard calling 'Paul.'

Paul answered.

'Come here a minute,' she said. 'I want to speak to ee.'

Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.

'Look at that,' she said, and Paul looked.