The Spinners

by Eden Phillpotts

CHAPTER XVI

THE OFFER OF MARRIAGE

Raymond met Estelle on his way from the works and together they walked home. Here and there in the cottage doorways sat women braiding. Among them was Sally Groves—now grown too old and slow to tend the 'Card'—and accident willed that she should make an opening for thoughts that now filled Ironsyde's mind. They stopped, for Sally was an old acquaintance of both, and Estelle valued the big woman for her resolute character and shrewd sense. Now Sally, on strength of long-standing friendship, grew personal. It was an ancient joke to chaff Miss Groves about marriage, but to-day, when Raymond asked if the net she made was to catch a husband, Sally retorted with spirit.

"All very fine for you two to be poking fun at me," she said. "But what about you? It's time you made up your minds I'm sure, for everybody knows you're in love with each other—though you don't yourselves seemingly."

"Give us a lead, Sally," suggested Raymond; but she shook her head.

"You're old enough to know your own business," she answered; "but don't you go lecturing other people about matrimony while you're a bachelor yourself—else you'll get the worst of it—as you have now."

They left her and laughed together.

"Yet I've heard you say she was the most sensible woman that ever worked in the mills," argued Raymond.

Estelle made no direct reply, but spoke of Sally in the past at one of her parties, when the staff took holiday and spent a day at Weymouth.

Their conversation faded before they reached North Hill House, and then, as they entered the drive, Raymond reminded Estelle of a time long vanished and an expedition taken when she was a child.

"Talking of good things, d'you remember our walk to Chilcombe in the year one? Or, to be more exact, when you were in short frocks."

"I remember well enough. How my chatter must have bored you."

"You never bored me in your life, Chicky. In fact, you always seem to have been a part of my life since I began to live. That event happened soon after our walk, if I remember rightly. You really seem as much a part of my life as my right hand, Estelle."

"Well, your right hand can't bore you, certainly."

"Some of the things that it has done have bored me. But let's go to Chilcombe again—not in the car—but just tramp it as we did before. How often have you been there since we went?"

She considered.

"Twice, I think. My friends there left ten years ago and my girl friend died. I haven't been there since I grew up."

"Well, come this afternoon."

"It's going to rain, Ray."

"Since when did rain frighten you?"

"I'd love to come."

"A walk will do me good," he said. "I'm getting jolly lazy."

"So father thinks. He hates motors—says they are going to make the next generation flabby and good-for-nothing."

They started presently under low grey clouds, but the sky was not grey for them and the weather of their minds made them forget the poor light and sad south-west wind laden with rain. It held off until they had reached Chilcombe chapel, entered the little place of prayer and stood together before the ancient reredos. The golden-brown wood made a patch of brightness in the little building. They were looking at it and recalling Estelle's description of it in the past, when the storm broke and the rain beat on the white glass in the windows above them.

"How tiny it's all grown," said Estelle. "Surely everything has shrunk?"

They had the chapel to themselves and, sitting beside her in a pew, Raymond asked her to marry him. Thunder had wakened in the sky, and the glare of lightning touched their faces now and then. But they only remembered that afterwards.

"Sally Groves was no more than half right," he said, "so her fame for wisdom is shaken. She told us we didn't know we loved one another, Estelle. But I know I love you well enough, and I've been shaking in my shoes to tell you so for months and months. I knew I was getting too old every minute and yet couldn't say the word. But I must say it now at any cost. Chicky, I love you—dearly, dearly I love you—because I'm calm and steady, that doesn't mean I'm not in a blaze inside. I never thought of it even while you were growing up. But a time came when I did begin to think of it like the deuce; and when once I did, the thought towered up like the effreet let out of the bottle—that story you loved when you were small. But my only fear and dread is that you've always been accustomed to think of me as so much older than you are. If you once get an idea into your head about a person's age, you can't get it out again. At least, I can't; so I'm afraid you'll regard me as quite out of the question for a husband. If that's so, I'll begin over again."

Her eyes were round and her mouth a little open. She did not blink when the lightning flashed.

"But—but—" she said.

"If I'm not too old, there are no 'buts' left," he declared firmly. "Ten years is no great matter after all, and from the point of view of brains, I'm an infant beside you. Then say 'yes,' my darling—say 'yes' to me."

"I wonder—I wonder, Ray?"

"Haven't you ever guessed what I felt?"

"Yes, in a vague way. At least I knew there was something growing up between us."

"It was love, my beautiful dear."

She smiled at him doubtfully. The colour had come back to her face, but she did not respond when he lifted his arms to her.

"Are you sure—can you be sure, Ray? It's so different,—so shattering. It seems to smash up all the past into little bits and begin the world all over again—for you and me. It's such a near thing. I've seen the married people and wondered about it. You might get so weary of always having me so close."

"I want you close—closer and closer. I want you as the best part of myself—to make me happier first and, because happier, more useful in the world. I want you at the helm of my life—to steer me, Chicky. What couldn't we do together! It's selfish—? it's one-sided, I know that. I get everything—you only get me. But I'll try and rise to the occasion. I worship you, and no woman ever had a more devout worshipper. I feel that your father wouldn't be very mad with me. But it's for you to decide, nothing else matters either way."

"I love to think you care for me so much," she said. "And I care for you, Ray, and have cared for you—more than either of us know. Yes, I have. Sally Groves knew somehow. I should like to say 'yes' this moment; but I can't. I know I shall say it presently; but I'm not going to say it till I've thought a great many thoughts and looked into the future and considered all this means—for you as well as for me. It's life or death really, for both of us, and the more certain sure we are before, the happier we should be afterwards, I expect."

"I'm sure enough, Estelle. I've been sure enough for many a long day. I know the very hour I began to be sure."

"I think I am too; but I can't say 'yes' and mean 'yes' for the present. I've got to thresh out a lot of things. I dare say they'd be absurd to you; but they're not to me."

"Can I help you?"

"I don't know. You can, I expect. I shall come to you again to throw light on the difficult points."

"How long are you going to take?"

"How can I tell? But I can all the same, I'm not going to take long."

"Say you love me—do say that."

"I should have told you if I didn't."

"That's all right, but not so blessed as hearing you say with your own lips you do. Say it—say it, Chicky. I won't take advantage of it. I only want to hear it. Then I'll leave you in peace to think your thoughts."

"I do love you," she said gently and steadily. "It can be nothing smaller than that. You are a very great part of my life—the greatest. I know that, because when you go away life is at evening, and when you come back again life is at morning. Let me have a little time, Ray—only a very little. Then I'll decide."

"I hope your wisdom will let you follow your will, then, and not forbid the banns."

"You mustn't think it cold and horrid of me."

"You couldn't be cold and horrid, my sweet Estelle. We're neither of us capable of being cold, or horrid. We are not babies. I don't blame you a bit for wanting to think about it. I only blame myself. If I was all I might have been, you wouldn't want to think about it."

This challenge shook her, but did not change her.

"Nobody's all they might be, Ray; but many people are a great deal more than they might be. That's what makes you love people best, I think—to see how brave and patient and splendid men and women can be. Life's so difficult even for the luckiest of us; but it isn't the luckiest who are the pluckiest generally—is it? I've had such a lot more than my share of luck already. So have you—at least people think so. But nobody knows one's luck really except oneself."

"It's the things that are going to happen will make our good luck," he said. "You'll find men are seldom satisfied with the past, whatever women may be. God knows I'm not."

"You were always one of my two heroes when I was a child; and father was the other. He is still my hero—and so are you, Ray."

"A pretty poor hero. I wouldn't pretend that to my dog. I only claim to have something worth while in me that you might bring out—raw material for you to turn into the finished article."

She laughed to hear this.

"Come—come—you're not as modest as all that. You're much too clever even to pretend any such thing. Women don't turn strong men into finished articles. At best, perhaps, they can only decorate a little of the outside."

"You laugh," he answered, "but you know better. If you love me, be ambitious for me. That's the most helpful love a woman can give a man—to see his capabilities better than he can, and fire him on the best and biggest he can do, and help him to grasp his opportunities."

"So it is."

"You've got to decide whether it's worth while marrying me, Chicky. You do love me, as I love you—because you can't help it. But you can help marrying me. You've got to think of your own show as well as mine. I quite understand that. You must be yourself and make your own mark, and take advantage of all the big new chances offered to the rising generation of women. I love you a great deal too much to want to lessen you, or drift you into a back-water. It's just a question whether my work, and the Mill, and so on, give you the chance you want—if, working together, we can each help on the other. You could certainly help me hugely and you know it; but whether I could help you—that's what you've got to think about I suppose."

"Yes, I suppose it is, Ray."

"Your eyes say 'yes' already, and they're terrible true eyes."

But she only lowered them and neither spoke any more for a little while. The worst of the storm had passed, and its riot and splash gave place to a fine drizzle as the night began to close in.

They started for home and, both content to think their own thoughts, trudged side by side. For Raymond's part, he knew the woman too well to suffer any doubt of the issue and he was happy. For he felt that she was quietly happy too, and if instincts had brought grave doubts, or prompted her to deny him, she would not have been happy.

Estelle did not miss the romance from his offer of marriage. She had dreamed of man's love in her poetry-reading days, but under the new phase and the practical bent, developed by a general enthusiasm for her kind, personal emotions were not paramount. There could be but little sex in her affection for Raymond: she had lived too near him for that. Indeed, she had grown up beside him, and the days before he came to dwell at North Hill seemed vague and misty. Thus his challenge came as an experience both less and greater than love. It was less, in that no such challenge can be so urgent and so mighty as the call of hungry hearts to each other; it was greater, because the interests involved were built on abiding principles. They arrested her intellectual ambitions and pointed to a sphere of usefulness beyond her unaided power. What must have made his prosaic offer flat in the ear of an amorous woman, edged it for her. He had dwelt on the aspect of their union that was likely most to attract her.

There was a pure personal side where love came in and made her heart beat warmly enough; but, higher than that, she saw herself of living value to Raymond and helping him just where he stood most in need of help. She believed that they might well prove the complement of each other in those duties, disciplines, and obligations to which life had called them.

That night she went closely, searchingly over old ground again from the new point of vision. What had always been interesting to her, became now vital, since these characteristics belonged to the man who wanted to wed her. She tried to be remorseless and cruel that she might be kind. But the palette of thought was only set with pleasant colours. She had been intellectually in love with him for a long time, and he had offered problems which made her love him for the immense interest they gave her. Now came additional stimulus in the knowledge that he loved her well enough to share his life, his hopes, and his ambitions with her.

She believed they might be wedded in very earnest. He was masterful and possessed self-assurance; but what man can lead and control without these qualities? His self-assurance was less than his self-control, and his instinct for self-assertion had nearly always been counted by a kind heart. It seemed to her that she had never known a man who balanced reason and feeling more judicially, or better preserved a mean between them.

She had found that men could differentiate in a way beyond woman's power and be unsociable if their duty demanded it. But to be unsociable is not to be unsocial. Raymond took long views, and if his old, genial and jolly attitude to life was a thing of the past, there had been substituted for it a wiser understanding and saner recognition of the useful and useless. Men did take longer views than women—so Estelle decided: and there Raymond would help her; but the all-important matter that night was to satisfy herself how much she could help him. In this reverie she found such warmth and light as set her glowing before dawn, for she built up the spiritual picture of Raymond, came very close to its ultimate realities, quickened by the new inspiration, and found that it should be well within her power to serve him generously. She took no credit to herself, but recognized a happy accident of character.

There were weak spots in all masculine armour, that only a woman could make strong, and by a good chance she felt that her particular womanhood might serve this essential turn for Raymond's manhood. To strengthen her own man's weak spots—surely that was the crown and completion of any wedded life for a woman. To check, to supplement, to enrich: that he would surely do for her; and she hoped to deal as faithfully with him.

She was not clear-sighted here, for love, if it be love at all, must bring the rosy veil with it and dim the seeing of the brightest eyes. While the fact that she had grown up with Raymond made her view clear enough in some directions, in others it served, of course, to dim judgment. She credited him with greater intellect than he possessed, and dreamed that higher achievements were in his power than was the truth. But there existed a mean, below her dream yet above his present ambition, that it was certainly possible with her incentive he might attain. She might make him more sympathetic and so more synthetic also, and show him how his own industry embraced industrial problems at large—how it could not be taken by itself, but must hold its place only by favour of its progress, and command respect only as it represented the worthiest relation between capital and labour. Thus, from the personal interest of his work, she would lift him to measure the world-wide needs of all workers. And then, in time to come, he would forget the personal before the more splendid demands of the universal. The trend of machinery was towards tyranny; he must never lose sight of that, or let the material threaten the spiritual. Private life, as well as public life, was open to the tyranny of the machine; and there, too, it would be her joyful privilege to fight beside him for added beauty, added liberty, not only in their own home, but all homes wherein they had power to increase comfort and therefore happiness. The sensitiveness of women should be linked to the driving force of men, as the safety valve to the engine. Thus, in a simile surely destined to delight him, she summed her intentions and desires.

She had often wondered what must be essential to the fullest employment of her energies and the best and purest use of her thinking; and now she saw that marriage answered the question—not marriage in the abstract, but just marriage with this man. He, of all she had known, was the one with whom she felt best endowed to mingle and merge, so that their united forces should be poured to help the world and water with increase the modest territory through which they must flow.

She turned to go to sleep at last, yet dearly longed to tell Raymond and amaze her father with the great tidings.

An impulse prompted her to leave her lover not a moment more in doubt. She rose, therefore, and descended to his room, which opened beside his private study on the ground floor. The hour was nearly four on an autumn morning. She listened, heard him move restlessly and knew that he did not sleep. He struck a match and lighted a cigarette, for he often smoked at night.

Then she knocked at the door.

"Who the devil's that?" he shouted.

"I," she said, opening the door an inch and talking softly. "Stop where you are and stop worrying and go to sleep. I'm going to marry you, Ray, and I'm happier than ever I was before in all my life."

Then she shut the door and fled away.