Pauline went off into peals of laughter and danced about the room; but when she was alone and thought again of what the gossips were saying, she suddenly realized it was not altogether for Richard's sake that she had dreaded the idea of Guy's falling in love with Margaret.
JANUARY
Plashers Mead and the Rectory were not the only romantic houses in Wychford. Indeed, the little town as a whole had preserved by reason of its remoteness from railways and important highroads the character given to it during the many years of prosperity which lasted until the reign of Charles the First. From that time it had slowly declined; and now with a stagnation that every year was more deeply accentuated by modern conditions it was still declining. New houses were never built, and even the King's Head, a pledge of commercial confidence in the Hanoverian succession, seemed to flaunt with an inappropriate modernity its red bricks mellowed by the passage of two centuries. Apart from this rival to the Stag Inn the fabric of Wychford was uniformly gray, to which, notwithstanding Miss Peasey's declaration of sameness, variety was amply secured by the character of the architecture. Gables and mullions; oaken eaves and corbels carefully ornamented; latticed oriels and sashed bows; roofs of steep unequal pitch to which age had often added strange undulations; chimney stacks of stone and Gothic entries—all these gave variety enough; and if the whole effect was too sober for Miss Peasey's taste, the little town on the hillside was now safe for ever from the brightening of the dolls-house spirit.
Wychford could still be called a town, for it possessed a few side-streets, along the grass-grown cobbles of which there still existed many houses of considerable beauty and dignity. These had lapsed into a more apparent decay, because a dwindling population had avoided their direct exposure to the bleak country and had left them empty. In the High Street this melancholy of bygone fame was less noticeable, and here scarcely a house was unoccupied. Some buildings, indeed, had been degraded to unworthy usages; and it was sad to see Perpendicular fireplaces filled with cheap lines in drapery, or to find an ancient chantry trodden by pigs and fowls. Generally, however, the High Street to the summit of its steep ascent had an air of sedate prosperity that did not reflect the reality of a slow depopulation.
About half-way up the hill on the other side of the town from Plashers Mead and the Rectory was a side-street called Abbey Lane that, instead of leading to open country, was bounded by a high stone wall. This blocked the thoroughfare except so far as to allow a narrow path to skirt its base and give egress along some untidy cottage gardens to a cross-road farther up the hill.
In the middle of the wall confronting the street two columns surmounted with huge round finials showed where there had once been a gate wide enough to admit a coach. Above the wall a belt of high trees obscured the view and gave a dank shadow to the road beneath. At one corner a small wooden wicket with a half-obliterated proclamation of privacy enabled any one to pass through the wall and enter the grounds of Wychford Abbey. This wicket opened directly on a path that wound through a plantation of yews interspersed with tall beeches and elms, whose overarching tops intensified even in Wintry leaflessness the prevalent gloom. The silence of this plantation made Wychford High Street seem in remembrance a noisy, cheerful place, and the mere crackling of twigs and beech-mast induced the visitor to walk more quietly, fearful of profaning the mysteriousness even by so slight an indication of human presence. The plantation continued in tiers of trees down the hill to the Greenrush, which had been deepened by a dam to support this gloom of overhanging branches with slow and solemn stream. The path, however, kept to the level ground and emerged presently upon a large square of pallescent grass the farther side of which was bounded by a deserted house.
There were no ruins of the ecclesiastical foundation to fret a Gothic moonlight, but Wychford Abbey did not require these to justify the foreboding approach; and the great Jacobean pile, whose stones the encroaching trees had robbed of warmth and vitality, brooded in the silence with a monstrous ghostliness that was scarcely heightened by the signs of material decay. Nevertheless, the casements whose glass was filmy like the eyes of blind men or sometimes diced with sinister gaps; the cracks and fissures in the external fabric; the headless supporters of the family coat; and the roof slowly being torn tile from tile by ivy—did consummate the initial impression. Within, the desolation was more marked. A few rotten planks had been nailed across the front door, but these had been kicked down by inquisitive explorers, and the hall remained perpetually open to the weather. In some of the rooms the floors had jagged pits, and there was not one which was not defiled by jackdaws, owls, and bats. Strands of sickly ivy, which had forced an entrance through the windows, clawed the dusty air. A leprosy had infected the plaster ceilings so that the original splendor of their moldings had become meaningless and scarcely any longer discernible; and the marble of the florid mantelpieces was streaked with abominable damp. The back of the house seemed to go beyond the rest in the expression of utter abandonment. Crumbling walls with manes of ivy inclosed a series of gardens rank with docks and nettles and almost impenetrable on account of the matted briers. As if to add the final touch of melancholy the caretaker (for somewhere in the depths of the house existed ironically a caretaker) had cultivated in this wilderness some dreary patches of potatoes. Beyond the forsaken parterres stretched a great unkempt shrubbery where laurels, peterswort, and hollies struggled in disorderly and overgrown profusion for the pleasure of numberless birds, and where a wide path still maintained its slow diagonal down the hillside to the river's edge.
Such were the surroundings Guy chose to embower the doubts and hesitations that followed close upon the morning when on Wychford down he had been so nearly telling Pauline he loved her. Perhaps the almost savage gloom of this place helped to confirm his profound hopelessness. A black frost had succeeded the sparkle of Christmastide. The banks of the river in such weather were impossible, for the wind came biting across the water-meadows and piped in the withered reeds and rushes with an intolerable melancholy. Here in the grounds of Wychford Abbey there was comparative warmth, and the desolation suited the unfortunate end he was predicting for his hopes. To begin with, it was extremely improbable that Pauline cared about him. His assay with regard to Richard had not been encouraging, and his worst fears of being too late for real inclusion within the charm of the Rectory were surely justified. He had known all along how much exaggerated were his ambitions, and he wished now that in the first moment of their springing he had ruthlessly strangled them. Moreover, even if Pauline did ultimately come to care for him, how much farther was he advanced upon the road of a happy issue? It were presumptuous and absurd with only £150 a year to propose marriage, and if he gave up living here and became a schoolmaster at home, he knew that the post would be made conditional upon a willingness to wait as many years for marriage as the wisdom of age decreed. Besides, he could not take Pauline from Wychford and imprison her at Fox Hall to dose little boys with Gregory's Powder or check the schedule of their underclothing. The only justification for taking Pauline away from the Rectory would be to make her immortal in poetry. Yet encouraging as lately one or two epithets had certainly been, he was still far from having written enough to fill even a very thin book; and really as he came to review the past three months he could not say that he had done much more or much better than in the days when Plashers Mead was undiscovered. Time had lately gone by very fast, not merely on account of the jolly days at the Rectory, but also because weeks that were terminated by weekly bills seemed to be endowed with a double swiftness.
"I really must eat less meat," said Guy to himself. "It's ridiculous to spend eleven shillings and sixpence every week on meat ... that's roughly £30 a year. Why, it's absurd! And I don't eat it. Bother Miss Peasey! What an appetite she has got."