"Doesn't Father look a darling?" demanded Pauline, as they watched the tall handsome dreamer striding along the drive towards the sound of the bell, that was clanging loud and soft in its battle with the wind.
"Oh, Pauline, run after him," said Mrs. Grey, "and remind him it's the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. He started wrong last Sunday, and to-day's Wednesday, and it so offends some of the congregation."
Pauline overtook her father in the church-porch, and he promised he would be careful to read the right collect. She had not stayed to get a hat and therefore must wait for him outside.
"Very well, my dear child, I shan't be long. Do go and see if those Sternbergias I planted against the south porch are in flower. Dear me, they should be, you know, after this not altogether intolerably overcast summer. Sun, though, sun! they want sun, poor dears!"
"But, Father, I can't remember what Sternbergias look like."
"Oh, yes, you can," said the Rector. "Sternbergia Lutea. Amaryllidaceae. A perfectly ordinary creature." And he vanished in the gloom of the priest's door.
As Pauline came round the corner the wind was full in her face, and under the rose-edged wrack of driving clouds the churchyard looked desolate and savage. There were no flowers to be seen but beaten down Michaelmas daisies and bedabbled phlox. The bell had stopped immediately when the Rector arrived; and the wind seemed now much louder as it went howling round the great church or rasping through the yews and junipers. The churchyard was bounded on the northerly side by the mill-stream, along which ran a wide path between a double row of willows now hissing and whistling as they were whipped by the blasts. Pauline walked slowly down this unquiet ambulatory, gazing curiously over to the other bank of the stream where the orchard of Plashers Mead was strewn with red apples. There in the corner by the house that was just visible stood the owner playing with a dog, a bobtail too, which was the kind Pauline liked best. She wanted very much to wave, but of course it was impossible for the Rector's daughter to do anything like that in the churchyard. Yet if he did chance to walk in her direction, she would, whatever happened, shout to him across the stream to bring the dog next time he came to the Rectory. Pauline walked four times up and down the path, but first the dog disappeared and then the owner followed him, and presently Pauline discovered that the path beside the abandoned stream was very dreary. The crooked tombstones stood up starkly: the wind sighed across the green graves of the unknown: the fiery roses were fallen from the clouds. Pauline turned away from the path and went to take shelter behind the East end of the church. From here, as she fronted the invading night, she could see the grey wall of the Rectory garden and the paddock sloping down to the river. How sad it was to think of the months that must pass before that small meadow would be speckled with fritillaries or with irises blow white and purple. The wind shrieked with a sudden gust that seemed more violent, because where she was standing not a blade of grass twitched. Pauline looked up to reassure herself that the steeple was not toppling from the tower; as she did so, a gargoyle grinned down at her. The grotesque was frightening in the dusk, and she hurried round to the priest's door. The Rector came out as she reached it, and accepted vaguely the information that there were no flowers to be seen but Michaelmas daisies and phlox.
"Ah, I told Birdwood to confiscate those abominable dahlias which wretched Mrs. Godbold will plant every year. I gave her some of that new saxifrage I raised. What more does the woman want?"
Pauline hung upon his arm, while they walked back to the Rectory through the darkling plantation.
"Isn't it a perfect place?" she murmured, hugging his arm closer when they came to the end of the mossy path and saw the twinkling of the drawing-room's oriel on the narrow south side, and the eleven steep gables that cleft the now scarcely luminous sky, one after another all the length of the house.