I felt like a poor relation. I sympathized with Anarchists. We had come out of the Park now finally, both Mary and I—into this....
"Mr. Stratton I am sure agrees with me."
For a time I had been marooned conversationally, and Lady Viping had engaged Sir Godfrey. Evidently he was refractory and she was back at me.
"Look at it now in profile," she said, and directed me once more to that unendurable grouping. Justin again!
"It's a heavy face," I said.
"It's a powerful face. I wouldn't care anyhow to be up against it—as people say." And the lorgnette shut with a click. "What is this? Peaches!—Yes, and give me some cream." ...
I hovered long for that measuring I had been promised on the steps, but either Mary had forgotten or she deemed it wiser to forget.
§ 11
I took my leave of Lady Ladislaw when the departure of Evesham broke the party into dispersing fragments. I started down the drive towards the rectory and then vaulted the railings by the paddock and struck across beyond the mere. I could not go home with the immense burthen of thought and new ideas and emotions that had come upon me. I felt confused and shattered to incoherence by the new quality of Mary's atmosphere. I turned my steps towards the wilder, lonelier part of the park beyond the Killing Wood, and lay down in a wide space of grass between two divergent thickets of bracken, and remained there for a very long time.
There it was in the park that for the first time I pitted myself against life upon a definite issue, and prepared my first experience of defeat. "I will have her," I said, hammering at the turf with my fist. "I will. I do not care if I give all my life...."
Then I lay still and bit the sweetness out of joints of grass, and presently thought and planned.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
The Marriage of the Lady Mary Christian
§ 1
For three or four days I could get no word with Mary. I could not now come and go as I had been able to do in the days when we were still "the children." I could not work, I could not rest, I prowled as near as I could to Burnmore House hoping for some glimpse of her, waiting for the moment when I could decently present myself again at the house.
When at last I called, Justin had gone and things had some flavor of the ancient time. Lady Ladislaw received me with an airy intimacy, all the careful responsibility of her luncheon party manner thrown aside. "And how goes Cambridge?" she sang, sailing through the great saloon towards me, and I thought that for the occasion Cambridge instead of Oxford would serve sufficiently well. "You'll find them all at tennis," said Lady Ladislaw, and waved me on to the gardens. There I found all four of them and had to wait until their set was finished.
"Mary," I said at the first chance, "are we never to talk again?"
"It's all different," she said.
"I am dying to talk to you—as we used to talk."
"And I—Stevenage. But—— You see?"
"Next time I come," I said, "I shall bring you a letter. There is so much——"
"No," she said. "Can't you get up in the morning? Very early—five or six. No one is up until ever so late."
"I'd stay up all night."
"Serve!" said Maxton, who was playing the two of us and had stopped I think to tighten a shoe.
Things conspired against any more intimacy for a time. But we got our moment on the way to tea. She glanced back at Philip, who was loosening the net, and then forward to estimate the distance of Maxton and Guy. "They're all three going," she said, "after Tuesday. Then—before six."
"Wednesday?"
"Yes."
"Suppose after all," she threw out, "I can't come."
"Fortunes of war."
"If I can't come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"You know the old Ice House?"
"Towards the gardens?"
"Yes. On the further side. Don't come by the road, come across by the end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I've not played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."
This last was for the boys.
"You've played twenty times at least since you've been here," said Guy, with the simple bluntness of a brother. "I'm certain."
§ 2
To this day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. And I feel the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings. Presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. Everything is different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a different value from what it has by day. All the little things upon the ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary, flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"Oh Stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
We each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly kiss.
"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It's still not six. And there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the wet. Oh! it's so good to be out of things again—clean out of things—with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."
"You're glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don't we always get up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"
We go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen. (I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from which her feet can swing....
Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three years for me—until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way—I will get hold of things. Believe me!—with all my strength."
I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon me.
"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."