A MIDSUMMER EVENING
An hour later Anna crossed the flags, reading Ambrose Piton's letter. It was long and she stood some time engrossed in it, but at last she folded it and slipped it into her pocket with a sigh of decided relief. Then, mounting the stile, she jumped down into the meadow.
At that moment she caught the sound of a horse cantering along the road. It stopped and a gate clicked, then fell to with a clash that roused the dogs. She knew it must be Mr. Borlase. Standing on tiptoe she looked through the hedge, expecting he would turn off to the stable.
But he did not. He scanned the garden and the fields, and seeing the glimmer of her white dress between the bars of the stile, rode up and stood in his stirrups, looking over. Her eyes met his with a laughing glance of defiance.
'Don't speak. Let me anticipate your remark. I know it,' she said.
'You may anticipate anything agreeable.'
'"The grass is dewy, your feet will be wet, Miss Hugo."'
He laughed, glancing down at his horse's head and flicking a fly from its ear, then back at her with a swift sidelong look of admiration. It was lost upon her for she was standing on the stile surveying her shoes.
'They are wet,' she said.
'Of course they are. You must take them off instantly.'
'If you had not come, I should have had a walk by the beck.'
'Well, you are not going to walk now and must take them off.'
'Yes, I will, directly;' then patting his horse she added, 'My sister wants you to see baby, at least she did an hour ago. She saw you ride past, into the Dale, I suppose.'
'Now, Miss Hugo, there should not be all this difference between instantly and directly,' said Borlase. He swung off his horse, drew her hand from its neck, and interposed himself between them. 'Must I put up while you speak to Mrs. Severn?'
'And change my shoes? Then you need not dream of a new and unruly patient at Old Lafer. I shall be very glad if you'll stay for supper, but Dad is away.'
They had reached the door. Without waiting for an answer she ran up the steps and vanished.
Borlase stood staring into the hall, where whitewash and black oak alternated. Through an open door at the end he heard Elias reading aloud to Dinah, who meanwhile bustled about between the kitchen and the dairy, or slipped into her clogs and clattered into the fold-yard or buildings. He read aloud every night and she never ceased from work to listen. Borlase had often laughed in thinking of the extraordinary jumble of curtailed facts with which her mind must be stored. But to-night he was in no humour for laughter. On the contrary their simplicity struck him as pathetic. Our own moods colour the actions of others and he was suddenly feeling depressed and disappointed. Not only was he baulked in his intention of spending the evening at Old Lafer but Anna had been far from shy when she asked him to do so. It was useless to have exerted that delightful bit of authority over her in the matter of the shoes. She neither resented nor encouraged whatever he might do. His pulses had been stirred by the touch of her hand, a touch he had longed to make significant. She had taken it as a matter of course. Would she never perceive what he wanted of her?
And now she reappeared.
'You are not to see baby,' she said from half-way down the stairs. 'But do come in, won't you?'
'Not to-night,' he said, going round his horse to tighten the saddle-girths. He glanced up involuntarily at the windows of Mrs. Severn's room. But no one was visible. Yet he had an impression that they were watched.
'I have got a new song that suits my voice exactly. Clothilde is going to accompany it,' said Anna.
'I will wait until then to hear it.'
'I thought you did not care for her accompaniments.'
'I don't, as a rule. But it does not signify much, either way.'
'I've heard you declare that everything, the most trivial, ought to have a decided significance in one direction,' said Anna, after a little pause of astonishment.
'So I have, I believe.'
'And I know you have a great contempt for inconsistency.'
'Yes.'
'You once said it was the brand of our human nature.'
'I must have been in a grandiloquent or dogmatic mood. Perhaps I often am. However, it is true. It is also its bane, and I confess I am guilty of it.'
'Oh no, I don't think so. I know you really prefer the piano with singing to either violin or guitar, but you are harassed over something, a bad case perhaps, and you don't care for music of any kind to-night. Forgive me for teasing a little.'
There was a music in her tones for which he cared! She was standing on the steps with her hands behind her, and having busied himself with the saddle to a degree which he knew was ridiculous, he turned and glanced at her. She was critically examining his work; being able to ride bare-backed at a hand-gallop herself, she understood the points both of horse and accoutrements. He got his look at her, unperceived. It sent the blood from his face. 'How marvellously dear she is to me!' he thought, and was thankful to be able to think it coherently. He still had power over himself when he could frame his knowledge into words. He reasoned over it too. She was plain, she was little—not the ideal woman of his dreams. But his ideal woman had vanished long ago, and in her place—he knew well when—had come Anna Hugo with her heavy-browed, square-jawed face, her unruly mass of coarse dark hair, her deep-set scrutinising eyes, and that play of expression which tantalised him into wanting to know her every thought, because it showed him so many. Preparing to mount he glanced at her again.
This time their eyes met. Hers were eloquent with unembarrassed kindness. His had a distressed look to which self-control gave a hardness unaccountable to her except on the one presumption. He was certainly in trouble. They were friends, she might be able to give a lighter turn to his thoughts.
'Let me walk to the gate with you,' she said. 'I want to hear about your ride.'
He read her like a book and smiled at the artlessness of her arts. Yet how cruel she could be because she thought more for others than of herself! Use had strengthened her original nature by binding its second nature upon her. She arranged, comforted, disciplined, befriended, the whole household at Old Lafer; and he, who knew of what contradictious elements it consisted, knew too that she had lost sight of self in determined efforts to control them to unity and concord. This had made her old for her years, and she unconsciously treated as younger many who were older than herself, a grievance with which he had once charged her. But she had not understood. The knitting of her brows as she puzzled over it made him laugh at last. He told her emotion would have to teach her his meaning, and the question, who would rouse that emotion, had since disquieted himself.
Borlase had been to the Mires to see old Hartas Kendrew. It was a name which clouded Anna's face for a moment, and made him avoid glancing at her as he uttered it. But the next moment she turned to him with the brightest of smiles.
'Did you ever hear of the burying he and his wife once went to?' she said. 'It was when buryings were buryings and finished off with rum. It had poured with rain all day and the waters were out. Jinny and Hartas had to cross a beck. They rode pillion and they were both drowsy, and it was comfortable to know the horse would find its own way home. They forgot the beck would be out, and could not hear its roar for the wind. Suddenly Jinny woke, feeling very cold, and saying "Not a drap more, thank you kindly, not a drap more." They were in the water, and it was the flood at their lips, not another glass of rum.'
'Good Heavens, what a shave! Did they get out?' said Borlase.
'Oh no! both were washed away and drowned.'
'But Hartas——?'
'Yes. He lived to tell the tale.'
'Then his wife was drowned? Well, he did cleverly to scramble out.'
'No.'
Borlase suddenly awoke to find himself puzzled. He looked suspiciously at Anna, walking unconcernedly beside him with her head averted.
'Then why did you say they were?' he asked.
'Why did you ask, when you had seen one of them in the flesh an hour ago?' said Anna, laughing.
Borlase was silent. The indictment was too obvious; another point for the dissection of his inner consciousness.
'One's imagination always flies to a catastrophe rather than good fortune,' said Anna.
'Not always,' said Borlase sharply. 'I never imagined on the moor to-night that Mr. Severn would be away after market at Wonston and I could not spend the evening with you.'
'But why not?' said Anna. 'I asked you and I told you of my new song. I thought as you declined you were in a hurry home.'
'If I had been in a hurry home I should have been there now.'
It was Anna's turn to be silent. Her resources suddenly seemed exhausted, the argument attenuated.
They had reached the gate. Borlase fumbled with the hasp, trying to secure a few moments for thought. He had known Anna many years and for the greater part of that time he had loved her. But he had resolved not to ask her to be his wife until he was his own master. At present he was still in partnership with the leading medical man in Wonston but in another year the partnership would expire and he would be independent and able to offer her such a home as he could think worthy of her. When he came to Old Lafer to-night he had not meant to precipitate matters but now he felt urged not to miss this opportunity, wholly unexpected and tempting as it was. He glanced at her with the resentment of desperation. She was looking across the road into the ferny depths of an oak planting where twilight gave the vistas a dreamy quietude. How could she be so calm when he was so overwrought? Would she never perceive his feeling? What a help a touch of shyness in her manner would be! He dreaded lest speech should forfeit her friendliness and gain nothing in its place, but still more lest his own inaction now should paralyse his resolution and unman him.
'She shall refuse me; perhaps a second time she would accept me,' he thought. 'Rather than that I should wrong her and myself any longer by not facing the truth, I'll be manly and ask her outright; at any rate it'll make her think of me.'
He opened the gate and she advanced with a smile to shake hands. He turned abruptly. There was a look on his face which she had never seen before. She stood transfixed, involuntarily gazing at him, scarcely conscious that his searching look was wholly concentrated on her and expressed an earnestness that the next moment struck her as overwhelmingly pathetic in a man. In that moment the tension of her figure relaxed, vivid colour rushed over her face, her eyes fell, veiling undreamt-of tears. It was her first self-consciousness and it stirred her unutterably, thrilled to the depths of her heart. She felt rather than heard that he was coming near to her. She had clutched the gate with one hand, for so sudden was the rush of this new tide of feeling that it dizzied her, the world swam before her. His voice, with a new tone in it whose vibration seemed to strike music into life—the music of love, of marriage, of lifelong companionship, reached her as in a dream. He was speaking, still with that look of ardent devotion fixed upon her. This was no dream. She heard, she saw.
But that was all to-night.
Mrs. Severn's voice broke into the midst of his eager speech. Both heard it and turned, startled.
'Anna, Anna!' she called.
She was standing at her open window, beckoning. Anna was alarmed, but Borlase was suspicious.
'Don't go,' he said, seizing her hand.
'I must. She wants me.'
'Oh Anna, so do I. But 'twill be a new habit for you to want me. Well, I'll wait.'
'Until I go and come?'
'Just so,' he said and laughed joyously.
But she was already blushing at her own words, and his laugh, setting free as it seemed to do his own wild emotion and her surrender, made her shrink into herself.
'Oh! not to-night. How could I come back to-night? It's getting late, it's——' she said incoherently, and wrung her hand out of his.
Not before he had bent close to her.
'But I shall wait. I have and I will in every way,' he said in a whisper. She gave him one glance, hurried, misty; a smile set in tears; passed him and was gone.
He leant against the gate, watching and waiting, scanning the house. Mrs. Severn had disappeared. No one was visible. It grew dusk. A bat flitted round him. The murmur of the beck on the sweet still air was every moment clearer as it sang its 'quiet tune' to the 'sleeping woods.' Surely she would come.
But she did not, and presently he mounted his horse and rode away.
