Pelleas reflected.
“Ah, well,” he said, “Hobart told me that one night when Mr. Didbin’s train ran into an open switch he walked through six miles of mud to marry a little country couple whom he had never seen.”
And that confirmed us: The Reverend Arthur Didbin would understand. We stepped on in the pleasant light talking of this quite as if we had a claim on moon-made balconies and were the only lovers in the world. That we were not the only lovers we were soon to discover. At the edge of a grove, where a midsummer-night-dream of a fountain tinkled, we emerged on a green slope spangled with little flowers; and on its marge stood a shallow arbour formed like a shell or a petal and brave with bloom. We hastened toward it, certain that it had risen from the green to receive us, and were close upon it before we saw that it was already occupied. And there sat Bonnie, the little maid whose romance we had openly fostered, and with her that young Karl, the under-gardener, whom we observed in an instant Avis could never call Faint Heart any more.
Pelleas glanced at me merrily as we immediately turned aside pretending to be vastly absorbed in some botanical researches on the spangled evening slope.
“Bless us, Etarre,” he said, smiling, “what a world it is. You cannot possibly hollow out an arbour anywhere without two lovers waiting to occupy it.”
“Ah, yes,” said I, “the only difficulty is that there are more lovers than arbours. Here are we for example, arbourless.”
But that we did not mind. On the contrary, being meddlers where arbours and so on are concerned, we set about finding out more of the two whom we had surprised. This was not difficult because we had brought with us Nichola; and through her we were destined to develop huge interest in the household. Nichola indeed talked of them all perpetually while she was about my small mending and dressing and she scolded shrilly at matters as she found them quite as she habitually criticizes all orders and systems. Nichola is in conversation a sad misanthrope, which is a pity, for she does not know it; and to know it is, one must suppose, the only compensation for being a misanthrope. She inveighed for example against the cook and the head laundress who had a most frightful feud of long standing, jealously nourished, though neither now had the faintest idea in what it had arisen—was this not cosmopolitan and almost human of these two? And Nichola railed at the clannishness of the haughty Scotch butler until he one day opened an entry door for her, after which she softened her carping, as is the way of the world also, and objected only to what she called his “animal brogue,” for all the speeches of earth alien to the Italian are to Nichola a sign of just so much black inferiority. And she went on at a furious rate about the scandalous ways of “Reddie,” the second stableman, who, she declared, “kep’ the actual rats in the stable floor with their heads off their pillows, what with his playin’ on a borrow’ fiddle that he’d wen’ to work an’ learnt of himself.” Through Nichola we also had our attention directed to Mrs. Woods’ groveling fear of burglars—her one claim to distinction unless one includes that she pronounced them “burgulars.” And too we heard of the sinful pride of Sarah McLean of the cedar linen room who declared in the hearing of the household that one of her ancestors was a Hittite. Where she had acquired this historic impression we never learned nor with what she had confused the truth; but she stoutly clung to her original assertion and on one occasion openly told the housekeeper that as for her family-tree it was in the Old Testament Bible; and the housekeeper, crossing herself, told this to Nichola who listened, making the sign of the horn to ward away the evil. It was like learning the secrets of a village; but the greatest of these realities proved to be Bonnie McLean, daughter of her of Hittite descent, and Karl, the under-gardener and the genie of the gate. Picture the agitation of Pelleas and me when Nichola told us this:—
“Yes, mem,” she said, “them two, they’re in love pitiful. But the young leddy’s mother, she’s a widdy-leddy an’ dependent on. An’ as for the young fellow, he’s savin’ up fer to get his own mother acrost from the old country an’ when he does it they’re agoin’ to get marrit. But he needs eighty dollars an’ so far they say he’s got nine. Ain’t it the shame, mem, an’ the very potatoes in this house with cluster diamin’s in their eyes?”
Surely Avis did not know this about the young lovers—Avis, one of whose frocks would have set the two at housekeeping with the mother from “the old country” at the head of the table. Pelleas and I were certain that she did not know, although we have found that there are charming people of colossal interests to whom one marriage more or less seems to count for as little as a homeless kitten, or a “fledgling dead,” or the needless felling of an ancient oak. But it is among these things that Pelleas and I live, and we believe that in spite of all the lovers in the world there is yet not enough love to spare one lover’s happiness. So while the moon swelled to the full and swung through the black gulf of each night as if it had been shaped by heaven for that night’s appointment, we moved among the roses of Little Rosemont, biding our golden-wedding day, gradually becoming more and more intent upon the romance and the homely realities of that liveried household. Perhaps it was the story of Bonnie and Karl that suggested to Pelleas the next step in our adventure; or it may have been our interest in “Reddie,” whom we unearthed in the stable one afternoon and who, radiant, played for us for an hour and fervently thanked us when he had concluded. At all events, as our day of days came on apace Pelleas became convinced that it was infamously selfish for us to spend it in our own way. Because heaven had opened to us was that a reason for occupying heaven to the exclusion of the joys of others?
“Etarre,” he said boldly, “there is not the least virtue in making those about one happy. That is mere civilization. But there is nobody about us but Avis’ servants. And she told us to make ourselves at home. Let’s give all the servants a holiday on that day and get on by ourselves.”