Watersprings, Arthur Christopher Benson [free novels .txt] 📗

for the minutes I got with you; and yet I thought it wasn't fair not to try to seem amused; then I saw you were vexed at something--vexed that I should want to talk to you--what a WRETCHED business!"

"Never mind all that now, child," said Howard, "it's a perfect nightmare. Why can't one be simple? Why, indeed? and even now, I simply can't believe it--oh, the wretched hours when I thought you were drifting away from me; do men and women indeed miss their chances so? If I had but known! Yet, I must tell you this--when I first came to this spring here, I thought it held a beautiful secret for me--something which had been in my life from everlasting. It was so, and this was what it held for me."

The afternoon sped swiftly away, and the shadow of the western downs fell across the pool. An immense and overpowering joy filled Howard's heart, and the silent world took part in his ecstasy.

"You remember that first day?" said Maud. "I had felt that day as if some one was coming to me from a long way off drawing nearer. . . . I saw you drive up in the carriage, and I wondered if we should be friends."

"Yes," said Howard, "it was you on the lawn--that was when I saw you first!"

"And now we must go back and face the music," said Howard. "What do you think? How shall we make it all known? I shall tell Aunt Anne to-night. I shall be glad to do that, because there has fallen a veil between us. Don't forget, dear child, how unutterably wretched and intolerable I have been. She tried to help me out, but I was running with my head down on the wrong track. Oh, what a miserable fool I was! That comes of being so high-minded and superior. If you only knew how solemn I have been! Why couldn't I just speak?"

"You might have spoken any time," said Maud. "Why, I would have walked barefoot to Dorchester and back to please you! It does seem horrible to think of our being apart all that time, out of such beautiful consideration--and you were my own, my very own all the time, every moment."

"I will come and tell your father to-morrow," said Howard presently. "How will Master Jack take it? Will he call you Miss?"

"He may call me what he likes," said Maud. "I shan't get off easily."

"Well, we have an evening and a night and a morning for our secret," said Howard. "I wish it could be longer. I should like to go on for ever like this, no one knowing but you and me."

"Do just as you like, my lord and master," said Maud.

"I won't have you talk like that," said Howard; "you don't know what you give me. Was ever anyone in the world so happy before?"

"There's one person who is as happy," said Maud; "you can't guess what I feel. Does it sound absurd to say that if you told me to stand still while you cut me into little bits, I should enjoy it?"

"I won't forget that," said Howard; "anything to please you--you need not mind mentioning any little wishes you may have of that kind."

They laughed like children, and when they came to the village, they became very ceremonious. At the Vicarage gate they shook hands, and Howard raised his hat. "You will have to make up for this dignified parting some time," said Howard. "Sleep well, my darling child! If you ever wake, you will know that I am thinking of you; not far apart! Good-night, my sweet one, my only darling."

Maud put one hand on his shoulder, but did not speak--and then slipped in light-footed through the gate. Howard walked back to the Manor, through the charmed dusk and the fragrance of hidden flowers, full of an almost intolerable happiness, that was akin to pain. The evening star hung in liquid, trembling light above the dark down, the sky fading to a delicious green, the breeze rustled in the heavy-leaved sycamores, and the lights were lit in the cottage windows. Did every home, every hearth, he wondered, mean THAT? Was THAT present in dim and dumb lives, the spirit of love, the inner force of the world? Yes, it was so! That was the secret hidden in the Heart of God.


XXII


LOVE AND CERTAINTY

The weeks that followed were a time for Howard of very singular happiness--happiness of a quality of which he had not thought himself capable, and in the very existence of which he was often hardly able to believe. He had never known what intimate affection was before; and it was strange to him, when he had always been able to advance so swiftly in his relations with others to a point of frankness and even brotherliness, to discover that there was a whole world of emotion beyond that. He was really deeply reserved and reticent; but he admitted even comparative strangers so easily and courteously to his house of life, that few suspected the existence of a secret chamber of thought, with an entrance contrived behind the pictured arras, which was the real fortress of his inner existence, and where he sate oftenest to contemplate the world. That chamber of thought was a place of few beliefs and fewer certainties; if he adopted, as he was accustomed to do, conventional language and conventional ideas, it was only to feel himself in touch with his fellows; for Howard's mind was really a place of suspense and doubt; his scepticism went down to the very roots of life; his imagination was rich and varied, but he did not trust his hopes or even his fears; all that he was certain of was just the actual passage of his thought and his emotion; he formed no views about the future, and he abandoned the past as one might abandon the debris of the mine.

It was delicious to him to be catechised, questioned, explored by Maud, to have his reserve broken through and his reticence disregarded; but what oftenest brought the great fact of his love home to him with an overpowering certainty of joy was the girl's eager caresses and endearing gestures. Howard had always curiously shrunk from physical contact with his fellows; he had an almost childishly observant eye, and his senses were abnormally alert; little bodily defects and uglinesses had been a horror to him; and the way in which Maud would seek his embrace, clasp his hand, lay her cheek to his, as if nestling home, gave him an enraptured sense of delight that transcended all experience. He was at first in these talks very tender of what he imagined her to believe; but he found that this did not in the least satisfy her, and he gradually opened his mind more and more to her fearless view.

"Are you certain of nothing?" she asked him one day, half mirthfully.

"Yes, of one thing," he said, "of YOU! You are the only real and perfect thing and thought in the world to me--I have always been alone hitherto," he added, "and you have come near to me out of the deep--a shining spirit!"

Howard never tired of questioning her in these days as to how her love for him had arisen.

"That is the mystery of mysteries!" he said to her once; "what was it in me or about me to make you care?"

Maud laughed. "Why, you might as well ask a man at a shop," she said, "which particular coin it was that induced him to part with his wares--it's just the price! Why, I cared for you, I think, before I ever saw you, before I ever heard of you; one thinks--I suppose everyone thinks--that there must be one person in the world who is waiting for one--and it seems to me now as if I had always known it was you; and then Jack talked about you, and then you came; and that was enough, though I didn't dare to think you could care for me; and then how miserable I was when you began by seeming to take an interest in me, and then it all drifted away, and I could do nothing to hold it. Howard, why DID you do that?"

"Oh, don't ask me, darling," he said. "I thought--I thought--I don't know what I did think; but I somehow felt it would be like putting a bird that had sate to sing to me into a cage, if I tried to capture you; and yet I felt it was my only chance. I felt so old. Why you must remember that I was a grown-up man and at work, when you were in long clothes. And think of the mercy of this--if I had come here, as I ought to have done, and had known you as a little girl, you would have become a sort of niece to me, and all this could never have happened--it would all have been different."

"Well, we won't think of THAT," said Maud decisively. "I was rather a horrid little girl, and I am glad you didn't see me in that stage!"

One day he found her a little sad, and she confessed to having had a melancholy dream. "It was a big place, like a square in a town, full of people," she said. "You came down some steps, looking unhappy, and went about as if you were looking for me; and I could not attract your attention, or get near you; once you passed quite close to me and our eyes met, and I saw you did not recognise me, but passed on."

Howard laughed. "Why, child," he said, "I can't see anyone else but you when we are in the same room together--my faculty of observation has deserted me. I see every movement you make, I feel every thought you think; you have bewitched me! Your face comes between me and my work; you will quite ruin my career. How can I go back to my tiresome boys and my old friends?"

"Ah, I don't want to do THAT!" said Maud. "I won't be a hindrance; you must just hang me up like a bird in a cage--that's what I am--to sing to you when you are at leisure."


XXIII


THE WEDDING

The way in which the people at Windlow took the news was very characteristic. Howard frankly did not care how they regarded it. Mr. Sandys was frankly and hugely delighted. He apologised to Howard for having mentioned the subject of Guthrie to him.

"The way you took it, Howard," he said, "was a perfect model of delicacy and highmindedness! Why, if I had dreamed that you cared for my little girl, I would have said, and truly said, that the dearest wish of my heart had been fulfilled. But one is blind, a parent is blind; and I had somehow imagined you as too sedate, as altogether too much advanced in thought and experience, for such a thing. I would rather have bitten out my tongue than spoken as I did to you. It is exactly what my dear girl needs, some one who is older and wiser than herself--she needs some one to look up to, to revere; she is thoughtful and anxious beyond her years, and she is made to repose confidence in a mind more mature. I do not deny, of course, that your position at Windlow makes the arrangement a still more comfortable one; but I have always said that my children must marry whom they would; and