But Peggy lay long awake. She turned from one side to the other and found no rest for her body or her thoughts. All her love for her sister desired her happiness, but all her wisdom told her that she could not find it permanently here. How could she? In the nature of things how could she? And Hugh?
CHAPTER VIII
HUGH was standing at the dining-room window of the Chalkpits at Mannington, opening letters, and looking with slightly pained wonder at the hopelessness of the morning. A south-westerly gale had set in last night, and through the hours of darkness it had increased to a hurricane, and though any reasonable gale might have been expected to blow itself out in this time, or anyhow to show signs of tiring, this particular one seemed merely to have blown itself in, just as it had blown in the window of his dressing-room half an hour ago. Outside the garden was cowering beneath these blasts, and the scuds of driving rain that crossed the water-meadow beyond like clouds of driven smoke, blotting out the landscape, flung themselves against the streaming panes. The terrace walk, that last night had been so neat and orderly, was now but a series of pools of wind-ruffled water, dotted over by twigs and branches torn from the tortured trees, and early seedlings that yesterday had shown so brave an upstanding were now but a little plaster of tiny stem and infinitesimal leaf embedded in mud. Creepers had been torn from the wall, leaves battered from them, and the Japanese cherry-tree at the end that had been a cascade of pink frothing blossom was now gaunt and bare. It seemed curious that the laws of Nature demanded so hysterical an outburst.
Hugh, like all mercurially minded persons, was a good deal affected by climatic conditions, and he felt somewhat depressed. Edith, too, had evidently finished breakfast and gone to see the cook, for Hugh certainly was very late that morning. Her absence was depressing too, and his letters were dull, and they had to go to town to-morrow, and he distinctly did not want to. It was cold too, quite disgustingly cold, and to fill up the time while he was waiting for his fresh tea to be brought in he had the brilliant idea of lighting the fire.
The fire was admirably laid (everything in the house was done exactly as it should be done, and in no other way), and paper caught stick, and stick licked coal instantaneously. Almost instantaneously also a beautiful cloud of stinging smoke was driven into the room. That would never do, and Hugh spent an active five minutes in beating out the fire he had just lit. But it warmed him. Also his tea came, and like a sensible young man he sat with his back to the depressing window, propped up the daily paper against the teapot, and took fish and bacon on one plate. But the first thing he saw in his paper was that the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, began on May 1 with “Lohengrin,” in which the name part would be taken by the new young English tenor. That was no news to him, but print settled it. Hugh read no further, but said “Oh, lor!”
That had been Edith’s doing, for he himself had almost taken it for granted that his engagement to her cancelled his engagement to the syndicate, which indeed at the time had only got to the point that he had told Reuss he would sing, and Reuss had not even at that moment told them. For it was quite a different thing for an unemployed bachelor to spend his winter (not in Frankfort, it is true, for Reuss was coming to London) in weeks of really hard work from a lately married man doing it. But he had been extraordinarily wide of the mark when he supposed that Edith would agree with him.
“Ah, Hughie, you mustn’t throw it up!” she said. “Why, my darling, even before——”
“Before what?” asked the guileful Hugh.
“Before July 24th it was one of the things in my life that I really most looked forward to, that this year I should see you as Lohengrin and Tristan. And what do you suppose it will be to me now?” she asked softly.
“But if we are not married till September we shall have just three minutes of honeymoon,” he said. “Because I can’t sing unless I study straight away from October.”