Love in a Muddle

by Christine Jope-Slade

"Come," said Cheneston curtly.

So he had been thinking things over, and he was going to ask me about Walter Markham, and tell me that he and Grace had discovered they cared for each other.

I wondered if I could manage to look merry as a marriage-bell with a funeral going on in my own heart. I discovered that to be a quaint little thing with a snubby nose has its advantages: you're not expected to furnish a big display of facial emotion.

"I can't walk any more," I said. My knees were trembling; I felt horribly, unromantically sick. It was my great hour, the hour of my renunciation, and I had no great feelings, only little squeamish, physical ones.

"Sit down, then," he said.

I sat down with a flop, under a crab-apple tree that was like a flame, and there was blue sky above us and golden bracken all around us, and when it swayed we could see the sea, like slits of turquoise through golden fretwork, and it seemed to me the stillest place in all the world.

"Pam," he said, "my mother is very ill—dying," and he turned from me and buried his head in his hands.

I sat very still. It was so absolutely unexpected, and by-and-by I clutched the bracken on either side of me and I prayed inside myself: "Don't let me go on feeling so dreadfully like his mother—or I shall put my arms round him and cuddle him!"

And I knew then that I loved Cheneston with the only sort of love that is real and lasting—I loved him as if he were my little, little boy. I loved him when he was my strong, decisive young knight. I loved the mystery in him, and the strength of him that I didn't understand; but I loved him best of all, most sweetly and dearly of all, when he was just my hurt boy.

I don't think I see things romantically. I suppose it's in keeping with my appearance. I never see love as something that is remote and cold and miles away. I would go to the ends of the earth with Cheneston, and I would love to nurse him when he's got a cold. I would love to go to his house in Norway, but I would also adore to make toast in front of the kitchen fire with him if the maid was out. I suppose my love is homely like myself, but it seems to me that once you've got love you can't tuck it up with the stars when you order dinner and help make the beds—you don't even want to, it makes you absolutely enjoy ordering dinner and making the beds, that's the splendid part about it.