CHAPTER XIX.
The minister and Evan Sinclair came to say good-bye; the minister has accepted our approaching departure with his usual philosophy. "You would soon tire of this place in the winter-time," he said. "And even looking at it from the other point of view, I believe that summer visitors should not prolong their stay above a few months. I admit that we have enjoyed your sojourn amongst us; but were you and your sister to become residenters in the place, our intercourse would have to be reconstructed from the foundation." The minister crossed his legs, and, without being pressed to continue the subject, he went on: "There is a certain conventionality, not to say forbearance, admitted and allowed between friends with whom one's acquaintance is to be short; but there is a basis stronger than that upon which any lengthy friendship must be made."
"And that basis?" I asked.
"That basis, I take it," said the minister, "should be a straightforward disregard for one another. I do not believe in politeness between near neighbours; it cannot last."
"I had hoped," said Palestrina, pouting a little, "that you would all miss us, Mr. Macorquodale."
"We shall miss you," said the minister quickly, but with judgment. "We shall see the merits as well as the demerits of the case. For instance, one of your friends cost me a sovereign for a favourite charity of hers."
Evan Sinclair said very kindly, blinking his fair eyelashes in a shy way, "Well, I know I shall miss you. The place will seem very dull with only Alexander and me left in it."
"I shall have my wife," said the minister brutally.
"Yes," said Sinclair; "and her mother! You have kept that pretty dark from us, Taurbarrels."
"It is only a visit," said Mr. Macorquodale shortly. And he went on in a truculent tone, "And I need not have her unless I want to."
"I hear she is strict," murmured Evan. "I hope you will be allowed to look out of the window on the Sabbath, my man."
"I am master in my own house," said Mr. Macorquodale magnificently.
"Believe me," said Evan, "that's a courtesy title, supported by no valid claim, and still less precedent. A man never has been master of his own house when there is a mistress in it. I remember when my brother got married he had just your very ideas, and he gave his wife the keys of the linen-press and the store-cupboard, 'But the rest of the bunch,' he said, 'I keep to myself.' And he put them all in his pocket. It was not six months after that," said Evan, "that I went to stay with them, and I heard him ask my sister-in-law if she would mind his having two pocket-handkerchiefs on Sundays."
Palestrina and I were alone, for Ellicomb had left us a few days before, and we hear from the Jamiesons that he is a daily visitor at their house. Thomas and Anthony were out shooting, and Mrs. Fielden had gone for a walk over the hills.
"I have a thousand things to do," said Palestrina, when Evan and the minister had departed.
"I also have a thousand things to do," I replied.
"Don't tire yourself," said Palestrina. "What are you going to do?"
"I am going to re-write my diary," I said.
"But, my dear," said Palestrina, "that would be the work of months."
"I am only going to correct all the mistakes I have made in it," I replied; and I took my book and a pen, and went and sat in the little room on the ground-floor which they call my den.
We once had an old aunt, Palestrina and I, who kept a diary all her life, and when any of the relatives whom she mentioned in its pages came to die, she used to go through all the back numbers of her journal and insert affectionate epithets in front of the names of the deceased. For instance (my aunt's existence was not marked by any thrilling events), the entry would perhaps be as follows: "Maria was late for breakfast this morning. In the afternoon she had her singing-lesson, and afterwards we did some shopping, when Maria tried on her new gown." But the amended entry after Maria's death would be, "Our darling Maria was (a little) late for breakfast this morning; in the afternoon she had her singing-lesson"—and here would probably be a footnote praising Maria's voice—"afterwards we did some shopping, and"—Maria struck out—"my sweet girl tried on her new gown." Any one's death, or even a successful marriage of one of the family, would cause her to revise and correct her diary in this way, and she used to fan the wet ink with a piece of blotting-paper to make it dry black, and thus prevent posterity from knowing that the words written over the lines were an afterthought induced by subsequent events.
It was manifestly an unfair way of keeping a diary. But I can claim her example and hereditary taint as an excuse for my own dishonesty this afternoon. I read through my diary with a sense of utter shame, and wherever I found, for instance, that I had said that Mrs. Fielden was frivolous, or even that she raised her eyebrows in an affected way, I corrected the misstatement by the light of the magnificent discovery I had made that Mrs. Fielden was faultless, and that I loved her. Oh, the beauty of this woman and her blessed kindness! the cunning with which she conceals her unselfishness, and her ridiculous attempts at pretending she is frivolous or worldly.
Alas! there were so many misstatements to correct, and so many dear adjectives to fill in, that I was not halfway through my task before Mrs. Fielden herself tapped at the window and looked in.
I believe I must have grinned foolishly, but what I wanted to do was to stretch out my arms to the beautiful vision, framed in the hectic Virginian creeper round the window, and call out to her to come to me.
Mrs. Fielden came in for a minute, and said with the adorable lift of the eyebrows: "I have been educating a pair of young boots by walking through all the bogs on the hillside. Listen, they are quite full of water." She raised herself on her toes with a squelching sound of the leather, and gave one of her joyous soft laughs.
"You must change directly," I said, with an idiotic sense of proprietorship.
"When I have done so I think I shall come and have tea with you," said Mrs. Fielden. And of course then I knew that she had come home early on purpose to have tea with me, and that probably she had given up something else which she wanted to do, in order that she might sit by me when I was alone—because of course I have found Mrs. Fielden out now, and exposed her hypocrisy.
Fortunately she took nearly a quarter of an hour to change her wet boots, and this gave me time to ask myself why I was behaving like a raving idiot, because I had found out that Mrs. Fielden was absolutely perfect, and that I loved her.
It was quite the worst quarter of an hour that I have ever spent, because in it I had time to remember that I was a crippled man with one leg, and that Mrs. Fielden was a beautiful young woman whom of course every one loved, and that she owned an old historical place called Stanby, and probably—I realized this also—that she would continue to come over and sit with a dull man and bewilder him with her beauty and her kindness only so long as he did not allow her to know the supremely impertinent fact that he had fallen in love with her.
I must plead ill-health, and a certain weakness of nerve which no doubt always follows a surgical operation, for the fact that I turned round and put my face in the pillows for a moment and groaned.
Mrs. Fielden came in in my favourite pale-blue gown which she sometimes wears when she changes her frock at tea-time. She came and took a seat beside me, and as she never hurriedly plunges into a conversation we sat silent for a time. The afternoon was darkening now, and the light of a blazing fire leaped and played upon her pale-blue dress, and turned her brown hair to a sort of red-gold.
Mrs. Fielden thinks she is the only person in the world who can make up a fire. And she is perfectly right. She arranged the logs with a long brass poker, shifting them here and there, while her dear face glowed in the light of the fire. She is not a luxurious woman, in spite of being surrounded always by luxury. For instance, she stands and walks in a very erect way, and I have never seen her stuff a lot of sofa cushions at her back in a chair, nor lounge on a sofa. Her glorious, buoyant health seems to exempt her from need of support or ease, and her figure is too pretty for lounging.
When she had finished arranging the logs she put down the poker and looked at me with that dear kindliness of hers, and said in her pretty voice, "What have you been doing with yourself this afternoon?"
"The minister and Evan Sinclair came up to say good-bye," I said.
"And since then?"
I took my diary, which still lay on my knee, and hid it under the sofa cushions.
"Since then," I said, "I have been correcting—that is, writing my diary."
"Oh, the diary!" exclaimed Mrs. Fielden delightedly. "I had forgotten about that!"
"No, you hadn't," I said to myself. "It is only part of your wilful, uncomprehendable, untranslatable charm that makes you pretend sometimes that you have no memory. As a matter of fact, you knew from the first that it would be a relief to an egotistical grumbler to get rid of his spleen sometimes on blue ruled essay paper, and so you set him a task to do, and you have often wondered since how he is getting on with it.
"I think I must see the diary," said Mrs. Fielden.
"That you certainly shall not," I said; and I pushed the book still farther under the sofa cushions—just as if it was necessary to fight with Mrs. Fielden for anything, or any use either!
"I thought you promised," said Mrs. Fielden.
"If I did I have changed my mind," I said firmly.
"You know you mean all the time to let me see it," said Mrs. Fielden.
"I know I do not mean to let you see it for even a minute of time," I replied.
One of Mrs. Fielden's special odd little silences fell between us. "No," I said to myself. "I will not say I am sorry. I will not say I have been a brute, I will not feel a desire to comfort her, even if her eyes have the wistful look in them."
Mrs. Fielden sat still and looked into the fire.
What unexpected thing will she do next, I wonder? Will she suddenly burst out laughing, or will she turn and take every bit of manhood out of me by smiling? Or shall I find, when I turn and look at her face, simply that she has gone to sleep?
Good heavens! What if she should be crying?
In an agony of compunction I turned and looked at her; and Mrs. Fielden not only smiled, but held out her hand for the book.... I rummaged underneath the sofa cushions, and passed it over to her. She bent forward till the firelight from the blazing logs fell full on the open page, and she read every one of those corrected lines. She saw where I had once put "affected" I had now put "beautiful," and for "frivolous" I put a "lovely gaiety," and she read till she came to the last correction of all. I had run a line through the words "Mrs. Fielden came to sit with me," and had written over it, "My darling came to see me——"
Then Mrs. Fielden closed the book, and left her chair where she had been sitting. She crossed the hearthrug quite slowly till she reached my sofa. And then she kneeled down and took both my hands in her dear strong ones, and looked at me with misty blue eyes, like wet forget-me-nots. "But, Hugo dear," she said, "why did you not tell me long ago?"
THE END.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
BY Miss MACNAUGHTAN.
THE FORTUNE OF CHRISTINA M'NAB.
THE DUENNA OF A GENIUS. M. E. Francis.
OWD BOB. Alfred Ollivant.
EIGHT DAYS. R. E. Forrest.
LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET. Miss Braddon.
THE OCTOPUS. Frank Norris.
THE PIT. Frank Norris.
MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE, Etc. Booth Tarkington.
WOODSIDE FARM. Mrs. W. K. Clifford.
WHITE FANG. Jack London.
THE PRINCESS PASSES. C. N. & A. M. Williamson.
THE MAN FROM AMERICA. Mrs. H. de la Pasture.
SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE. "Q"
INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS. A. and E. Castle.
IF YOUTH BUT KNEW! A. and E. Castle.
MATTHEW AUSTIN. W. E. Norris.
HIS GRACE. W. E. Norris.
THE AMERICAN PRISONER. Eden Phillpotts.
THE HOSTS OF THE LORD. Mrs. F. A. Steel.
THE LADY OF THE BARGE. W. W. Jacobs.
THE GOD IN THE CAR. Anthony Hope.
QUISANTE. Anthony Hope.
THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY. Anthony Hope.
THE KING'S MIRROR. Anthony Hope.
THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE. Sir G. Parker.
AN ADVENTURER OF THE NORTH. Sir G. Parker.
THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG. Sir G. Parker.
MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. Mrs. Humphry Ward
HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE. Mrs. Humphry Ward.
ROBERT ELSMERE. Mrs. Humphry Ward.
CLEMENTINA. A. E. W. Mason.
THE RECIPE FOR DIAMONDS. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne.
THE WAGES OF SIN. Lucas Malet.
Etc., Etc.
NELSON'S LIBRARY.