No one can be in profounder ignorance than is Peggy of the fact of any one breathing passionate sighs towards her from Downing Street. The only news that she has heard of John Talbot is a casual mention by Freddy of the fact of his having invited him to spend his Christmas at the Manor, and of his having refused without giving any particular reason.
'He does not care for our simple pleasures, I suppose,' says Freddy, with a smile; 'and, on the whole, I am not sorry. He is a good fellow; but we are really much more comfortable by ourselves. I like to have you two dear things all to myself.'
As he speaks he extends a hand apiece impartially to his betrothed and her sister. Peggy is in these days in possession of one of Freddy's hands oftener than she altogether cares about; but, since he is always reminding her that he is now a more than brother to her--in fact, as he has long been in feeling--she decides that it is not worth making a fuss about, and lets her cool and careless fingers lie in that fraternal hand without paying any attention to it. For her the winter has passed tant bien que mal. Christmas had brought her love to Prue, and the mumps to the Evanses; and both events have supplied Peggy with plenty of work.
The Evanses are one of those families who have all their diseases bountifully. Their very mumps are severe and simultaneous. They all have them--father, mother, schoolboys, old baby, new baby. A hireling tells the Christmas news from Mr. Evans's pulpit, while Mr. Evans sits in his study, with the door locked to hinder the intrusion of his suffering progeny, stooping his swelled features over his Earthly Paradise, and thinking with envy and admiration of the institution of a celibate clergy. Both babies bawl from morning to night at this practical joke played upon them by Providence at the outset of their career; and the boys wistfully press their enlarged faces--unnecessarily enlarged, since they were large before--against the frozen panes of the Vicarage windows, in futile longing for the unattainable joys held out to them by the view of the iron-bound Vicarage pond, and the glassy slideableness of the turnpike road.
The calamity to her clergy has thrown the conduct of the whole of the parish charities and gaieties on Peggy's hands. Nor is she without a little nursing on her own account; for Freddy, by dint of keeping his Prue out on the leads till ten o'clock at night, talking to her about himself and the fixed stars, has succeeded in giving her such a cold on the chest, that neither can she hear the Christmas tidings. However, he is so touchingly repentant for what he has done, says such cutting things about himself, and sits by her side so devotedly for hours, reading poetry to her in a charming sympathetic voice, that nobody can be seriously angry with him--least of all Prue, whose one heart-felt prayer is that her cold may become chronic, or that at least she may have a new one every month.
'He has been reading me such beautiful poetry!' she says in a soft voice one day, when Peggy rejoins her after her lover has taken his daily departure. 'Very deep, you know; so that one had to put one's whole mind to following it. But beautiful, too--like Browning, only better?'
Peggy lifts her eyebrows.
'Like Browning, only better!'
'And when I said so,' pursues Prue, with hot cheeks and bright proud eyes, 'he told me that he never knew any one who had such an unerring instinct for what was good in literature as I.'
'And whose was it?' inquires Margaret, a little suspiciously.
'He would not tell me. I could not get him to tell me; but I think--oh, Peggy, I cannot help fancying that it was his own!'
'That would account for his looking upon your instinct as unerring, would not it?' retorts Peggy, laughing.
But she does not always laugh over Freddy and Prue. Though young Ducane repeats to her oftener than once or twice a day that he is now her more than brother, in fact as well as in feeling, he does not tell any one else so. Despite all Peggy's representations, entreaties, protests, he has not yet given the slightest hint of his new situation to his aunt.
'I must insist upon your telling her,' Peggy has said. 'As things now stand, I cannot bear to meet her; I feel an impostor and a cheat. It is putting us all in such a false position; it makes me miserable to think that she has not a suspicion that the old conditions are not quite unaltered.'
'Poor old conditions!' says Freddy dreamily, leaning with thrown-back head in the rocking-chair, and staring up at the ceiling, as in the summer he used to stare up at the sky and the jackdaws. 'It is a sad thought that one never can gain anything in this world without some counterbalancing loss! Life is a sort of compromise; is not it, Peg?'
'If you do not tell her, I warn you that I shall tell her myself.'
Her tone is so resolute that Freddy forsakes his pensive generalities, and sits up.
'I am sorry once again, my Peggy, to have to remind you of that well-known firm who realised a large fortune by minding their own business.'
'It is my own business,' retorts Peggy firmly, though her cheek burns, 'it is Prue's business; and Prue's business is mine. If you do not tell milady, I repeat that I shall tell her myself.'
'I daresay you will,' replies Freddy sadly; 'and if you do, you will give a great deal of pain to a person who has never wittingly given you anything but pleasure in all her life.'
'Why should I give her pain?' returns Margaret, rising in high excitement from her chair, and standing before the fire, with quivering nostril and flashing eye. 'What is there to give her pain in----'
'It would give her pain, acute pain, to hear such a piece of news from any one but myself,' answers Freddy, with the same air of subdued sadness.
'Then why do not you tell her?' persists Margaret.
For all answer he rises too, and tries, unsuccessfully this time, to put his brotherly arm about her waist. 'Wait till I have got through my schools,' he says in a melting whisper; 'wait till I have taken my degree. When I have taken my degree she can no longer look upon me as a child, bless her old heart!'
'I see no signs of her looking upon you as a child now.'
'Oh, but she does,' replies Freddy confidently; 'to her' (beginning to laugh) 'I am still the lisping little innocent whom she took to her arms eighteen years ago.' Then, growing grave again, 'I do not think that you quite understand how difficult it is for an old person to realise that we are grown up; as I have told you several times, I find it difficult to realise it myself. Do not you too? No? Well, dear, because you are strong yourself do not be harsh to weaker vessels; but,' sinking his voice to a coaxing whisper, 'be the dear thing I have always found you, and wait till I have taken my degree.'
She has not the slightest ambition to be the 'dear thing he has always found her;' and his beguilements would have been absolutely wasted upon her, nor served to turn her by one hair's breadth from her purpose, had not they been so strenuously backed up by Prue.
'Oh, Peggy, for pity's sake do not interfere!' she has implored, with eyes full of tears and an agonised voice. 'Leave it all to him. He has such exquisite tact that he is sure to choose the best moment for telling her; and if you told her, and anything disagreeable came of it, it might give him a turn against me. He is so finely strung--he knows it himself, and looks upon it as quite a misfortune; the other day he asked me if I thought there was any use in his trying to change it--so finely strung that he cannot bear a contact with anything harsh or violent; and, as he often says, our love now is like a poem; and he thinks that anything that seemed to vulgarise it, or pull it down to a common level, would kill him.'
'Very well, dear, very well,' replies Peggy, with a long impatient sigh, stroking her sister's hair; 'have it your own way; only I fancy he would take more killing than that.'
And now Christmas has gone, and the New Year come; and Freddy has returned to his studies, leaving his aunt still in ignorance of those tidings which his exquisite tact has not yet found the right moment to communicate.
And now the spring is coming on with slow green steps. The brown earth is rubbing her eyes, in preparation for her blossomed wakening. Peggy's garden, so long iron-bound, is beginning to turn in its sleep. Jacob and she have gone together round their domain, counting over the dead and wounded that the long frost has left them in legacy. Among the dead, the irrecoverably dead, to which no Easter sunshine or April rains can bring back any little green shoots of life, is the old lavender-bush.
What matter? There are plenty of young ones. And yet, as she stands looking at the dry wreck of last year's fragrance, a hot and foolish tear steals into each eye. Her back is turned towards Jacob, who is examining the mowing-machine, which will soon be again needed.
'It wants fettlin' a bit,' he says in a grumbling voice; 'it has never been the same since that Muster Talbot meddled wi' it.'
Poor Muster Talbot! There is not much fear of his meddling with the mowing-machine ever again. She lifts her eyes, still a little obscured by those tears, to the sky, and they follow a pigeon, its wings silver-white as they turn in the sun. It is flying southwards. She wishes idly that it would fly to him to tell him that the lavender-bush is dead, and the mowing-machine broken; only it should choose a moment when Lady Betty is not by, as such silly news would not interest her.
She strolls away from Jacob, his last remark having given her a distaste for his conversation; strolls away into the little orchard, listening to the birds. How loud they are! and despite the long winter, how many! What a honeyed Babel of strong little voices! There is the thrush, of course:
'The wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!'
But besides the thrush's dominant harmony, how many others there are! There are the chiff-chaff's clear reiterations; the wren, with a voice so much bigger than her tiny body; the chaffinch's laugh-like notes; the robin's, who, not content with his own pretty song, that perhaps he thinks smacks too much of winter, puzzlingly mimics other singers. She lifts her eyes, shaded by her hand, to look at them, as they swing--jubilant specks--on twig and tree-top. How they are bragging of their happiness! outbragging one another! They are extravagantly gay, and yet their melodies bring the tears to her eyes. Perhaps they remind her that she is alone. Perhaps--more likely, indeed, since she is not very apt to be thinking of herself at all--they remind her of another extravagant gaiety, over which she rejoices or half rejoices in trembling. It is only in trembling that any human soul can see one they love uplifted to such a height of extravagant joy as that on which Prue now sits queening it over the workaday world. 'Can it last?' is the anxious question that Peggy asks herself a hundred times a day; finds herself feverishly asking when she wakes up at night.
If Prue's beauty, such as it is, can keep him, then indeed she has a better chance than ever; for love has put a meaning into the poor soul's insignificant lilies and roses, and made her transiently beautiful. If love, insane and limitless; love at once grovelling and soaring; love that would kiss the dust from his feet, or be burned by a slow fire to give him a moment's pleasure--if love such as this can bind him, then is he bound indeed. But can it?
'I wish you would not spoil him so,' Peggy says grudgingly one day, during the Easter vacation, when her sister has come hurrying from garden to house, on some errand of Freddy's. 'I cannot bear to see you fetching and carrying for him; it is such a reversal of the right order of things. You spend your life in waiting upon him hand and foot!'
'How could I spend it better?' replies Prue, the rapturous colour coming into her face, and the moisture into her radiant eyes.
And so Peggy has to submit, has to overhear ten and twenty times a day:
'My Prue, if you are going to the house--of course, do not go on purpose--my darling, I could not hear of such a thing! What do you suppose that I am made of? Well, of course, if you insist! it is awfully good of you! I will do as much for you when I am as young as you are,' etc. 'Prue, there is a fly on my forehead! I cannot get at my own hands somehow; do you think you could flick it off for me!' 'Oh, Prue! my head burns so! feel it! You do not happen to have any eau-de-Cologne in the room, do you? No? Then do not trouble to go upstairs for it. What? You have been to fetch it! Bad Prue! and I told you not!'
Easter has fallen late this year, and so has come with pomp of pear-blossom, with teeming primroses, with garden hyacinth and field daffodil; has come, too, with a breath like June's. The garden-chairs are set out; and on them, just as if it were midsummer, only that above their heads the Judas-tree holds leafless arms, the lovers sit, through the splendour of the lengthening days.
Freddy has said many a charming thing about the pear-blossom; about nature's awakening; about the hymeneal birds--things that, as Prue says, are almost poetry just as he speaks them, without any alteration. But he will not be able to say any more to-day, since he lies under one of his mysterious obligations--an obligation which he not darkly hints to have been imposed upon him by his aunt--to dine and sleep at a house in the neighbourhood.
'Milady has ignored them for twenty years,' he says of his intended hosts; 'and now she is sending me out as her dove, with her olive-branch. Of course I could not be so selfish as to refuse her. But,' with a heavy sigh, 'I wish she would carry her olive-branch herself!'
'I wish she would,' replies Prue dejectedly, her small face already overcast at the prospect of twenty-four hours' separation.
'It seems hard that one can never be perfectly well off without there coming some element of change and disintegration,' says Freddy, with a subdued sadness. 'Well, God bless you, darling! Take care of her, Peggy! Take good care of my Prue! Be waiting for me, Prue, at the garden-gate at twelve o'clock to-morrow!'
And Prue does wait, is waiting long before the appointed hour; waits--it would be piteous to say for how long after that hour--waits in vain, for Freddy comes not. He does not return all that day; nor is it till late on the next that he comes stepping, cool and smiling, across the evening shadows.
'Do not go to meet him,' says Peggy half crossly; 'he does not deserve it!'
But she speaks, as she had known that she would, to inattentive ears. It was, indeed, only as a relief to her own feelings that she had given that futile counsel. It is some time before they rejoin her, and when they do--
'It was not quite so bad as you expected, I suppose?' Margaret says, a little drily.
'When is anything so bad as one expects?' replies Freddy evasively, throwing himself into his accustomed chair; 'by Jove! how the pear-tree has come out since I left!'
'That was two whole days ago!' says Prue, rather wistfully.
'Two whole days ago!--so it was--
"Measured by opening and by closing flowers!"
Prue, do you happen to have a needle about you? No? Of course I do not mean to give you the trouble of going into the house to fetch one; some people have a crop of needles always about them. Oh, Prue!--stop! I am shocked--that is the last thing I meant!'
But poor Prue is off like a lapwing.
'You stayed longer than you intended?' says Peggy interrogatively.
'Yes;--by Jove, Peggy! do not you wish you could paint? Did you ever see anything like the colour of that sky behind the pear-blossom?'
'Did you like them?'
'Oh, you know I like everybody,' answers he vaguely; 'I do not think I possess the faculty of dislike. I think,' pensively, 'that in every human soul, if one gets near enough to it, there is something to love; and,' with a change of key, 'good heavens, are not they rich! They have a yacht of 500 tons; they are going round the world in her next autumn; they asked me to go too. I should like to go round the world.'
'To go round the world!' repeats Peggy, with a rather blank look; 'but by that time you will have taken your degree. You will have settled down to some steady work, will not you?--whatever work you have decided upon. By the bye, are you any nearer a choice than you were when last I spoke to you?'
Freddy agitates his curly head in an easy negative.
'I am afraid not the least; but, after all, there is no great hurry. I think,' with his serious air, 'that one ought to interrogate one's own nature very deeply before one decides on a question of such moment; and meanwhile,' becoming gay again, 'I should like to go round the world with the Hartleys--would not you, Peg? No?--well, I should.'
