Abington Abbey: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

Recognising, after a time, that she was hopelessly lost, and being even without the country lore that would have given her direction by the softly blowing west wind, she gave it up with a laugh and decided to return slowly home. She would anyhow have had a nice long ride, and the feminine spirit in her turned gratefully towards a cosy afternoon indoors with a book, which would be none the less pleasant because it had hardly been earned.

She followed tracks across the fields until she came to a lane and then to a road, followed that till she found crossroads and a signpost, and then discovered that she was going in the opposite direction to that of Abington. So she turned back about a mile, and going a little farther found herself in familiar country and reached home in time for a bath before luncheon.

That was Beatrix's day with the hounds, but she had plenty to think about as she walked and trotted along the quiet lanes.

She felt rather soft with regard to Bertie and Mollie. He had shown himself in a light that touched her, and the conviction, which at one period of their conversation she had quite sincerely expressed to him, that he was not nearly good enough for her chosen friend, she found herself to have relinquished. As the young man with some reputation for love-making, who had seemed to be uncertain whether he would or he wouldn't, he had certainly not been good enough, nor on that side of him would he ever be good enough. But there had been something revealed that went a good deal deeper than that. Beatrix thought that his love for Mollie was after all of the right sort, and was honouring to her friend. She also thought that she herself might perhaps do something to further it.

As for Mollie, she had found herself somewhat impressed by the young man's statement that she had given him little encouragement. She had seen for herself, watching the pair of them when they had been together, how she had been invited to it. Here again her own experience that had been so sweet to her came in. The man shows himself attracted. He makes little appeals and advances. An aura begins to form round him; he is not as other men. But the girl shrinks instinctively from those advances at first, holding her maiden stronghold. Then, as instinctively, she begins to invite them, and greatly daring makes some fluttering return, to be followed perhaps by a more determined closing up. The round repeats itself, and she is led always further along the path that she half fears to tread, until at last she is taken by storm, and then treads it with no fear at all, but with complete capitulation and high joy.

So it had been with her, and she thought that it should have been so with Mollie, until the tiresome figure of the Vicar, spoiling the delicate poise with his crude accusations, presented itself to her. It was that that had made Mollie so careful that she had shut herself off in irresponsiveness, wary and intended, instead of following the fresh pure impulses of her girlhood. She was sure of it, and half wished she had said as much to Bertie, but on consideration was glad that she hadn't. He would have been very angry, and awkwardness might have come of it, for those who were forced to live in proximity to this official upholder of righteousness. He would be sufficiently confounded when what he had shown himself so eager to spoil in the making should result in happiness and accord. If Beatrix, in her loyalty towards youth as against interfering middle-age, also looked forward with pleasure to exhibitions of annoyance at the defeat that was coming to him, she may perhaps be forgiven.

It may be supposed, however, that during that long slow ride home her thoughts were more taken up with her own affair than with that of her friends, which indeed seemed in train to be happily settled in a way that hers was not.

For the first time in all these months, she examined it from a standpoint a little outside herself. She did not know that she was enabled to do this by the fact that her devotion to Lassigny's memory had begun to loosen its hold on her. Her time of love-making had been so short, and her knowledge of her lover so slight, that it was now the memory to which she clung, and was obliged to cling if her love was not to die down altogether. None of this, however, would she have admitted. She had given her love, and in her own view of it she had given it for life.

What she found herself able to examine, in the light of Bertie Pemberton's revelation of himself, was the figure of her own lover, not altogether deprived of the halo with which she had crowned it, but for the first time somewhat as others might see it, and especially her father.

He distrusted Lassigny. Why? She had never admitted the question before, and only did so now on the first breath of discomfort that blew chill on her own heart. Those two sorts of love of which Mollie's lover had dimly seen his own to be compounded—had they both been offered to her? There had been no such shrinking on Lassigny's part as the more ordinary young man had confessed to. He had wooed her boldly, irresistibly, with the sure confidence of a man who knows his power, and what he may expect to get for himself from it. He had desired her, and she had fallen a willing captive to him. She knew that he had found her very sweet, and he had laid at her feet so much that she had never questioned his having laid all. All would have included his own man's past, the full tide of the years and experiences of youth, spent lavishly while she had been a little child, and beginning now to poise its wings for departure. It was the careless waste of youth and of love that Mollie's lover had felt to have been disloyalty to the finer love that had come to him, and turned him from his loud self-confidence to diffidence and doubt. There had been no self-abasement of that sort in Beatrix's lover. He had claimed her triumphantly, as he had claimed and enjoyed other loves. She was one of a series, different from the others insomuch as the time had come for him to settle down, as the phrase went, and it was more agreeable to make a start at that postponed process with love as part of the propulsion than without it. It was not even certain that she would be the last of the series. In her father's view it was almost certain that she wouldn't.