Don't smile down at your violoncello. You shall not rule me into being like yourself. Oh, I'll never play music with either of you again."

Then she left them and in her white room for an hour she listened hopelessly to the trolling wind.

_November_

Guy was very indignant when he heard from Pauline the sequel of her sisters' vigilance. That they should afterward have tried to atone with gentleness for what they had made her suffer did not avail with him.

Monica and Margaret now impressed him with their unworldly beauty in a strange way, for they became sinister figures like the Lady Geraldine in Christabel, sly malignant sylphs set in ambush to haunt the romantic path of his love. He was intensely aware that he ought not to resent their interference, but that he ought in fact to acknowledge the justice of it and by a stoical endeavour prove himself ent.i.tled to the cares of this long engagement. Actually Guy was enduring a violent jealousy, and illogically he began to declare how the others were jealous of him and Pauline. The consciousness that he could not carry her off into immediate marriage galled him and he suffered all the pangs of an unmerited servitude. He and Pauline became the prisoners of tyrants who were urging them to accept the yoke of convention; the more he suffered, the more he knew in his heart that he was culpable, and the more culpable he recognized himself, the more he chafed against the burden of waiting. All the resolutions that with the announcement of their betrothal had seemed to sail before a prospering breeze now turned and beat up against adverse influences and were every moment in danger of being irreparably wrecked.

Naturally coincident with all the stress of a situation, that owing to the temperament of the Greys was never relieved by discussion, was a complete failure to advance on the private road of his poetical ambition. All that he had written was seeming vain and bad: all that he was now trying to write deteriorated with every word painfully inscribed upon the cheerless empty page. He had conceived a set of eclogues that were to mark his contempt for the feverish incompetence of the modern school, whose ears had been corrupted by Wagner's filthy din; and all he could manage to achieve were seeming the ba.n.a.l inspirations of Mendelssohn. Guy was like an alchemist perpetually on the verge of discovering the stone that will trans.m.u.te base metals to gold as he tried to find the secret by which such an one as Beethoven could purify with art the most violent emotions of humanity, yet always preserve their intrinsic value. He craved the secret which even the most obscure Elizabethans seemed to have possessed, that unearthly power of harmony which could fuse all baseness in a glittering song. Pa.s.sion had never lost itself in arid decoration when they sang; nor yet had it ever betrayed itself with that impudently direct appeal these modern lyrists made, these shameless Rousseaus of verse. Yet he was as bad as any of them, for he was either like them when he tried to write his heart, or he expired in the mere sound of words like the degenerate ruck of the Caroline heirs to a great tradition. He was almost on the point of proclaiming his final failure, and if at that moment he could have received from his father the offer to come and teach small boys at Fox Hall, he would have gone.

And yet would he have gone? Could he abandon the delight of being with Pauline? The nearer he came to confessing his failure, the more he longed for her company. He was surely now in the midway of the th.o.r.n.y path of love, and whether he progressed or retreated he could not escape the spines. Well had he said to himself that night in May: '_La belle Dame sans mercy bath thee in thrall_.'

All the fire and fever of his present life on the outskirts of a haunted country was for his imagination alone. However timidly his pen approached those dreams, they vanished; and whenever his pen betrayed him, Guy turned despairingly again to Pauline herself. These days without her were every day more unendurable. Once he had been content to talk about her to Mrs. Grey and her sisters, to listen to their praise of her: now every word they spoke wounded his pride. This madness of love could only feed itself in the very dungeons of his mind; and unless she were with him it did so horribly gorge itself that, if he had not swiftly seen her again, the madness would have broken the bars of its prison and ridden him like a hag.

It was when Guy had worked himself to this pitch of desire for the remedy of her sweet presence that Pauline was denied to him. He knew he must blame himself because, even after the warning of that afternoon in the Abbey, whenever they were together he would carry her away into the country, whence they would not return sometimes until night had fallen.

Worse than that, by his now continuous withdrawal from the life of the Rectory he must have disquieted her family. He saw that they were becoming anxious about Pauline, but for that very reason he could not bring himself to mitigate a solitary doubt of theirs. Even to talk about her in the lightest way was now become an outrage upon the seclusion of their joint life. Such a conversation as that with Margaret about the silver photograph frame was now unimaginable. What right had anyone to know even what picture of Pauline burned upon his wall in the night-time? At first Pauline herself when the memory of the shock her mother's words had been to her died out, tried to justify the att.i.tude of guardianship. She would explain to Guy how, ever since she could remember, her mother and sisters had treated her with this vigilance.

They had, as she said, always so much adored her that it was natural for them to be unable at once to relinquish entirely to someone else the complete possession of her. Yet Guy must not be jealous, because she told them none of her secrets now: indeed she was distressed at the thought of how far outside her confidence they reproachfully esteemed themselves. Her love for him had severely shaken the perfect unity of their immemorial life together, and he must be generous and understand how gradual would have to be their renunciation of her to him. Guy, however, would not allow Pauline to have regrets like this. The most trivial consideration of her family aroused his jealousy; and when Mrs.

Grey said she thought it would be better if the old rule of only seeing Pauline twice a week came into force again, Guy was determined that Pauline should resent the step as bitterly as he resented it. All the time he was with her he would be lamenting the briefness of their permitted intercourse, and since the weather was now so wet that even they could not reasonably claim beneath such streaming skies the right to abscond into deserted country, November shed a gloom upon their love.

On the days when Guy did come to the Rectory, no one attempted to rob them of their privacy; they were always granted the nursery to themselves, and even sometimes they had tea there together, if visitors came, so that the privilege of their few hours should not be infringed.

Nevertheless, the old sense of time and the world at their service was lost. The dull November dusk came swiftly on; and out in the pa.s.sage the cuckoo with maddening reiteration proclaimed each fleeting fifteen minutes. Often Guy was asked to dinner, but the old pleasure was mostly gone, for in the evening he and Pauline were not expected to retire by themselves; and there was always an implied reproach for his influence when she refused to play her violin. Then there came a dreadful day, because some cousins had arrived to stay at the Rectory; for these two girls like everyone else had been accustomed to adore Pauline, and so were determined to take an extreme interest in her engagement.

"We seem to have a ghastly lure for them," Guy groaned in exasperation, when Pauline had managed at last to secure the nursery for themselves.

"Guy, they're only staying a week."

"Well," he protested, "and for me to stay with you a week takes months of these miserable little hours we have. Oh, Pauline, I must see more of you."

Then back came the adoring cousins, and Guy felt that no torture he could imagine was bad enough for them. Their cordiality to him was so great that he had to be superficially pleasant; and, as smile after smile was wrung from him, by the end of the afternoon he felt sick with the agony his politeness had cost.

"Hurry and dress! hurry! hurry!" he begged Pauline, in a whisper when the gong sounded. "Let us at least have five minutes alone before dinner comes and I must go."

Pauline was scarcely five minutes in coming down again, but Guy counted each tick of the clock with desperate heartsickness.

"Oh, my darling, my darling," he said when she was held in the so dearly longed for, the so terribly brief embrace. "I cannot bear the torment of to-day."

She tried to soothe him; but Guy had reached the depths and this relief after such effort was almost too late.

"Pauline, listen," he said quickly. "You must come and say good-night to me in the garden. Do you hear? You must. You must. I shan't sleep unless you do. You must."

"Guy," she murmured, "I couldn't."

"You must. Promise ... you must. Come down and say good-night to me on the lawn. I shall wait there all night. I shall wait...."

The cuckoo burst out to cry seven o'clock.

"You must come. You must come. Promise."

"Perhaps," she whispered faintly. Then she said she could not.

Guy went to the door.

"Remember, I have not kissed you good-night," he proclaimed solemnly.

"And now I'm going. I shall wait from eleven o'clock, and stay all night until you have kissed me."

"Oh, but Guy...."

"To-night," he said. "You promise?"

"Guy, if I dare, if I dare."

There were footsteps in the pa.s.sage. He fled across the room, kissed her momentarily and hurried out, saying good-bye to the cousins, as he pa.s.sed them, with a kind of exultant affection.

Outside, the November night hung humid and oppressive; Guy looking up felt rain falling softly yet with gathering intensity, and he lingered a few moments in the drive held by the whispering blackness. Behind him, the lamplight of the Rectory windows seemed for the moment sad and unattainable and gave him the fancy he was drifting away from a friendly sh.o.r.e. Then suddenly he marched away along the drive, content; for the thought of 'to-night,' which latterly had often brought such a presentiment of loneliness, now sounded upon his imagination like the rapture of a nightingale.

Plashers Mead had never appeared so desirable as now when it was the prelude to such an enterprise as this of consecrating with a last embrace the rain and gloom of November. If he had any hesitation about the rightness or even, setting probity aside, about the prudence of such an action, he justified himself with romantic reasons; and if he was driven by conscience to an ultimate defence, he justified himself with the exceptional circ.u.mstances that gave him a sanction to accept from Pauline this sacrifice of her traditions. Impulses to consider what he was doing were easily dismissed: indeed before he reached his house there was not one left. Inside, the warmth and comfort of Plashers Mead were additional incentives to prosecute his resolve; every gleaming book, the breathing of the dog upon the mat before the fire, the gentle purr of the lamp, all seemed to demand that voluptuous renunciation which would later urge him forth again into the night. That it would probably be raining was not to prove an obstacle: Pauline would be more sure to come if she thought he were standing outside in the rain. It was a second Eve of St. Agnes; and Guy went across to his shelf and took down Keats. He had come to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, when there was a knock at the front-door, and his mind leapt to the thought that Pauline might have sent a note by Birdwood to prevent his coming to-night. The knock sounded again, and as Miss Peasey was evidently too deeply immersed in The Pilgrim's Progress, her vespertine lectionary, to pay heed to visitors at this hour of nine o'clock, he must go down and open the door himself.

"Are we disturbing you?"

It was the voice of Brydone, and with Willsher in his wake he came into the hall.

"Charlie and I have made several shots to find you in, but of course we know you're a busy man nowadays."

"Go on upstairs, will you?" said Guy making a tremendous effort to appear hospitable. "I'll dig out the whisky."

He went along and shouted in Miss Peasey's ear what was wanted. She looked up as if it were Apollyon himself come to affront her holy abstraction.

"I think there's some left from that bottle we got in August.... I shall lay it on the mat," she told him.

Guy nodded encouragingly and went upstairs to join his guests.

"Well, I suppose you'll be soon having a missus in charge here," said Brydone heartily.

Willsher hummed Bachelor Boys as a contributory echo of the question.

"Oh, no, we're not getting married at once, you know," Guy explained.

"Well, you're quite right," Brydone declared heartily. "After all, being close at hand like this, you're not much likely to draw a blank in the lottery."

"Marriage is a lottery, isn't it?" said Guy with polite sarcasm.

"Rather," sighed Willsher. "Terrific!"

"I suppose I shall have to be looking round preparatory to getting married in two or three years' time," Brydone added. "Well, you see, after Christmas I shall be thinking about my finals, and then I'm going to come in as the old man's partner. Country people like it best, if a doctor's married. No doubt about that, is there, Charlie?"