A Bachelor's Comedy

by J. E. Buckrose

CHAPTER XVI

Andy still went up to Gaythorpe Manor fairly often to play billiards with Dick Stamford; but the two young men no longer sat chatting after their game, and their talk became rather strained, as it always must be between two people who are constantly reminded by each other’s presence of a subject about which they cannot speak.

The fact is that the air becomes, under those circumstances, so full of interesting and unspoken conversations that you cannot hear the dull words which do pass, and when Andy said, “Rotten weather for the time of year,” he really was indicating the unpleasantness of life in the present trying conditions.

So when Dick Stamford replied, “Yes, beastly,” he meant that Andy was not the only one who suffered.

But a young clergyman who dashes about the country in a shining green cart picked out with red drawn by a very active piebald pony does not excite pity in the casual observer, and people round Gaythorpe, and in all the villages between there and Marshaven, where Mrs. Dixon and the Webster girls still lingered, said to each other that Parson Andy had the times of it.

In this way Elizabeth was able to see very plainly that he did not wear the willow; and Norah, who was greatly relieved to find that her sister would not be thrown away on an impecunious country clergyman, lost no opportunity of accentuating this obvious fact.

And as the summer days passed on into autumn, Elizabeth was obliged to own to herself that she had given the most exquisite thing a girl has to give—first love, with all the bloom and glory on it—to a man who had looked at it quite near and not found it worth taking.

She did not mope or grow thin, but she looked sometimes as if she had not slept, and her mother made her take some kind of beef juice. Beef juice invariably is administered by those in authority for disappointed love, though they may know nothing about the love, and Elizabeth took it because she did not want to talk about her symptoms.

But she had some silent hours which left a mark on her life before she finally made up her mind that Andy did not want her; and she quite haunted the doorstep of the Miss Birketts, who were very dull, and lived in a little house in Millsby, and always had dry cakes, and wanted her very much indeed. She clung at this time with a sort of still passion to those who wanted her enough. Outwardly, however, she was just the same. Her slow voice, and her manner, which was like that of a young mother and yet all girlish, did not change at all. The peculiar, elusive tenderness of it only deepened; there was a sort of strength in sweetness about Elizabeth now which you may often notice in those who love so much that they will be bound to sacrifice—the sort of thing which lies at the bottom of all the folly and all the glory of life.

One morning she came down to breakfast when a rather celebrated amateur ornithologist was staying with her parents, and, Mrs. Atterton for once being present at that meal, the conversation fell on parrots.