Watersprings - Arthur Christopher Benson (short novels to read TXT) 📗

I should have welcomed you, my dear Howard, as a son-in-law, under any circumstances."

Jack, on the contrary, was rather more cautious in his congratulations. "I am all for things being fixed up as people like," he said, "and I am sure it's a good match for Maud, and all that. But I can't put the two ends together. I never supposed that you would fall in love, any more than that my father would marry again; and when it comes to your falling in love with Maud--well, if you knew that girl as I do, you would think twice! I can't conceive what you will ever have to talk about, unless you make her do essays. It is really rather embarrassing to have a Don for a brother-in-law. I feel as if I should have to say 'we' when I talked to the other Dons, and I shall be regarded with suspicion by the rest of the men. But of course you have my blessing, if you will do it; though if you like to cry off, even now, I will try to keep the peace. I feel rather an ass to have said that about Fred Guthrie; but of course he is hard hit, and I can't think how I shall ever be able to look him in the face. What bothers me is that I never saw how things were going. Well, may it be long before I find myself in the same position! But you are welcome to Missy, if you think you can make anything of her."

Mrs. Graves did little more than express her delight. "It was what I somehow hoped from the first for both of you," she said.

"Well," said Howard, "the only thing that puzzles me is that when you saw--yes, I am sure you saw--what was happening, you didn't make a sign."

"No," said Mrs. Graves, "that is just what one can't do! I didn't doubt that it would come right, I guessed what Maud felt; but you had to find the way to her yourself. I was sure of Maud, you see; but I was not quite sure of you. It does not do to try experiments, dear Howard, with forces as strong as love; I knew that if I told you how things stood, you would have felt bound out of courtesy and kindness to speak, and that would have been no good. If it is illegal to help a man to commit suicide, it is worse, it is wicked to push a man into marriage; but I am a very happy woman now--so happy that I am almost afraid."

Howard talked over his plans with Mrs. Graves; there seemed no sort of reason to defer his wedding. He told her, too, that he had a further plan. There was a system at Beaufort by which, after a certain number of years' service, a Fellow could take a year off duty, without affecting his seniority or his position. "I am going to do this," he said. "I do not think it is unwise. I am too old, I think, both to make Maud's acquaintance as I wish, and to keep my work going at the same time. It would be impossible. So I will settle down here, if you will let me, and try to understand the place and the people; and then if it seems well, I will go back to Cambridge in October year, and go on with my work. I hope you will approve of that?"

"I do entirely approve," said Mrs. Graves. "I will make over to you at once what you will in any case ultimately inherit--and I believe your young lady is not penniless either? Well, money has its uses sometimes."

Howard did this. Mr. Redmayne wrote him a letter in which affection and cynicism were curiously mingled.

"There will be two to please now instead of one," he wrote. "I do not, of course, approve of Dons marrying. The tender passion is, I believe, inimical to solid work; this I judge from observation rather than from experience. But you will get over all that when you are settled; and then if you decide to return--and we can ill spare you--I hope you will return to work in a reasonable frame of mind. Pray give my respects to the young lady, and say that if she would like a testimonial to your honesty and sobriety, I shall be happy to send her one."

All these experiences, shared by Maud, were absurdly delightful to Howard. She was rather alarmed by Redmayne's letter.

"I feel as if I were doing rather an awful thing," she said, "in taking you away like this. I feel like Hotspur's wife and Enid rolled into one. I shouldn't DARE to go with you at once to Cambridge--I should feel like a Pomeranian dog on a lead."

And so it came to pass that on a certain Monday in the month of September a very quiet little wedding took place at Windlow. The bells were rung, and a hideous object of brushwood and bunting, that looked like the work of a bower-bird, was erected in the road, and called a triumphal arch. Mr. Redmayne insisted on coming, and escorted Monica from Cambridge, "without in any way compromising my honour and virtue," he said: "it must be plainly understood that I have no INTENTIONS." He made a charming speech at the subsequent luncheon, in which he said that, though he personally regretted the turn that affairs had taken, he could not honestly say that, if matrimony were to be regarded as advisable, his friends could have done better.

The strange thing to Howard was the contrast between his own acute and intolerable nervousness, and the entire and radiant self-possession of Maud. He had a bad hour on the morning of the wedding-day itself. He had a sort of hideous fear that he had done selfishly and perversely, and that it was impossible that Maud could really continue to love him; that he had sacrificed her youth to his fancy, and his vivid imagination saw himself being wheeled in a bath-chair along the Parade of a health-resort, with Maud in melancholy attendance.

But when he saw his child enter the church, and look up to catch his eye, his fears melted like a vapour on glass; and his love seemed to him to pour down in a sudden cataract, too strong for a human heart to hold, to meet the exquisite trustfulness and sweetness of his bride, who looked as though the gates of heaven were ajar. After that he saw and heard nothing but Maud. They went off together in the afternoon to a little house in Dorsetshire by a lonely sea-cove, which Mr. Sandys had spent many glorious and important hours in securing and arranging. It was only an hour's journey. If Howard had needed reassuring he had his desire; for as they drove away from Windlow among the thin cries of the village children, Howard put his arm round Maud, and said "Well, child?" upon which she took his other hand in both of her own, and dropping her head on his shoulder, said, "Utterly and entirely and absolutely proud and happy and content!" And then they sate in silence.


XXIV


DISCOVERIES

It was a time of wonderful discoveries for Howard, that month spent in the little house under the cliff and beside the cove. It was a tiny hamlet with half a dozen fishermen's cottages and two or three larger houses, holiday-dwellings for rich people; but there was no one living there, except a family of children with a governess. The house they were in belonged to an artist, and had a big studio in which they mostly sate. An elderly woman and her niece were the servants, and the life was the simplest that could be imagined. Howard felt as if he would have liked it prolonged for ever. They brought a few books with them, but did little else except ramble through the long afternoons in the silent bays. It was warm, bright September weather, still and hazy; and the sight of the dim golden-brown promontories, with pale-green grass at the top, stretching out one beyond another into the distance, became for Howard a symbol of all that was most wonderful and perfect in life.

He could not cease to marvel at the fact that this beautiful young creature, full of tenderness and anxious care for others, and with love the one pre-occupation of her life, should yield herself thus to him with such an entire and happy abandonment. Maud seemed for the time to have no will of her own, no thought except to please him; he could not get her to express a single preference, and her guileless diplomacy to discover what he preferred amused and delighted him. At the same time the exploration of Maud's mind and thought was an entire surprise to him--there was so much she did not know, so many things in the world, which he took for granted, of which she had never heard; and yet in many ways he discovered that she knew and perceived far more than he did. Her judgment of people was penetrating and incisive, and was formed quite instinctively, without any apparent reason; she had, too, a charming gift of humour, and her affection for her own circle did not in the least prevent her from perceiving their absurdities. She was not all loyalty and devotion, nor did she pretend to be interested in things for which she did not care. There were many conventions, which Howard for the first time discovered that he himself unconsciously held, which Maud did not think in the least important. Howard began to see that he himself had really been a somewhat conventional person, with a respect for success and position and dignity and influence. He saw that his own chief motive had been never to do anything disagreeable or unreasonable or original or decisive; he began to see that his unconscious aim had been to fit himself without self-assertion into his circle, and to make himself unobtrusively necessary to people. Maud had no touch of this in her nature at all; her only ambition seemed to be to be loved, which was accompanied by what seemed to Howard a marvellous incapacity for being shocked by anything; she was wholly innocent and ingenuous, but yet he found to his surprise that she knew something of the dark corners of life, and the moral problems of village life were a matter of course to her. He had naturally supposed that a girl would have been fenced round by illusions; but it was not so. She had seen and observed and drawn her conclusions. She thought very little of what one commonly called sins, and her indignation seemed aroused by nothing but cruelty and treachery. It became clear to Howard that Mr. Sandys and Mrs. Graves had been very wise in the matter, and that Maud had not been brought up in any silly ignorance of human frailty. Her religion was equally a surprise to him. He had thought that a girl brought up as Maud had been would be sure to hold a tissue of accepted beliefs which he must be careful not to disturb. But here again she seemed to have little but a few fine principles, set in a simple Christian framework. They were talking about this one day, and Maud laughed at something he said.

"You need not be so cautious," she said, "though I like you to be cautious--you are afraid of hurting me; but you won't do that! Cousin Anne taught me long ago that it was no use believing anything unless you understood more or less where it was leading you.