Plashers Mead Part 22

"One would think we spent all our time together," said Guy, "instead of barely four hours a week."

"Oh, Guy darling, it's more than that. This is the fourth afternoon running that we've been together; and we weren't back yesterday till dinner-time."

Guy put a finger to his mouth.

"Hus.h.!.+ We're coming to the bend in the river that flows round the place we first met," he whispered. "Hus.h.!.+ if we talk about other people it will be disenchanted."

He swung the canoe under the bushes, tied it to a hawthorn bough, and declared triumphantly, as they climbed ash.o.r.e up the steep bank, that here was practically a desert island. Then they went to the narrow entrance and gazed over the meadows, which in this sacred time of growing gra.s.s really were impa.s.sable as the sea.

"Not even a cow in sight," Guy commented in well-satisfied tones. "I shall be sorry when the hay is cut, and people and cattle can come here again."

"People and cattle! How naughty you are, Guy! As if they were just the same!"

"Well, practically, you know, as far as we're concerned, there isn't very much difference."

For a long while they sat by the edge of the stream in their fragrant seclusion.

"Dearest," Pauline sighed, "why can I listen to you all day, and yet whenever anybody else talks to me why do I feel as if I were only half awake?"

"Because even when you're not with me," said Guy, "you're still really with me. That's why. You see, you're still listening to me."

This was a pleasant explanation; but Pauline was anxious to be rea.s.sured about what Margaret had hinted was a deterioration in her character lately.

"Perhaps we are a little selfish. But we won't be, when we're married."

Guy had been scribbling on an envelope which he now handed to her; and she read:

Mrs. Guy Hazlewood Plashers Mead Wychford Oxon.

"Oh, Guy, you know I love to see it written; but isn't it unlucky to write it?"

"I don't think you ought to be so superst.i.tious," he scoffed.

She wished he were not obviously despising the weakness of her beliefs.

This was the mood in which she seemed farthest away from him; when she felt afraid of his cleverness; and when what had been simple became maddeningly twisted up like an object in a nightmare.

Yet worries that were so faint as scarcely to have a definite shape could still be bought off with kisses; and always when she kissed Guy they receded out of sight again, temporarily appeased.

June, which had come upon them unawares, drifted on towards Midsummer, and the indolent and lovely month mirrored herself in the stream with lush growth of sedges and gra.s.ses, with yellow water-lilies budding, with starry crowfoot and with spongy reeds and weeds that kept the canoe to a slow progress in accord with the season. At this time, mostly, they launched their craft in the mill-stream, whence they glided under Wychford bridge to the pool of an abandoned mill on the farther side.

Here they would float immotionable on the black water, surrounded by tumble-down buildings that rose from the vivid and exuberant growth of the thick-leaved vegetation flouris.h.i.+ng against these cold and decayed foundations. Pauline was always relieved when Guy with soundless paddle steered the canoe away from these deeps. The mill-pool affected her with the merely physical fear of being overturned and plunged into those glooms haunted by shadowy fish, there far down to be strangled by weeds the upper tentacles of which could be seen undulating finely to the least quiver upon the face of the water. Yet more subtly than by physical terrors did these deeps affect her, for the fathomless mill-pool always seemed, as they hung upon it, to ask a question. With such an air of horrible invitation it asked her where she was going with Guy, that no amount of self-reproach for a morbid fancy could drive away the fact of the question's being always asked, however firmly she might fortify herself against paying attention. The moment they pa.s.sed out of reach of that smooth and cruel countenance, Pauline was always ashamed of the terror and never confided in Guy what a mixture of emotions the mill-pool could conjecture for her. Their journey across it was in this sunny weather the prelude to a cool time on the stream that flowed along the foot of the Abbey grounds. During May they had been wont to paddle directly up the smaller main stream, exploring far along the western valley; but on these June afternoons such a course involved too much energy. So they used to disembark from the canoe, pulling it over a narrow strip of gra.s.s to be launched again on the Abbey stream, which had been dammed up to flow with the greater width and solemnity that suited the grand house s.h.i.+mmering in eternal ghostliness at the top of the dark plantation. Pauline had no dread of Wychford Abbey at this distance, and she was fond of gliding down this stream into which the great beeches dipped their tresses, shading it from the heat of the sun.

Every hour they spent on the river made them long to spend more hours together, and Pauline began to tell herself she was more deeply in love than any one she had ever known. Everything except love was floating away from her like the landscape astern of the canoe. She began to neglect various people in Wychford over whom she had hitherto watched with maternal solicitude; even Miss Verney was not often visited, because she and Guy could not go together, the one original rule to which Mrs. Grey still clung being a prohibition of walking together through the town. And with the people went her music. She did not entirely give up playing, but she always played so badly that Monica declared once she would rather such playing were given up. In years gone by Pauline had kept white fantail pigeons; but now they no longer interested her and she gave them away in pairs. Birdwood declared that the small bee-garden, which from earliest childhood had belonged to her guardians.h.i.+p, was a "proper disgrace." Her tambour-frame showed nothing but half-fledged birds from which since Winter had hung unkempt shreds of blue and red wool. And even her mother's vague talks about the poor people in Wychford had no longer an audience, because Margaret and Monica never had listened, and now Pauline was as inattentive as her sisters. Nothing was worth while except to be with Guy. Not one moment of this June must be wasted, and Pauline managed to set up a precedent for going out on the river with him after tea, when in the cool afternoon they would float down behind Guy's house under willows, under hawthorns, past the golden fleurs-de-lys, past the scented flags, past the early meadowsweet and the flowering rush, past comfrey and watermint, figwort, forget-me-not, and blue crane's-bill that s.h.i.+mmered in the sun like steely mail.

On Midsummer Day about five o'clock Pauline and Guy set out on one of these expeditions that they had stolen from regularity, and found all their favorite fields occupied by haymakers whose labor they resented as an intrusion upon the country they had come to regard as their own.

"Oh, I wish I had money!" Guy exclaimed. "I'd like to buy all this land and keep it for you and me. Why must all these wretched people come and disturb the peace of it?"

"I used to love haymaking," said Pauline, feeling a little wistful for some of those simple joys that now seemed uncapturable again.

"Yes. I should like haymaking," Guy a.s.sented, "if we were married. It's the fact that haymakers are at this moment preventing us being alone which makes me cry out against them. How can I kiss you here?"

A wain loaded high with hay and laughing children was actually standing close against the ingress to their own peninsula. The mellow sun of afternoon was lending a richer quality of color to nut-brown cheeks and arms; was throwing long shadows across the shorn gra.s.s; was gilding the pitchforks and sparkling the gnats that danced above the patient horses.

It was a scene that should have made Pauline dream with joy of her England; yet, with Guy's discontent brooding over it, she did not care for these jocund haymakers who were working through the l.u.s.tered afternoon.

"Hopeless," Guy protested. "It's like Piccadilly Circus."

"Oh, Guy dear, you are absurd. It's not a bit like Piccadilly Circus."

"I don't see the use of living in the country if it's always going to be alive with people," Guy went on. "We may as well turn round. The afternoon is ruined."

When they reached the confines of Plashers Mead he exclaimed in deeper despair:

"Pauline! I must kiss you; and, look, actually the churchyard now is crammed with people, all hovering about over the graves like ghouls. Why does everybody want to come out this afternoon?"

They landed in the orchard behind the house, and Pauline was getting ready to help Guy push the canoe across to the mill-stream, when he vowed she must come and kiss him good night indoors.

"Of course I will; though I mustn't stay more than a minute, because I promised Mother to be back by seven."

"I don't deserve you," said Guy, standing still and looking down at her.

"I've done nothing but grumble all the afternoon, and you've been an angel. Ah, but it's only because I long to kiss you."

"I long to kiss you," she murmured.

"Do you? Do you?" he whispered. "Oh, with those ghouls in the churchyard I can't even take your hand."

They crossed the bridge from the orchard and came round to the front of the house into full sunlight, and thence out of the dazzle into Guy's hall that was filled with water melodies and the green light of their own pastoral world. Close they kissed, close and closer in the coolness and stillness.

"Pauline! I shall go mad for love of you."

"I love you. I love you," she sighed, nestling to his arms' inclosure.

"Pauline!"

"Guy!"

Each called to the other as if over an abyss of years and time.

Then Pauline said she must go back, but Guy reminded her of a book she had promised to read, and begged her just to come with him to the library.

"I do want to talk to you once alone in my own room," he said. "The evenings won't seem so empty when I can think of you there."

She could not disappoint him, and they went up-stairs and into his green room that smelt of tobacco smoke and meadowsweet. They stood by the window looking out over their territory, and Guy told for the hundredth time how, as it were, straight from this window he had plunged to meet her that September night.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed, suddenly, reading on the pane that was scrabbled with mottoes cut by himself in idle moments with the glazier's pencil:

The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land.

Michael Fane. _June 24_.

"That's to-day! Then Michael must be here. What an extraordinary thing!"