CHAPTER XVII
The next day was the same, and the next and the next. On the fourth day, urged by despair, Carrie sat down to write to Sebastian the whole tale of her woe.
‘Sir, I shall die,’ she wrote. ‘ ’Tis terrible; I do not like living with women, I find men vastly more agreeable. Pray, pray, dear sir—my dearest dada—write and summon me home, for I am weary of my life here at Wynford.’
Sebastian laughed a good deal over this mournful missive, and wrote Carrie to try to cultivate patience and the womanly graces.
But before his letter had reached her, help had come to Carrie from an unexpected quarter. Lady Mallow, by the kindness of Heaven, fell sick of an influenza, which painful disorder confined the poor lady to her bed, and set Carrie at liberty.
And ennui fled: and with happy hurrying feet Carrie raced down the avenue and along the sweet hedge-bordered roads, going she knew not whither—but away, away from bondage and embroidery and double-dummy whist!
She turned off into a side lane, and then stood looking across the country to see which direction seemed the most promising.
The river plainly beckoned her: so, thrusting her way through the hedge, Carrie set off across the meadows towards the silvery loops of water that slipped along so invitingly in the distance. The fields were white with anemone blossoms. She stood among them in perfect rapture, and then got down upon her knees and began to pull the flowers in handfuls; then further off, along the river bank, she saw a great thicket of blossoming thorn, white as snow, and off she ran towards it.
Carrie flung down all her freshly gathered flowers in a heap upon the grass when she reached the thorn bushes. For these blossoms were lovelier by far than anything she had seen yet; the little starry flowers set on to their jagged black stems had a beauty all their own. Undismayed by the assailing thorns, Carrie pressed into the thicket to gather some of the coveted branches. Her hair caught on the bushes, her dress gave a distracting tear, and finally she scratched her plump white arm up to the elbow. This at last sobered her adventurous spirit. She tried to escape from the clinging branches, but being town-bred, she was ignorant of the fact that to turn round in a thorn thicket is to imprison yourself hopelessly there. So Carrie twisted quickly round, thinking to find herself free, and instead felt of a sudden twenty more thorns catch on her unfortunate person. She shook her head, and a branch a-dance in the breeze clutched her hair like a human hand.
‘O you beautiful cross bushes!’ cried Carrie in despair, ‘I will not gather more of you, if you will but let me go!’
‘Can I help you, madam?’ said a voice behind her at this moment, and some one laughed. Carrie could not turn round to see who had come to her assistance, but she laughed also.
‘O yes, I thank you,’ she cried; ‘I do not know what to do, I am all caught round and round.’
‘Come out backwards; do not try to turn, I shall hold the branches here for you. Take heed for your eyes, madam,’ said her helper. Carrie began to beat a slow retreat, disengaging herself from the clinging branches one by one. At last, torn and dishevelled, she shook off the last assailant and turned round to see who had come to her aid.
A young man with very shining eyes stood beside her, still holding back the thorn bushes with one hand. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then the young man exclaimed in a tone of surprised amusement,
‘Now, by all the powers! ’Tis little Carrie Shepley!’ And Carrie, in spite of her ruffled plumage, responded to this salutation with great urban ease of manner.
‘And this is “Phil” that used to be?’ she said, holding out her hand to him.
‘Carrie, you are scarce changed at all, saving that you are grown to be near as tall as I am,’ said Phil, and he eyed Carrie with great admiration as he took her hand.
‘Nor you either, Mr.—Mr.—I forget your surname,’ said Carrie, drawing herself up with some dignity at this rather free address from a stranger. But as she spoke she met Phil’s shining eyes so ridiculously unchanged that she laughed outright and came down from her high horse without further delay.
‘You are not Mr. Anything, I think—only Phil,’ she said. ‘I could think, to look at us both just now, that we were playing in the Park, and that Patty and Peter would come round the corner in a moment to scold us! Pray, sir—Phil—where are you come from, and how do we meet here?’
‘Come and sit by the river, and I shall tell you everything you care to hear,’ said Phil. And Carrie, nothing loath, sat down on the bank, gathered her torn flounces around her, and gave a surreptitious smooth to her straying locks.
‘Well, I must tell you, you are a trespasser, Carrie, on my father’s land. But ’twould be an ungracious way to renew an old friendship to arrest you—so I let that pass. My father, if you must know, is Mr. Richard Meadowes of Fairmeadowes—the house you see far away there among the trees; that is how I come to be here.’
‘Do you live always here then?’ asked Carrie.
‘I? no—I am but come from Oxford for Easter. I am alone here though just now. My father is in town.—But you have not yet told me how you are here, Carrie?’
‘I am visiting my aunt, Lady Mallow. She hath taken Forde, the house which stands on the sloping ground about half a mile from here along the high road. And indeed, indeed, Phil, I have come near running away to London, so dull have I been these four days since I came to Wynford.’
‘Dull—ah, ’tis a terrible thing to be dull,’ said Phil sympathetically; ‘once I was dull—just once in life, and I made the resolve never to suffer it again. I can bear to be unhappy, or even to be in pain; but dulness—never. I’d sooner get drunk than be dull!’ And at that the young man went off into a curiously ringing laugh that sounded across the fields like a bell.
‘Then are you never dull here?’ asked Carrie in amazement.
‘O no—never. I come here once or twice in the year, and I bring with me books to last me all the time and more; sometimes I work hard, hard, till I feel as though my brain would crack—’tis rather nice that, and then I come down here by the river and amuse myself; or I ride, or shoot the crows, or anything else there is to shoot. But the first morning I waken at an end of my resources, that day I leave Wynford. Oh, but I love Fairmeadowes. I never tire here.’
‘You are just the same,’ said Carrie, more emphatically than before; ‘to hear you talk—’tis just as you used to.’ She looked down at Phil as she spoke. He had flung himself down on the bank at her feet, and was gazing up at her in the frankest manner possible. ‘Why, how old are you?’ she asked suddenly, as unceremonious as he was, and Phil answered without a moment’s hesitation, ‘One-and-twenty, and horribly young it is—but there is all the world to conquer, to be sure, and only one life to do it in.’
Carrie opened her eyes at this statement. ‘How?’ she inquired.
‘How? ah, that is just the question! My father wished me to enter the Service—not I! “ ’Tis a profession for gentlemen,” he said. “Yes, and for fools,” said I, and he (who was in it himself, though he’s no fool!) was rarely angry with me. My father, you know, is a curious man—oh, I shall tell you all that another time,’ said Phil, rolling over on the bank in the most childish manner; then he rose and seated himself beside Carrie. Leaning his chin on his hand he looked down at the river as it flowed below them, and went on in a more serious tone—
‘I had no mind to enter the Service, you see, because I must have something to do that I care about. To speak now before crowds and crowds of people—that would be my ambition.’
‘But what would you speak about?’ asked Carrie laughingly—she was a splendid listener!
‘Speak! I’d speak about anything, Carrie. I’d speak eloquently for half an hour upon your shoe-strings and my entire unworthiness to unloose them!’
‘I believe you would,’ laughed Carrie; ‘you should enter the Church, Phil, then each Lord’s Day you must speak for a certain time.’
‘Not the Church for me, my imagination is by far too strong for that; ’twould have me before my Bishop in a jiffy. Oh, do you remember how scared you were once when I described to you how God would come down on the gilt top of St. Paul’s?’
‘Yes indeed; I should pity your hearers did you scare them after that fashion,’ said Carrie, with a smile of reminiscence.
‘I think I shall study for the Bar,’ began Phil, and then, because in spite of his volubility he was not a bore, he started up in genuine dismay.
‘Lord save us!’ he exclaimed; ‘here have I been talking of my own affairs so long you will never speak to me again, Carrie. Come, let me show you the path through the park, and as you love me, talk of some other matter!’
Carrie laughingly obeyed, talking in her turn of herself, and then they talked of childhood (that was not so very far behind either of them), and of Patty and of Peter. (‘He’s about the only man I respect in this world; if I could do my duty like him I should be proud,’ said Phil. ‘Why, he has never been late with my shaving-water for years.’ At this statement Carrie glanced up with a little grimace of amusement at Phil’s rather peach-like cheek, and he laughed ringingly. ‘Well, that is mayhap something of an exaggeration,’ he admitted.)
And so they sauntered on, abundantly amused with each other, till Carrie remembered with dismay the lateness of the hour, and bidding Phil a hurried farewell, ran off down the road in the direction of Forde.
Phil called after her as she ran: ‘Come again to-morrow, Carrie.’ And so they parted.