CHAPTER V
Perhaps it was because he felt the knot so obligingly tied by Simon Prior not quite impossible to untie, that Richard Meadowes took his marital obligations very lightly. He was well pleased with his new acquisition, and used to ride out from town constantly to see Anne. They would walk out together in the long spring twilights, and gradually Anne began to lose her dread of such a fine lover and spoke to him freely and naturally.
Anne could be a very amusing companion; for she had quick wits; and that for companionship is far better than being well educated. She would tell Meadowes all about her life; excepting one episode only, no mention of which ever crossed her lips—of the men who had courted her, and the women who had hated her, of the straits of poverty, and all she had seen and suffered and enjoyed in her five-and-twenty years’ pilgrimage. In return, she would ask Meadowes about the unknown world to which he belonged. Had they always enough to eat without thinking about it or working for it? (‘Lord sakes, how grand!’) Had they never to walk when they were weary, or toil when they were faint? Was it possible he had never known what it was to be cold for want of clothing, or run out of fuel in the winter? (‘You scarce know you’re alive!’) Or, sorest strait of all, was it possible he had never known sickness and want together? (‘You’ve not felt the Lord’s hand on you yet then, Dick.’) And she would listen with delight to Meadowes’ tales of his world. Outwardly, indeed, Anne was cheerful enough now; Meadowes began to think she was forgetting the past. Only her entire silence about Sebastian Shepley seemed to mark any feeling on the subject. Yet every now and then he fancied she was thinking of her former lover. Once as they walked together down the lane on a lovely summer night—the birds were singing as if their little throats would burst, the year’s jubilee was at its height—Meadowes turned to her in his sudden, impulsive way.
‘ ’Tis fine to be alive and young,’ he said; ‘and the birds sing like the angels of Paradise!’
‘I think to have heard the sparrows in the Green Park——’ Anne began to say, almost as if she were speaking to herself—then she broke off in the middle of her sentence and turned away. A moment later she added—
‘You do speak rarely clear, Dick—for all the world like a flute’s note. I like to hearken to your voice better than them birds by far.’
Meadowes was charmed with this pretty speech; he flung his arm round Anne’s waist and kissed her. She looked up at him with her brown eyes full of tears; but they may have been tears of mirth, for all she said was, ‘Good sakes! but men be mortal vain,’ and with that she drew herself away from his embrace.
‘Why should she cry over the sparrows in the Green Park?’ Meadowes wondered; how should he know how often Anne had walked there with Sebastian Shepley?
Time wore on, summer merged into autumn, and still Anne had never spoken once to Meadowes about Sebastian Shepley; they were the best of friends, Anne welcomed his coming and mourned at his going, but without a trace of sentiment, as Meadowes found himself forced to admit. Men do not like a want of sentiment in women: they may condone it in their own sex, it is considered an essential in ours; so Meadowes, who had never blamed himself for lacking this quality, found it in his heart to be surprised and a little indignant with Anne for doing so. ‘She should be beginning to care more for me by now,’ he thought; he had been a very devoted husband.
It was devotion indeed, which urged him to ride out from London one cruel night of wind and rain. The miles seemed as though they would never be got over; yet Meadowes rode on and on, out into the deep country, his head bowed before the lashing of the rain and the onslaught of the wind. At the Cross Roads Inn he dismounted, and leaving his horse there, strode on through the darkness to Anne’s cottage.
‘Good sakes, Dick, is it you!’ cried Anne at sound of his knock. She flung open the door and he passed in, into the warmth and stillness of the cottage kitchen, where he stood laughing and breathless, the water dripping from his drenched clothes on to the sanded floor. Anne, exclamatory and sympathetic, stood beside him.
‘ ’Tis wetted through and through you are, Dick,’ she said, wringing the flap of his riding-coat. ‘For the love of heaven go and cast these wet clothes from off you, while I do heat up some ale for you on the fire. There be naught like hot ale for chills. Good lack! to think of mortal man riding from London this night!’
Meadowes laughed. ‘I shall be none the worse, Anne. But not hot ale—mulled claret for me, my girl.’
‘I have no knowledge of your fine sour-wine drinks, Dick. For certain the hot ale be far wholesomer,’ urged Anne, who clung to tradition as surely as Meadowes.
So to please her hot ale he drank, sitting by the wide cottage fireplace listening to the driving storm. The candle, which had been low in its socket, burned lower; then Anne put it out, and still they sat silently in the pleasant fire-lit room and heard the storm rave on outside. They were sitting side by side on the settle by the fire, Meadowes had his arm round Anne’s shoulder in his kindly caressing fashion, but though Anne permitted the endearment she did not respond to it in any way.
‘You are very quiet to-night?’ said Meadowes at last. Anne shivered, and bent forward to stir up the fire for answer.
‘What ails you, Anne? Has aught distressed you through the day?’ he asked.
Anne turned round and looked at him; her eyes had a curiously wild, frightened expression.
‘ ’Tis like great guns,’ she said. ‘There, there. O Lord, I can’t a-bear to hear it—guns and guns a-thundering on, and when it cometh round the corner o’ the house ’tis for all the world like the shrieks of dying men.’
Meadowes was mystified by her words. He had never seen Anne fanciful before.
‘Well, what of it?—’tis not unlike heavy firing, as you say,’ he admitted. ‘But you are safe enough here, my girl, in all truth.’
‘Eh, Dick! don’t you understand?’ cried Anne. ‘Battles, and guns, and all. . . . I do seem to hear from over seas, from Flanders, bringing to my mind all I’ve a mind to forget. I’ve sat all this day a-hearing of them guns, and times I’d stop my ears.—O Lord! there be the screams again.’ And Anne, turning to the only helper she had, held out her hands to him with a trembling, childish gesture.
‘Dick, Dick,’ she said, ‘you be quick to feel all things, and kind too, more nor I deserve, I that have married you, and my heart turning back to another.’
Quick to feel, Meadowes was feeling a hundred conflicting sensations at that moment. But first of all he must quiet Anne.
‘Come, Anne,’ he said, ‘you are tired and fanciful. ’Tis time you were gone to bed, and by the morning you will have forgot the storm that scares you now. Ah, I understand altogether, Anne; aye, and feel for you too. But these things are better left alone, it but makes them harder to speak of them.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Anne, rising to put a fresh candle in the candlestick. She had appealed to ‘Dick’ in vain, she thought, and would not attempt to make him understand.
‘I have some letters to write,’ said Meadowes, dismissing the subject; ‘I shall sit up and finish them.’
When Anne had gone, however, there, was not much letter-writing done. Meadowes sat and looked into the fire, coming to several conclusions. Well, here was the end of his amour; up to this time he had been quite content with Anne, delighted with her; but now—he simply could not stand this. If she was going to be always thinking about Sebastian Shepley, and even mentioning him, it was high time that the connection between himself and her was at an end. Meadowes, who was a very fastidious man, shuddered at the whole situation. ‘Horrible; truly ’twas in Providence I did not marry her,’ he said. Yet he had quite enough of conscience to make it a difficult matter for him to break with Anne. He dreaded beyond measure her anger when she found herself to have been so duped. It was indeed almost impossible to contemplate telling her. How would it best be done? Offer her money? Anne would never consider that a recompense. Just leave her? ‘Even I am not bad enough for that!’ Trust to time? Time would possibly make matters worse. Yet after hours of thought on the subject this last and very lame conclusion was the one which Meadowes finally adopted. He resolved not to see so much of her now and—to wait.
‘A plague upon Sebastian Shepley, and a plague upon Constancy and Love and all the Virtues!’ he said as he rose from his chair at last; ‘and equally a plague upon Richard Meadowes, and Treachery and Passion and all the Vices,’ he added, as he stood looking down at the last embers of the wood-fire that glowed on the hearth. He gave an angry kick to the red ashes with the toe of his riding-boot that sent a shower of scarlet sparks up into the air; they fell down a moment later in soft grey ash, and the fire was out.
‘The end of all hot fires,’ said Meadowes, as he groped his way across to the door.