Plashers Mead Part 42

"Does he know you go to Confession?"

Pauline blushed. Monica was like a Roman Catholic in the matter-of-fact way in which she alluded to something that for Pauline pierced such sanct.i.ties as could scarcely even be mentioned by herself to her own soul.

"Monica, you don't really think that I ought to speak of that," she stammered. Not even to her sister could she bring herself to utter the sacramental word.

"I certainly think you should," said Monica. "When you and Guy are married it would be terrible if your duties were to be the cause of a disagreement. Why, he might even persuade you to give up going to Confession."

"Darling Monica," said Pauline, nervously, "I'd rather you didn't talk about this any more. You see, you're so much better than I, and you've thought so much more deeply than I have about religion. I don't think I shall ever be able to make my faith so narrow a ... so strict a rule as yours is. No, please, Monica, don't let us talk about this subject any more."

"I only mentioned it because I'm afraid that with your beautiful nature you will be too merciful to that Guy of yours."

"Oh, and I'd really rather you didn't say my nature was beautiful,"

Pauline protested. "Truthfully, Monica darling, it's a very ugly nature indeed, and I'm afraid it's getting uglier every day."

Her sister's cloistral smile flickered upon the scene like the wan February sunlight.

"I do hope Guy really appreciates you," was what she said.

"See how the sparrows have pulled the crocuses into ribbons," Pauline exclaimed. And so that Monica could not talk to her any more, she hailed her father, who was wandering along towards the house on the other side of the lawn. When he sauntered across to them she pointed out the destructiveness of the sparrows.

"Ah, well, my dear," he chuckled, "most florists are worse."

"Perhaps _I'm_ a florist," Monica whispered, "and Guy may be only a mischievous sparrow."

Pauline smiled at Monica and took her arm gratefully and affectionately.

"We shall have all the daffs gone before we know where we are," said the Rector. "Maximus is out under the oaks. And King Alfred is just going to turn down his buds."

"Dear King Alfred," said Pauline. "How glad I shall be to say good morning to him again!"

Yes, all the daffodils would soon be here and then gone; and beyond this austere afternoon already she could fancy a smell of March winds.

After Monica's question it was no longer possible for Pauline when she was alone to avoid facing the problem of Guy's att.i.tude towards religion. The repression of her anxiety on this point had only increased the force of it when it was set free like this to compete with, and, in fact, overshadow all other cares. Looking back to her earliest thoughts of the world as it would one day affect herself, she remembered how, if she had ever imagined some one in love with her, she had always created a figure whose faith would be an eternal and joyful contemplation. She had never invented for herself a marriage with some one merely good-looking or rich or endowed with any of the romantic attributes that young girls were supposed to award their ideals, as her cousins would say, of men. When Guy entered her life, the only gift he brought her for which she was at all prepared was the conviction of his faith. This indeed was his spiritual and mental reality for her; the rest of him was a figment, a dream that might pa.s.s suddenly away. The visit of his father had given her a more clearly defined a.s.surance of his existence on earth, but his faith had been the heart of the immortal substance of her love for Guy. The endlessness of their union was always present in her thoughts, the ultimate consolation of whatever delays they might be called upon to endure. Very often, even at the beginning of the engagement, Guy had frightened her sometimes by his indifference to immortality--sometimes by his harping upon the swift flight of youth, sometimes by his manifest indulgence of her creed. All these doubts, however, of his sympathy were allayed by his apparently deliberate pleasure in wors.h.i.+p. She was angry with herself then for her mistrust of him, and her contentment had been perfect when in church he knelt beside her on that birthday of his, that day of their avowed betrothal, and on all those other occasions when he had given an outward proof of his faith. Now as she looked back on his absence from church lately, she could not but wonder whether all his attendance had not been a kind of fair-weather spoiling of her that could not withstand the least stress of worldly circ.u.mstance. She began to torment herself over every light remark that might have been a sneer and to look forward dreadfully to Guy's abrupt declaration of a profound disbelief in everything she held most sacred. His cleverness, as he hated her to call it, intervened and seemed to wrench them asunder; and the more she pondered his behavior, the more she became convinced that all the time Guy's religion had merely been Guy's kindness. This discovery was not to make her love him less; but it did throw upon her the responsibility of the knowledge that he had nothing within himself to fortify his soul, should mishap destroy his worldly confidence.

For a long time Pauline lay awake in the darkness, fretting herself on account of Guy's resourcelessness of spirit, and to her imagination concentrated on this regard of him every hour seemed to make his solitude more terrible. Of her own religion she did not think, and Monica's anxiety about their agreement after marriage was without the least hint of danger. The possibility of any one's, even Guy's, influencing her own faith was inconceivable; nor was she at all occupied with her own disappointment at not finding Guy constant to her belief in him. Pauline's one grief was for him, that now when things were going badly he should be without spiritual hope. Suddenly her warm bed seemed to her wrong and luxurious in comparison with the chill darkness she imagined about Guy's soul at this moment. Impulsively she threw back the sheets and knelt down beside the bed to pray for his peace. So vividly was she conscious of the need for prayer that she was carried to undreamed-of heights of supplication, to strange summits whereon it seemed that if she could not pray she would never know how to pray again. Ordinarily her devotions had been but a beautiful and simple end or beginning of the day; they were a.s.sociated with the early warmth of the sunlight or with the gentle flutters of roosting birds; they were the comforting and tangible pledges of a childhood not yet utterly departed. Now the fires and ecstasies of a more searching faith had seized Pauline. No longer did there pa.s.s before her eyes a procession of gay-habited saints, glad celestial creatures that smiled down upon her from a paradise not much farther away than the Rectory garden; no longer did she find herself surrounded by the well-loved figures who when death took her to them would hold out their arms in actual welcome and whom she would recognize one by one. To-night these visions were uncapturable, and beyond the darkness they had forsaken stretched a terrifying void and beyond the void was nothing but light that seemed to have the power of thinking, "I am Truth!" A speck in that void she saw Guy spinning away from her, and it seemed that unless she prayed he would be spun irremediably out of her consciousness. It seemed that the fierceness of her prayer was like the fierceness of a flame that was granted the power to sustain him, for when sometimes the tongues of fire languished Guy would sink so far that only by summoning fresh force from the light beyond could she bring him back. Gradually, however, her power was waning, and with whatever desperate force she prayed he could never be brought back to the point from which he had last slipped. He was spinning away into a horror of blackness....

"O Holy Ghost, save him!" she cried. Then Pauline fainted, and wondered to find herself lying upon the cold floor when she woke as from a dream.

Yet it was not like the gasping rescue of oneself from a nightmare, for she lay awake a long while afterwards in peace, and she slept as if upon a victory and very early in the morning went to church.

The days when the thrushes sang matins were come, and all the way she heard freshets of holy song pouring down through the air. She and her family always knelt apart from one another, and this morning Pauline chose a place hidden from the others, a place where she could lean her cheek against a pillar and be soothed by the cool touch of the stone like the a.s.surance of unfathomable and maternal love. Now to her calm spirit returned the vision of those happy heavenly creatures, the bright-suited and intimate companions of her childhood. They welcomed her this morning and thronged about her downcast eyes with many angels, too, that like Tobit's angel, walked by her side. Only her father's mellow voice spoke from the chancel of earth, and even he in his violet chasuble took his place among the saints, and when she went up to the altar Heaven was once again very near to her.

In the morning coolness it was almost impossible to believe that last night she had fainted, and she began to believe the whole experience had been a dream's agony. However, whether it were or not, she had made up her mind to ask Guy a direct question this afternoon. If, as she feared, he was feeling hostile to religion, she would accept the warning of the night and give all her determination to prayer for his faith to return.

When they were together, it was for a long time impossible to begin the subject, and it was not until Guy asked what was making her so abstracted that Pauline could ask why he never came to church any more.

In the pause before he answered she suffered anew the torment of that struggle in the darkness.

"Does it worry you when I don't come?" he asked.

"Well, yes, it does rather."

"Then, of course, I will come," said Guy, at once.

Now this was exactly the reason for which least of all she wanted him to come, and a trace of her mortification may have been visible, because he asked immediately if that did not please her.

"Guy, don't you want to come to church? You used to come happily, didn't you?"

"I think I came chiefly to be near you," he said.

"That does make me so unhappy. I'd almost rather you came out of politeness to Father."

"Well, that was another reason," Guy admitted.

"And you never came because you wanted to?" she asked, miserably.

"Of course I wanted to."

"But because you believed?"

"In what?"

"Oh, Guy, don't be so cruel. Don't you believe in anything?"

"I believe in you," he said. "Pauline, I believe in you so pa.s.sionately that when I am with you I believe in what you believe."

"Then you haven't any faith?"

"I want to have it," said Guy. "If G.o.d won't condescend to give it to me ..." he broke off with a shrug.

"But religion is either true or it isn't true, and if it isn't true why do you encourage me in lies?" she demanded, with desperate entreaty.

"I'm ready to believe," he said.

"How can you expect to have faith if your reason for it is merely to sit next me in church?" she asked, bitterly.

"Now, I think it's you who are being cruel," said Guy.

"I don't care. I don't care if I am cruel. You'll break my heart."

"Good G.o.d!" Guy exclaimed. "Haven't I enough to torment me without religion appearing upon the scene? If you want me to hate it.... No, Pauline, I'm sorry ... you mustn't think that I don't long to have your faith. If I only could.... Oh, Pauline, Pauline!"

She yielded to his consolation, and when he told her of the poems sent back almost by return of post from the second publisher she must open wide her compa.s.sionate arms. Nevertheless, he had somehow maltreated their love; and Pauline was aware of a wild effort to prepare for sorrow, whether near at hand or still far off she did not know, but she seemed to hear it like a wind rising at sunset.

ANOTHER SPRING