CHAPTER XXII
Philip, who knew every step of the road between Wynford and London, had some very disquieting thoughts as he rode down to the cross roads to meet Carrie.
Everything depended upon whether they could reach the half-way house at Wyntown before Dr. Shepley. For after Wyntown there were several roads which each led to town; but between Wynford and Wyntown there was only one road. Therefore if they met, they would in all probability meet upon that road. Phil determined to keep his fears to himself. It was a pleasant morning, and a pleasant ride. He found Carrie already waiting for him under the flickering shade of the beech-trees.
‘You see I can make haste when I please, sir,’ she said, trying to smile. The smile, however, was rather forced, and after a few ineffectual attempts at conversation they rode along in silence.
‘The deuce take that horse of your aunt’s!’ at last quoth Phil in despair; ‘can you not make him go a better pace, Carrie?’
Carrie smiled, and shook her head. ‘My aunt will never permit her steeds to go beyond a slow trot,’ she explained.
‘Oh, your aunt be ——,’ began Phil, and Carrie actually laughed outright at his irritation.
‘Now you resemble a little boy I once knew who used bad words,’ she said, looking up at him under her eyelashes.
‘I ask your pardon, Carrie; ’tis that old cow you are riding irritates me,’ he said, with an impatient flick of his riding-whip.
Phil affected more assurance than he felt, however, as they dismounted before the door of the inn at Wyntown. ‘Heaven send Shepley is not here before us!’ he thought as he lifted Carrie down and gave the horses to the ostler.
‘We shall come up-stairs and dine, Carrie,’ he said. ‘Do you not feel as though you were my wife already?’ He drew Carrie’s rather limp little hand through his arm as he spoke, and they went up-stairs to the inn parlour, which overlooked the courtyard.
‘You are wearied, I fear, Carrie,’ he said.
‘Hot wearied, Phil, in the least, but not very happy,’ said Carrie, with a stifled sob.
Phil affected deafness, and requested the landlady to bring up dinner as quickly as might be. ‘For I am near famished with the morning air, Mistress Heathe,’ said he, with a smile to the good woman, an old acquaintance, ‘and so is this lady also; but she is somewhat weary, so see no stranger comes in while we are here.’
‘Just as you please, sir; just as you please,’ said Mistress Heathe, as she bustled round the table, and made bold to ask for his father’s health.
‘The same I did serve with a bottle of wine yesterday at this very hour. “Bad roads they are to-day, Mistress Heathe,” said he, for your father, sir, is ever so affable in the passing by, ’tis a pleasure serving such gentry as he, to be sure.’ And she gave a curious squint at Carrie meanwhile.
That young woman made a show of eating a little, but in truth it was Phil who cleared off the viands, and Lady Mallow would have been quite pleased by the genteel appetite of her niece, if she could have seen how she toyed with a scrap of chicken, and shook her head at sight of an apple tart.
‘I am sorry, Phil, I cannot eat,’ she said, ‘and somehow I cannot talk either, so perhaps we had best not try to talk.’
‘Never fear, Carrie; ’twill be all right soon,’ said Phil, and he crossed over to the window and sat there looking out into the yard.
Wyntown was nearly equidistant between London and Wynford, so, calculating that Dr. Shepley had left town at the same hour as they had left Wynford, he must arrive at Wyntown not much later than themselves—so calculated Philip. He had no real reason to suppose that Dr. Shepley would come at all; everything depended on the contents of that letter, but if he did——
There was a rumble of wheels over the cobble-paved courtyard, and Phil saw a very tall grave-faced man jump down from the seat of a post-chaise and come up to the door. Carrie, at the sound of the wheels, came to the window. She laid her hand on Phil’s shoulder, and glanced out.
‘Phil! Phil!’ she cried, ‘ ’tis my dear father.’
In the one glance she had got of his face Carrie marked there a new stamp of anxiety she had never seen before—and it was she who had stamped it there! She turned away and buried her face on the cushions of the settle. Phil, trying to be hard-hearted, affected no sympathy with her grief, but when at last there came a succession of quick gasping sobs, he crossed the room and bent over her.
‘Come, Carrie, you must not grieve so,’ he said rather lamely. Carrie sat up and dried her pretty eyes, that were all reddened with tears.
‘O Phil,’ she said, with a little choke in her voice, ‘I have never seen him look thus. Ah, I must see him—speak with him—I shall explain!’
She rose and hurried to the door, but Phil barred her exit.
‘ ’Tis madness, Carrie—sheer madness this,’ he expostulated; ‘you’ll never see my face again if Dr. Shepley discovers you here with me.’
‘I cannot help it. Ah, Phil, do not be cruel! See him I must—then I shall go with you—then we will be married.’
‘You are a fool, Carrie!’ cried Phil, carried away by one of his sudden, hot fits of temper. ‘ “Then we will be married!”—do you suppose for one moment your father would permit our marriage?’
‘Yes,’ said Carrie, ‘I think he would.’
‘Then you think nonsense.’
‘I know him better than you do, Phil.’
‘Well, explain me this then—if so be he will not oppose our marriage, why doth he hasten from London at first hint of your meeting me?’
‘He could not forbid it did he understand all I shall tell him; ’twould not be like my father to do so. Phil, you do not know him. You do not guess even at his generous heart—you——’
‘Generous!’ laughed Phil; ‘no, no, not so generous as that.’
‘Phil, I shall see him—whatever you say, I shall see him!’ cried Carrie, and she tried once more to escape towards the door.
And Phil, fairly mastered now by his temper, flung the door wide open, crying out: ‘Go to him then, if you love him the best.’
A moment later he saw Carrie swirl down the narrow panelled passage of the inn into the very arms of Sebastian, who had appeared at the far end of it.
‘Lord, Carrie!’ he heard Sebastian exclaim, as he laughed his jolly whole-hearted laugh and kissed his daughter on either cheek with more fervour than gentility. Then there was an incoherent murmur of exclamation and sobs from Carrie, then Sebastian’s voice again:—
‘And how are you here, my girl? Have you run away from her Ladyship and the influenza?’
‘Yes, sir—with Philip Meadowes, sir,’ said Carrie, whose downright nature equalled her father’s.
Phil held his breath to hear what Sebastian would reply.
‘And where is Philip Meadowes?’ he heard Sebastian say. A minute later Carrie came into the parlour, leading her father by the hand. There fell a moment of ominous silence. Neither of the men spoke, but Carrie, as she took a hand of each, and looked from one to the other in puzzled, pretty confusion, was the first to speak.
‘This is Philip, sir,’ she said; ‘and indeed I am sure you cannot choose but love him.’
‘There may be two opinions on that point mayhap,’ said Sebastian grimly.
For all the antagonism of their mutual relations at the moment, Phil, with his extraordinarily sensitive nature, felt a sudden impulse of liking to this man, Carrie’s father. ‘Why have I not a father like that?’ he thought—‘some one to rely on without a shadow of distrust.’ Poor Philip, for all his charm, was sadly alone in the difficult places of life, and youth, in spite of all its self-assertion, is conscious enough of its own need. Beside this resolute masterful man, Phil felt himself, of a sudden, boyish and foolish, as he had never felt before. But, assuming a great deal more self-confidence than he felt, he bowed to Dr. Shepley and ‘feared the circumstances of their meeting would scarce conduce to an agreeable acquaintance between them.’
The older man did not reply to this remark; but drew back the window-curtain so that the light might fall full across Phil’s face, and gazed intently at him for a few moments. Annie’s son! Flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone—and Annie cold in her grave these twenty years! How say some among us that there is no resurrection? This is, instead, a world of resurrections, in which that man or woman is fortunate who can succeed in burying the past so deep that it cannot rise. Phil and Carrie, hot with their own impatient young desires, were only irritated by Sebastian’s silence. How could they guess at that blinding back-flash of memory that held him silent at sight of Phil? How could they hear the voice Sebastian heard—an urgent tearful voice, ‘Phil, that hath gotten half my soul’; and again, ‘If ever you can help Phil you’ll do it, because I gave him half my soul,’ . . . and . . . ‘God give Phil a white heart,’ . . . and . . . ‘Come, Sebastian?’
‘Sir, sir, speak!’ cried Carrie, catching hold again of her father’s hand.
At the touch of her hand, at the sound of her voice, Sebastian came back to the present—the important present.
‘By Heaven!’ he cried. ‘Once in life is enough to be robbed by Richard Meadowes!’
‘But, sir, I am not Richard Meadowes,’ said Phil.
‘His son; and twice accursed by that token. Never shall daughter of mine have my consent to marry with son of his—black-hearted lying devil that he is.’
Carrie shrank back, scared at her father’s violence; she had never heard him speak like this before.
‘Perhaps, sir, ’twould be better for you and me to discuss this matter by ourselves,’ suggested Phil. There had, in fact, been no explanation given on either side as yet, a fact which Phil was the first to realise. Sebastian, beside himself with anger, at the sight of Carrie in company with the son of his enemy, had never stopped to ask any questions one way or other.
‘There is little to discuss, I know, Mr. Meadowes,’ he said. ‘I have information this very day of your intentions, sent me by your father, and these intentions I cannot even discuss with you; I cannot give you my daughter. Even had you asked her hand of me in a fair and honourable manner, I would have denied it. Now doubly I do so since you thought to obtain it by stealth—a coward’s trick, that savours of the man you have the honour to name your father.’
Carrie, who knew the hot temper of her lover, held her breath for fear. But Phil did not fly into a sudden passion. He looked Sebastian full in the face, but though he flushed with anger, his words were quiet enough.
‘Did I not know the bitter provocation which makes you speak so, I would not stand here and listen to you in silence,’ he said. ‘My father may be all that you say, sir, but’—here Phil hesitated for a breath—‘he is all the father I have, and moreover has been a kind parent enough to me, as the world counts kindness.’
‘There—the boy speaks rightly,’ said Sebastian. ‘My words were perhaps over hasty; but the larger fact of our quarrel remains—that you have induced my daughter to leave her home with you, instead of honestly asking her hand from me.’
‘I knew, as you have indeed just told me, that that would be wasted breath; ’twas the only thing left me to do; now Carrie hath spoilt it all, and I suppose she means to return with you,’ said Phil, his anger redoubled.
‘I presume that to be her intention,’ said Sebastian, turning to Carrie as he spoke.
‘Sir, dearest sir, I must do as you command me now,’ said Carrie. ‘But’—and here she laid her hand in Phil’s—‘some day I must go with Phil, for he hath all my heart.’
‘When you are old enough to take your own will against mine?’ asked Sebastian.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘When that day comes, you choose betwixt him and me.’
‘If so be I must make the choice,’ said Carrie, ‘I must choose Phil; I cannot, cannot forsake him.’
There fell a short silence, then Philip spoke.
‘You must admit, sir,’ he said, ‘ ’tis hard that Carrie and I should be parted by reason of your and my father’s old quarrels. But I, in my turn, must admit I did wrong to make her leave home with me as I did—for that I must ask your forgiveness, but, as I live, sir, I swear you’d have done the same at my age!’
It was scarcely possible for Phil to harp very long on the serious string; inevitably his buoyant nature resented the restraint it was under, and broke through it. Frustrated, disappointed, angry, on the eve of being parted from Carrie, he must still find something to laugh at. And Sebastian, in spite of himself, very much in spite of himself, found it impossible not to laugh also.
‘ ’Pon my soul! the boy does not lack assurance! Yes, that I would!’ he said, but added a moment later, ‘I laugh, but that doth not retract my displeasure one whit, nor alter a word of what I have said: Carrie shall never marry you an I can prevent it.’
‘How long must I wait ere you consider Carrie of an age to choose for herself?’ asked Phil.
‘Two years, at the earliest. You will then be of an age to judge for yourself, though young enough to marry, in all conscience.’
‘And during these two years how much may I see of Carrie?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I may write to her at times?’
‘No, never; you forget, Mr. Meadowes, that my object is that you should forget one another so speedily as may be.’
Philip bowed, accepting the inevitable.
‘If that be all, there remains nothing but that I should say my farewells,’ said he.
‘Nothing; the sooner and the shorter they are the better,’ said Sebastian. He looked at the two young people before him. Carrie stood scared and silent by the window.
Phil crossed over to where she stood and gathered her up in his arms, kissing her long and fondly.
‘If it must be.—Good-bye, sweetheart, I shall never forget,’ he said. And Carrie, as she raised her lips to his, smiled an almost happy smile.
They vowed at that moment an unspoken vow, and parted undoubtingly.
‘Come, dearest sir!’ said Carrie a moment later, when Phil was gone; ‘shall we return to London to-night—you and I?’
‘There! if you wish to see the last of him,’ said Sebastian. He pointed out to the courtyard, where the ostler had led out Phil’s horse.
‘Lord! what a temper the boy hath!’ said Sebastian, for Phil, without one backward look to the window where Carrie stood, gave a savage lash at the horse, which bounded out through the archway, and swung round the turn that led into the Wynford road with scant direction from its rider.
‘The Lord send him safe at Fairmeadowes,’ said Carrie softly, under her breath.