Amazing Grace Part 39

I shook my head sorrowfully.

"I wish I did," I replied. "For so many years this has been my House of a Hundred Dreams!"

We both fell into a moment's dreamy thoughtfulness, which I was first to cast aside.

"Come and tell me about the plants, if you can!" I begged. "Which _is_ rosemary, and which is rue?"

We walked down a flight of worn steps, and came upon prim gravel pathways.

"This is rosemary," he said, "and here, by the sun-dial, is rue."

Then, even when I realized that this was the place where Lady Frances Webb had spent her wearisome days, to keep from hearing the clock chime in the hall, I could not be sad. The sun-dial was another grief spot, it was true, but it was an ancient grief spot--and it was located in a golden sea of suns.h.i.+ne, under a sky that was the reflection of forget-me-nots.

"She could gather the rue while the sun-dial told, all silently, of the day's wearing on," I said.

He looked at me uncertainly.

"Did she say that in her letters?" he asked.

"Yes. She had sent her lover away, you see, and--there was nothing else in life."

"And she longed for the days to pa.s.s silently?"

"She stayed out here as much as she could--to keep from hearing the clock in the hall," I told him. "The chime shamed the unholy prayer on her lips, she said--and the sound of the ticking reminded her of her heart's wearying beats."

"Of _their_ hearts' wearying beats, you mean," he exclaimed, and a quick look of pain which darted into his face showed me that he comprehended. Then, for the first time, I began to grasp what a lover he would make! Before this time I had been absorbed with thoughts of him as a beloved.

Suddenly my hat began to feel intolerably heavy, and my gloves intolerably hot. I tampered fumblingly with the pearl clasp at my left wrist, and drew that glove off first. Maitland Tait was watching me.

He saw my hand--my bare ringless hand. He stared at it as if it might have been a ghost, although it looked fairly pink and healthy in the warm glow of the noonday sun. Even the little pallid circle on the third finger was quite gone.

"Grace----" he said.

"Yes?"

"Does this mean that you're--you're----"

A discreet cough--a still distant, but distinctly warning cough--interrupted for a moment. Collins was coming toward us, from the ruins of the old abbey. Maitland Tait looked up and saw him coming, but he did not stop. On the other hand, the sight of his servant seemed to goad him into a hasty precipitation.

"Grace, will you marry me?" he asked.

"Of _course_!" I managed to say, but not too energetically, for the muscles of my throat were giving me trouble again.

"Soon?" he asked hungrily.

I felt very reckless and--American.

"Before the shadows pa.s.s round this dial again, if you _insist_," I smiled.

But his eyes were very grave.

"Without knowing anything more about me than you know now?"

"Why, I know everything about you," I replied, in some astonishment.

"I know that you are the biggest, and the best-looking, and the dearest----"

"You know nothing about me," he interrupted softly, "except what I have told you. I am a working man! I have always had the ma.s.s hatred for cla.s.s, and--and my grandfather was a coal-digger in Wales."

I was silent.

"Yet, you are willing to marry me?" he asked.

"Of course! Coal is--very warming," I answered.

Collins descended the flight of stone steps and came slowly along the gravel walk. When he had come to the respectful distance he stopped.

No English servant ever approaches very close--as if there were a quarantine around the sacred person of the served.

"My Lord," he said, but stammeringly, as a man halts over a newly-acquired language--"My Lord, Mrs. Carr wishes to know if you will have lunch served in the oak room, or in the----"

"In the oak room," the man standing beside me answered readily enough.

"And have the old wing opened and lighted, Collins. We want to see the pictures in there."

The servant breathed the inevitable "Thank you," and turned away.

I seemed suddenly to feel that the golden sea of sunlight was sweeping me away--up into the blue, which was the reflection of forget-me-nots.

And there loomed big on my horizon a house that was a home!

"My _Lord_?" I demanded, as soon as I could speak.

Maitland Tait nodded rea.s.suringly.

"My father died two weeks ago," he said. "And I _had_ to come into the t.i.tle."

"And this place is _yours_!" I sang out, feeling that all the years of my life I had been destiny's love-child. "This old abbey is yours! The park is yours! The garden is yours! The sun-dial is yours!"

"And the girl is mine!" he said, with a grave smile. "I am careless of all the other."

His gravity sobered my wild spirits.

"And your father was--Lord Erskine?" I finally asked.

"He _was_--Lord Erskine," he answered. "He married out of his station--far, far above his station, _I_ think----"

His big beautiful mouth set grimly, but he said nothing more, and I knew that this was as heavily as he would ever tread upon the ashes of the dead. Gradually, bit by bit, I learned the history of the muddy pool of mistake and fault, out of which the tender blossom of his boyhood had been dragged. His father had never seen him, but a certain stiff-necked family pride had caused him to provide material bounty for his child. The combination of a good education and rugged plebeian industry had made him what he was.

"But why didn't you tell me--that day when you first came to see me and we talked about this place--why didn't you tell me that it was _your_ ancestral home?"