CHAPTER XXX

The Whitsun garlands that had so gaily wound about the pillars of

Roupell Church have long ago been taken down, dead and faded. Poor Peggy

has once again stood all day on her ladder, and decked aisle and chancel

and font and altar with the manifold roses and the May lilies that by

Trinity Sunday are bountifully ready to her hand. Once again has Mrs.

Evans sat in a pew and helped her with moral suasion, and with easy

suggestions of alterations that would entail her undoing half her work.

The scent of the lilies is too much next day for the youngest

church-going Evans, and he has to be carried out, with his boots in the

air, to the great delight of the schoolchildren, and enlivenment of the

congregation generally. Not one of the civil parishioners, dropping in

now and again to observe her progress and offer help, would think that

the Peggy they see smiling down upon them from her ladder had been

lately treading on hot ploughshares. But yet she has. The worst is over

now, she tells herself. Which was the worst hour? Which the worst

moment? she asks, with what she thinks to be a perfectly dispassionate

inquiry. That one when she had found his glove lying quite naturally,

and as if at home, on the hall-table? That one when she had had to tell

Prue that it was all over; when through the obstinacy of the young

girl's disbelief she had had to asseverate and re-asseverate it, until

she had almost screamed out loud in the agony of that reiteration? That

one when scarce two days after the blow had fallen, going on some

necessary business to the Parsonage, Mrs. Evans had met her with the

triumphant announcement that she--Mrs. Evans--had been right after all

in her conjecture as to Lady Betty Harborough? that though it might not

be known to many persons, yet the fact was none the less certain that

she had paid a flying visit to the Manor: Mrs. Evans's nurse having had

the information from the very flyman who had driven her from the

station; adding the circumstance, that so little sense of shame did she

manifest that she insisted upon an open fly.

'Of course the children were the pretext,' pursues the Vicar's wife,

with a shrug; 'it is so shocking to think that they should be made

accomplices, as it were. One always feels,' looking affectionately round

at the various Evans specimens--old and new baby, little girl with a

cold, middle-sized boy with a stomach-ache, kept indoors by reason of

these ailments, and now littering the worn carpet--'one always feels

that one's children are one's best safeguard.'

And Peggy remembers to have smiled. That a hideous knife is cutting her

own heart in two, does not make the fact of Mrs. Evans's virtue

requiring a safeguard at all the less funny. The worst is over, so she

assures herself. The wren that sang at her chamber-window, waking her to

tell her that Talbot was at the gate, that waked her all the same when

it had no such news to tell her, is happily silent.

The pungent hawthorn-blossoms are discoloured and dead. She smiles drily

as she sees them swept up, and rolled away in Jacob's barrow. What a

mercy it would be if she could sweep up the dead brown love they

emblematise, and get Jacob to wheel it away too!

After all she is but where she was before Whitsuntide, where she has

been all her life. She has only a few, such a few steps to retrace. Ah,

but the retracing of those steps! The nights are worst. All the great

nations of the variously woeful on this sorrowful earth's face, know

that the nights are worst. Oh, the agony of that crying out of strong

souls for earth's supreme good just shown them, and then for ever

snatched away! She had thought herself happy before--quite sufficiently

happy, and had walked smiling and content along her path, until suddenly

one had taken her by the hand, and had led her into God's paradise; and

having just given her time to have her astonished eyes for ever dazzled

by the shining of that great light, had pushed her away into the

darkness, where she must stand henceforth with blind hands beating on

the unopened door. She had thought herself happy before. In the darkness

she laughs out loud. She had mistaken that wretched farthing rushlight

for day.

All night she struggles in the deep waters, foothold slipping from under

her. All night she fights with dragons, with noisome, baleful creatures,

like stout Christian in the Valley of the Shadow; wrestles with

temptations unworthy of her; with base longings to have him back, even

though it be to go shares with another in his love; to cry 'Come back,

come back! fool me, cheat me again--only come back!'

She had told him but the truth in saying that when she cared for any

one, she cared very badly. She is caring very badly now, and it goes

hard with her. What wonder that the wakening birds and the uprising wind

of morning find her daily staring dry-eyed, watchful, languid, at the

rose of dawn!

'Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,

How can she seek the empty world again?'

But through the day no one finds out her languor; no one knows that she

is going about her daily work unfortified by sleep. Happily for her

there is no one to observe her very nicely. If there were any one to

steal anxious glances of sympathy at her to see how she is bearing it,

she must break down; but, as I have said, happily for her, there is no

one.

Prue, indeed, is quite affectionate and sorry; rather remorseful, in

fact, at the consciousness of having but grudgingly given that kindness

which, as it turns out, would have been needed only for one week. Her

method of compensation for former shortcomings, that of repeating many

times how unworthy she had always thought Talbot of her sister, is

perhaps scarcely judicious. The assertion of his unworthiness cuts Peggy

like a lash, but she bears it with set teeth and a sort of smile. It is

true. He is unworthy. And after a while--but a little while--this part

of her ordeal is over; for Prue, swallowed up in the sea of her own

coming troubles, forgets to remember that there is any one else

struggling in the waves.

And so, by and by, Peggy grows to walk her ploughshares with as

unshrinking a foot as if they were velvet turf; grows to thank God again

for her garden, and to be able to thank Him even for that one glimpse of

the supremest good, though given but to be withdrawn; last of all, to

acquiesce in that withdrawal. Since she is so urgently needed by the

poor little life beside her, it is as well, so she tells herself, that

she should have no distracting life of her own to pull her two ways.

Whatever else her Prue loses, she can now never lose her.

And as time goes on, it seems as if Prue, too, were to have her

losses. The first of these is perhaps but a little one, merely the

loss of that promised company of her betrothed through those rich June

days when Oxford is holding her yearly riot of pleasure--the riot from

which he had joyfully engaged to steal away to her quiet side. But,

as has happened not unfrequently before in Freddy's history, as it may

be confidently predicted will happen not unfrequently again, he has

promised more than when pay-day comes he is able to perform. After

all, it seems--and at that poor Prue would be the last to

wonder--Commemoration cannot get on without him.

Strange as it may appear, among the crowd, unusually large this year,

that throngs to the fair city for her saturnalia, and extensive as is

the acquaintance among undergraduates of the Hartley family--two of the

sons, indeed, being at the present time members of the University--there

is no one who is found capable of doing the honours of the festival to

these comparatively new acquaintance with the exception of Mr. Ducane.

He is therefore compelled, in compliance with his own creed of, as he

very nobly says in his letter to Prue, 'making Self march last in the

Pageant of Life,' to forego the simple joys he had planned in his

sweetheart's company, and carry his absent, yearning heart through the

bustle of theatre, ball, and _fete_. It is not until the last moment

that he has announced to Prue his change of project, not until all her

little preparations for his reception had been made, all the flowers

gathered to be laid on the altar of the poor soul's God.

'He might have told you before,' says Peggy indignantly, when one

morning the news of this defalcation is brought her by a

trembling-lipped pale Prue.

'He did not know it himself,' replies the other, in eager defence; 'he

says so somewhere, doesn't he?' (turning over the pages in feverish

search); 'or if he did know, it was out of consideration for me that he

kept me in the dark, that I might have less time to be disappointed in;

and he was right. I have had all these weeks--all this hope and looking

forward--to the good.'

Her under-lip quivers so piteously, as she makes this cheerful

statement of her gains, that she puts up her hand in haste to hide it.

But after all, Commemoration is only a matter of four days; and perhaps

it is worth while to have the pleasure of his company deferred for that

short interval, for the sake of the still higher pleasure she receives

on his return, of hearing him read aloud to her a choice little poem he

has found time to write on the subject of his own distraught wandering

through the gay throng; questioning every maid he meets as to why she

was not Prue. After he is gone, Prue repeats it--she has already learnt

it by heart--with sparkling eyes to her sister. It is not only that it

is so beautiful, as she says, but it is so _true_. Nobody could write

like that, unless he felt it, could he now? Peggy is spared the pain of

a reply by her sister's hurrying off to copy out the lines into that

gold-clasped, vellum-bound volume, in which, written out in his

sweetheart's best hand, the productions of Mr. Ducane's muse find a

splendid shelter, until that surely near moment when rival publishers

will snatch them from each other. She has plenty of time to devote her

best penmanship to them, as it turns out; since after two days at the

Manor, Freddy has to be off again. It is to London this time that a

harsh necessity drives him. Freddy never 'goes,' or 'wishes to go.' He

always 'has to go.'

'Whatever happens, we must not lose touch with the Great World-Heart

beating outside us!' he has said, looking solemnly up at the stars over

his betrothed's head, hidden sobbingly on his breast.

And she, though she knows little, and cares less, about the Great

World-Heart, acquiesces meekly, since _he_ must be right. So the Red

House relapses into its condition of female tranquillity; a tranquillity

of two balked young hearts beating side by side. The one pastures her

sorrow on the name that now appears almost daily among the titled mob

that crowds the summer columns of the _Morning Post_. The other digs

hers into the garden; paints it into pictures for the workhouse; turns

it into smiles for the sorrowful; stitches it into clothes for the

naked.

The stillness of high summer is upon the neighbourhood; all the leafy

homes around emptied of their owners; the roses, ungathered, shedding

their petals, or packed off in wet cotton-wool to London. Milady is in

London. So are the Hartleys. So is everybody; everybody, that is, except

the Evanses. The Evanses are at home. They mostly are. A family of their

dimensions, even in these days of cheap locomotion, does not lend itself

to frequent removals. A couple of years ago, indeed, milady

good-naturedly whisked off the Vicar for a fortnight's Londoning. But he

came back so unaffectedly disgusted with his cure, his offspring, and

his spouse, that the latter cherishes a hope, not always confined to her

own breast, that this act of hospitality may never be repeated. And

hay-harvest comes. The strawberries ripen, and jam-making begins. The

Evans boys are home for the holidays; and one of them breaks his leg.

The threatened baby arrives; and all the little events, habitual in the

Red House's calendar, happen punctually; for even the Vicarage fracture

is not more than the usual and expected outcome of the summer holidays.

But neither hay-time, nor hot jam-time, nor holiday-time bring back

Freddy to the Manor, whither his country-loving aunt has hastened back

joyfully to spud and billycock and shorthorns, a round month ago. He

does not even write very often. How should he? as Prue says. How could

any one who knows anything of London expect it of him? But in all his

letters, when they do come, there is invariably an underlying ring of

sadness, that proves to demonstration how cogent though unexplained are

the reasons which alone keep him from that dear and sacred spot, where

alone, as he himself says, his soul reaches its full stature. But at

length, apparently, the occult causes relax their hold of him; and when

August has begun to bind her gold stooks, and the cuckoo has said

good-bye, he comes. In August. It is a month to whose recurrence Peggy

has looked forward with dread: to her a month of anniversaries. Happily

it is only to herself that they are anniversaries. Who but she will

remember that on such a day the fox bit Talbot? Dingo himself has

certainly forgotten it; though he is as certainly quite ready to do it

again, if the chance is afforded him. Who will know, or even suspect,

that such and such days are made bitter to her by the fact that on their

fellows in last year he drove the mowing-machine, or gathered the

lavender, or cut out the new flower-bed? She smiles half sarcastically,

wrapping herself securely in the cloak of her little world's entire

indifference to her epoch-making moments.

'One has no windows in one through which one's friends can look in at

one,' she says philosophically, 'even if they would take the trouble.

Mrs. Evans perhaps would take the trouble; I do not know any one else

that would. As long as one is not foolish outside, it does not matter;

and I am not foolish outside.'

August is here; and the sacred seat under the Judas-tree, the seat that

had been forbidden to Peggy during her one triumph-hour, is again

occupied: save in the dead of the night has, for the last five days,

been scarcely a moment unoccupied; and Prue's little cup--the cup that

had run as low as mountain-springs in a droughty summer--again brims

over.

'It is so much better than if he had never gone away,' she says

rapturously, 'for then I might have thought that he liked me only

because he had never seen anything better; but now that he has had all

the most beautiful ladies in London at his feet----'

'Has he indeed?' rejoins Peggy, smiling; 'does he tell you so?'

But she has not the heart to suggest that the present emptiness of the

Manor of all inmates, except himself and his aunt, may count for even

more in Mr. Ducane's assiduities than his indifference to the London

beauties.

One afternoon she has left the young pair cooing on their rustic seat as

usual, and has betaken herself to the Manor, on one of her mixed errands

of parish business and individual friendliness to its mistress. She

finds the old lady surrounded by all the signs and symptoms of a new

hobby--plans, encaustic tiles, designs for the decorated pans and

skimmers of an ornamental dairy.

'I have a new toy, my dear!--congratulate me!' says she, looking up from

the litter around her, almost as radiant as Prue; 'an ornamental

dairy-house! I cannot think how I have lived without it for sixty-five

years! After all, there is nothing like a new toy; you would not be the

worse for one,' she adds, glancing kindly at the girl's face, a little

oldened and jaded since this time last year, its beauty lending itself

even less than it had then done to Lady Betty's sarcasm about being

improved by being bled. 'And Prue?--how is Prue? She is not in want of a

new toy _par hasard_?--still quite satisfied with the old one, eh? Well,

he is a very ingenious piece of mechanism!'

'Very!' replies Peggy drily.

'And when are the banns to be put up?' inquires the old lady abruptly,

resting her arms upon the heap of her plans and estimates, and pushing

up her spectacles on her forehead, in order to get a directer view of

her young _vis-a-vis_. 'I should like to have a week's notice, in order

to get myself a new gown; Mason was telling me this morning that I have

not one that can be depended upon to hold together.'

'The banns?' repeats Peggy, a flush of pleasure spreading over her face;

'then he has told you! Oh, I am so glad! I was afraid that he would

not!'

'Told me!' repeats the elder woman, with a withering intonation; 'not

he!--trust him for that! No doubt he has some high-falutin' reason for

not doing so; it would wound my feelings!--it would be dangerous at my

age! He had rather efface himself and his own interests for ever than

roughen, by one additional pebble, my path to the grave!' mimicking,

with ludicrous insuccess, Freddy's round young tones. 'Told me?--not

he!' The tinge brought into Peggy's face by that emotion of transient

satisfaction of which milady's words have proved the fallaciousness,

dies out of it again. 'Nobody has told me,' continues the old lady

tranquilly; 'I have only taken the liberty of seeing what was directly

under my nose. No offence to you, Peggy; but I had quite as soon not

have seen it.'

'Of course--of course,' replies Peggy, flushing again.

'I suppose that we have no one but ourselves to thank,' says milady,

with philosophy, her eye returning affectionately to one of the designs

for the front of her hobby. 'I do not care about that one; it is too

florid--it would look like Rosherville. Throw two selfish idle young

fools together, and the result has been the same since Adam's time!'

Peggy's heart swells. Idle and selfish! Never, even in the most secret

depths of her own mind, has she connected such epithets with her Prue;

and here is milady applying them to her as if they were truisms.

'I must send him away somewhere, I suppose,' pursues Lady Roupell, with

a rather impatient sigh. 'He is an expensive luxury, is Master Freddy,

as your poor little Prue would find; but no doubt it will come cheaper

in the end. Give him a couple of hundred pounds, and pack him off on a

voyage round the world! Believe me, dear,' laying her hand--whose tan,

contracted by an inveterate aversion for gloves, contrasts oddly with

its flashing diamonds--compassionately on Peggy's shoulder, 'he would

have clean forgotten her before he had got out of the chops of the

Channel.'

A great lump has sprung into Peggy's throat, constricting the muscles.

'And she?'

The old woman shrugs her shoulders.

'When we are forgotten, child, we do the graceful thing, and forget too.

I suppose we all know a little about that.'

Margaret has picked up one of the Dutch tiles that are to line the walls

of milady's new plaything; but it is but a blurred view that she gets of

its uncouth blue figures.

'She would not forget,' she says in a low voice, that, low as it is, has

yet been won with difficulty from that seeming mountain in her throat;

'she has put all--everything into one boat! Oh! poor Prue, to have put

everything into one boat!'

'And such a boat!' adds milady expressively.

For all rejoinder, Peggy fairly bursts out crying. The accumulated

misery of weeks, so carefully pent and dammed in the channels of her

aching heart, breaks down her poor fortifications. Her own life-venture

hopelessly perished! Prue's foundering on the high seas before her very

eyes! She had not cried for herself; she may, at least, have leave to

cry for Prue.

'God bless my soul, Peggy!' says the elder woman, taking off and laying

down her spectacles, and speaking with an accent of pronounced surprise

and indignation; 'you do not mean to say that you are going to _cry_!

There's an end to all argument while you are sniffing like that.' Then

as the girl rises to go, but imperfectly strangling her sobs, she adds

in a still vexed but rather remorseful voice: 'You make me feel quite

choky too. You have no right to make me feel choky! Run away! run away!

What do I care for any of you? I have got my dairy-house!'