Abington Abbey: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

There was a look on his ordinary, rather unmeaning face which touched Beatrix. "I like you for saying that," she said frankly. "It's what anybody who can see things ought to think about darling Mollie. I'm sorry I said just now that you weren't really good enough for her."

He looked up and laughed again, the gravity passing from his face. "Well, it was rather rough," he said, "though it's what I feel myself, you know. Makes you ashamed of having knocked about—you know what I mean. Or perhaps you don't. But men aren't as good as girls. But when you fall in love with a girl like Mollie—well, you want to chuck it all, and make yourself something different—more suitable, if you know what I mean. That's the way it takes you; or ought to when you're really in love with somebody who's worth it."

She liked him better every moment. A dim sense of realities came to her, together with the faintest breath of discomfort, as her own case, always present with her while she was discussing that of another, presented itself from this angle. She had been very scornful of Bertie's frank admission that there had been others before Mollie. But weren't there always others, with men? If a true love wiped them out, and made the man wish he had brought his first love to the girl, as he so much revered her for bringing hers to him, then the past should be forgiven him; he was washed clean of it. It was the New Birth in the religion of Love. Mollie represented purity and innocence to this ordinary unreflective young man, and something good in him went out to meet it, and sloughed off the unworthiness in him. His chance of regeneration had been given him.

"If you feel like that about her," she said, "I don't know what you meant when you said she hadn't given you enough encouragement to make you take the risk with her."

His face took on its graver look again. "I don't know that I quite know what I meant myself," he said. "I suppose—in a way—it's two sorts of love. At least, one is mixed up with the other. Oh, I don't know. I can't explain things like that."

But Beatrix, without experience to guide her, but with her keen feminine sense for the bases of things, had a glimmering. The lighter love, which was all this young man had known hitherto, would need response to set it aflame. He was tangled in his own past. The finer love that had come to him was shrinking and fearful, set its object on a pedestal to which it hardly dared to raise its eyes. It was this sort of love that raised a man above himself and above his past. Again a question insinuated itself into her mind. Had it been given in her own case? But again there was no time to answer it.

There was no time, indeed, for more conversation. A hulloa and a bustle at the further edge of the wood from which they had come showed it to have contained a prize after all. The stream set that way, and they followed it with the hope of making up for the ground they had lost.

For a time they galloped together, and then there came a fence which Bertie took easily enough, but which to Beatrix was somewhat of an ordeal. She went at it, but her mare, having her own ideas as to how much should be asked of her, refused; and at the beginning of the day, with her blood not yet warmed, Beatrix did not put her at it again. There was a gate a few yards off which had already been opened, and she went through it with others. In the meantime Bertie, to whom it had not occurred that she would not take a fence that any of his sisters would have larked over without thinking about it, had got on well ahead of her, and she did not see him again.

But although their conversation had been cut short, all, probably, had been said that he could have expected to be said. Beatrix thought that there was little doubt now of his proposing to Mollie, and perhaps as soon as he should find an opportunity.

Beatrix, of all three of the girls, was the least interested in hunting. When she realised that the day had opened with a good straight run, and that her bad start had left her hopelessly behind, she gave it up, and was quite content to do so. A little piece of original thinking on her part had led her to take a different line from that followed by most of those who had started late with her, but it had not given her the advantage she had hoped from it. Presently she found herself quite alone, in a country of wide grass fields and willow-bordered brooks which was actually the pick of the South Meadshire country, if only the fox had been accommodating enough to take to it.