Plashers Mead Part 34

"But, Guy, we haven't needed a refuge very often," objected Pauline, who, for all that she was losing some of her dread of the Abbey, was by no means inclined to set up a precedent for going there too often.

"Not yet," he admitted. "But with Winter coming on and the wet days that will either keep us indoors or else prevent us from doing anything but walk perpetually along splashy roads, we sha'n't be sorry to have a place like this to which we can retreat in comparative comfort."

"Oh, Guy," Pauline asked, anxiously, "I suppose we ought not to come here?"

"Why on earth not?"

"Don't be angry. But the idea just flashed through my mind that perhaps Mother wouldn't like us to come here very often."

He sighed deeply.

"Really, sometimes I wonder what is the good of being engaged. Are we for ever to be hemmed in by the conventions of a place like Wychford?"

"Oh, but I expect Mother wouldn't mind, really," said Pauline, rea.s.suring herself and him. "I'm always liable to these fits of doubt.

Sometimes I feel quite weighed down by the responsibility of being grown up."

She laughed at herself, and the laughter ringing through the hollow house seemed to return and mock her with a mirthless echo.

"Oh, Guy!" she exclaimed. "Oh, Guy, I wish I hadn't laughed then! Did you hear how strangely it seemed as if the house laughed back at me?"

She had gripped his arm, and Guy, startled by her gesture, exclaimed rather irritably that she ought to control her nerves.

"Well, don't let's stay in this room. I don't like the green light that the ivy is giving your face."

"What next?" he grumbled. "Well, let's go out on the balcony."

They went half-way down-stairs to the door that opened on a large bal.u.s.traded terrace with steps leading from either end into the ruined garden. The wind beat against them with such force here that very soon they went back into the house, and Guy found a small room looking out on the terrace, in which he persuaded Pauline to come and sit for a while.

All the other rooms in the house had been so dreadfully decayed, so much battered by every humiliation time could inflict upon them, that this small parlor was in contrast positively habitable. It gave the impression of being perhaps the last place to which the long-vanished owners had desperately held. There was a rusty hob-grate, and in the window a deep wooden seat; while the walls were still painted with courtly scenes, and the inlaid wooden floor gave a decency which everywhere else had been destroyed by the mouldering boards.

"I say, it would be fun to light a fire some time," said Guy. "This is just the room for us."

"It's rather a frightening room," said Pauline, doubtfully.

"Dearest, you insist on being frightened by everything this afternoon,"

he answered.

"No, but this room is frightening, Guy," she persisted. "This seems so near to being lived in by dead people."

"And what can dead people do to you and me?" he asked, with that sidelong mocking smile which she half disliked, half loved.

Pauline looked back over her shoulder once; then she came across to where he invited her to sit in the window-bay.

"I ought to have brought my diamond pencil," he said. "This is such a window for mottoes. Why, I declare! Somebody has scrawled one. Look, Pauline. Pauline, look! _1770. R. G. P. F._ inside a heart. Oh, what a pity it wasn't _P. G._ for Pauline Grey. Still, the _G_ can stand for Guy. Oh, really, I think it's an extraordinary coincidence! _P. F.?_ We can find out which of the Fentons that was. We'll look up in the history of the family. Darling, I am so glad we came to this little room. Think of those lovers who sat here once like us. Pauline, it makes me cherish you so."

She sat upon his knees, because the window-seat was dusty, and because in this place of fled lovers she wanted to be held closely to his heart.

The wind boomed and moaned, and the sun breaking through the clouds lit up the walls with a wild yellow light.

Suddenly Pauline drew away from his arms.

"Shadows went by the window," she cried. "Guy, I feel afraid. I feel afraid. There's a footstep."

She was lily-white whose cheeks had but now been burning so fiercely.

"Nonsense," he replied, half roughly. "It was that burst of suns.h.i.+ne."

"Guy, there were shadows. Hark!"

She nearly screamed, because footsteps were going down the stairs of the empty house.

"It must have been the caretaker," said Guy.

"I saw a white person. Guy, never, never let us come here again."

"You don't seriously think you saw a ghost?" he asked.

"Guy, how do I know? Come away into the air. We should never have come here. Oh, this room! I feel as if I should faint."

"I'll see who it was," said Guy, springing up.

"No, don't leave me. Wait for me. I'll come with you."

They hurried down the stairs, and when they reached the pallid lawn they saw Margaret and Monica in their white coats disappearing among the yew-trees by the entrance.

"There are your ghosts," said Guy, laughing.

Yet, though Guy scoffed at her fears, Pauline was not sure that she would not have preferred a ghost to that disquieting pa.s.sage of her sisters without hail or comment. Yet perhaps, after all, they had not seen her and Guy in that sinister small parlor.

"Shall we catch them up?" he asked.

And Pauline, with a breath of dismay, was conscious of an inclination to pretend that they had not been here this afternoon. She discovered herself, as it were, proposing to Guy that they should not overtake Monica and Margaret. A secretiveness she had never known before had seized her soul, and she hoped that their presence in the Abbey was unknown. Guy divined at once that she did not want to overtake her sisters, and he kept her under the trees, where they watched each a.s.sault of the wind tearing at the little foliage that still remained.

He guided her tenderly away from the sight of the house; and they walked along the broad path down through the shrubbery, meeting a rout of brown and red and yellow leaves that swept by them. She clung to Guy's arm as if this urgent and tumultuous wind had the power to sweep her, too, into the confusion; such an affraying journey was life beginning to seem.

This ghastly elation of the October weather would not allow her breath to examine the perplexity in which she had involved herself. She felt that if the wind blew any louder she would have to scream out in defiance of its violence or else surrender miserably and be whirled into oblivion. A brown oak-leaf had escaped from the perishable host and was palpitating in a fold of her sleeve like a hunted creature; but when Pauline would have rescued it at the same moment a gust came roaring up the walk under the hissing trees, and the driven leaf was torn from its refuge and flung high into the air to join the myriads in their giddy riot of death.

"Come away from here," she cried to Guy. "Come away or I shall go mad in this wind."

He looked at her with a sort of judicial demeanor, as if he were in doubt whether he ought not to reprove such excitement.

"It was really beginning to blow quite fiercely," he said, when they had reached the comparative stillness of Abbey Lane.

Behind them Pauline still heard with terror and hatred the moaning of the trees, and she hurried away from the sound.

"Never, never will I go there again. Why did you ask me to go there? I would sooner have met a thousand Brydones than have been in that house."

"Pauline," he protested, "you really do sometimes encourage yourself to be overwrought."

"Guy, don't lecture me," she said, turning upon him fiercely.

"Well, don't let the whole of Wychford see that you're in a temper," he retorted. "People haven't yet got over the idea of us two as a natural curiosity of the neighborhood. I don't want ... and I don't suppose you're very anxious for these yokels to discuss our quarrels in the post-office to-night?"