A Bachelor's Comedy

But the climax was reached when Andy, long after luncheon time, arrived home and awaited tea in his study, where the maid appeared bearing the tray, while Mrs. Jebb fluttered after with a plate in her hand.

“I thought,” said she, signing to her underling to depart, “that you would be glad of a few sandwiches after your drive. We had nothing but ham in the – ”

She stopped short with her mouth open, for Andy had seized the plate from her and flung the sandwiches upon the fire.

“Bread and butter,” he said thickly.

It was atrocious. It was everything that can possibly be said against such an action. But it did Andy good.

The only drawback was that he had to spend quite an hour, later in the evening, in talking to Mrs. Jebb about Mr. Jebb and the glories of the past.

When they parted, Mrs. Jebb, having forgiven him, eye-cornered him from the doorway and said, very softly —

“I understand. I know what” – she made a pause – “what tooth-ache is, myself.”

She felt sure he would also understand that by “tooth” she meant “heart.” Only a woman can put these things delicately enough.

But Andy stared after her in heavy amazement as the door closed.

“Toothache!” he thought to himself. “Surely I haven’t been telling her I had toothache, have I? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

For a few minutes he sat staring into the fire, then he got up and went to his desk, and his work gained strength, no doubt, as work always does, from love and sorrow decently borne.

CHAPTER XX

Real jollity is as antiseptic as sunshine, and when Andy sat in a leather chair opposite Mr. Thorpe, with Mrs. Thorpe presiding over an immense batch of the first mince-pies which had been brought out for his refreshment, he unconsciously felt the bitterness of his grief being sweetened and purified. It had been a lonely and disappointing time lately, and he had watched the autumn leaves hanging thick on the trees ready to fall at the first gale, with a leaden dulness of heart that was sapping his vitality.

When he trudged back and forth to the little church past the resting-place of Brother Gulielmus he thought often that so he would lie, his little day’s work done, and he had an intense consciousness of the futility of life, though he worked hard and tried to fight against it.

To-night, he had come down to the Thorpes’, because Mrs. Thorpe asked him, with a heavy sense of all places being alike; and now, though they had discussed nothing but the crops and the weather, his bitterness was already changing into that good grief which never yet harmed a man, in a wholesome atmosphere of mince-pies and blazing autumn logs – or rather, in the atmosphere of sane and strong acceptance of life as it is which emanated from the Thorpes present, and the generations of Thorpes who had gone before. They – those older Thorpes – and the Will Ford who was afterwards Gulielmus had doubtless sat through long evenings after harvest-time in exactly the same atmosphere as surrounded Andy at present – and a sturdy sense of a man’s right to work and gain strength by working – and of a man’s right to suffer and grow fine by suffering – took hold of Andy’s soul to the exclusion of that weak dream of universal ease which had been, unconsciously, the outcome of a modern education.

For when Mrs. Thorpe said —

“Have another mince-pie —do,” she really voiced, quite without it, the brave and kind thoughts of those who had been strong enough to take life gladly, and urged Andy to follow their example.

And when Mr. Thorpe said —

“We shall pull our damsons to-morrow. We waited until they’d had a touch of frost on them to take the tartness off. Have you pulled yours yet?” he really spoke of all those things, deep hidden, which make a man ready to do his day’s work here and trust in God for the reward.

And as they sat round the fire, their tongues speaking of the unchanging springtime and harvest, and their souls of the unchanging day’s work and faith in the end, they belonged – those three – to no time or place. They were so absolutely unconsciously above and beyond all that, and any man who has ever thought from the far misty dawn of history until now, might have slipped into the fourth empty chair, and talked with them and understood.

At last Mrs. Thorpe began to speak of Elizabeth’s wedding, and wondered what the bridesmaids would wear, and brought out a silver cream-jug which she and Mr. Thorpe were presenting to the young couple.

“I hear the Squire is going to the Little House,” said Mr. Thorpe, for so the Dower Lodge was called in the village. “But he fails a bit, week by week, though he isn’t an old man. He’ll be glad to see his son settled in and managing everything.”

“That’s why they are hurrying the marriage on so. Only five days from now,” added Mrs. Thorpe. “I have heard people say, ‘Short a-doing – long a-rueing!’ but it can’t be so in this case, I think. They do seem to have everything the heart can want.”

“Nice-looking girl,” said Mr. Thorpe, taking the masculine view. “Very.”

“The Stamfords have gold plate, if they like to use it, and no young man ever made a worse husband for having sown his wild oats first,” said Mrs. Thorpe, following with the feminine outlook. “Shall you assist at the ceremony, Mr. Deane?”

“No,” said Andy. Then he added more quietly, “I don’t expect to. They will have Mr. Banks, of course, and probably other old friends.”

“Well, anyway, it’s poor fun marrying a pretty girl to somebody else,” concluded Mr. Thorpe, knocking out his pipe.

Soon after that Andy went home, and he was met in the hall by Mrs. Jebb, who informed him that Mrs. Simpson – with whom she was now on terms of armed neutrality – had been to ask him about fetching her sideboard home. It appeared that an empty removal van would be passing her house early the following morning, and the men had promised to bring the sideboard from the Vicarage, if agreeable to Mr. Deane.

Andy glanced at his watch and saw it was already past eleven.

“I will go round myself and tell her that it is all right,” he said.

“Such a shame for you to turn out again after your hard day,” said Mrs. Jebb sentimentally. “Mrs. Simpson has made more trouble about that hideous sideboard – ”

But Andy was already half-way down the steps, so Mrs. Jebb resumed her candle and went up to bed, leaning awhile from her casement to watch the Hunter’s moon shining splendid over the massed tree-tops, and to dream vaguely of pale-grey satin and orange blossoms. Then she drew down her blind and perused a novel called An Autumn Rose, which had a heroine whose virgin heart had remained untouched until she was well over forty.

Andy ran along with his hands in his pockets, for the night was sharp with a touch of frost, and as he turned out of his own gate he paused for a moment to glance, like Mrs. Jebb, at the extraordinary brilliance of the moonlight.

The little village lay asleep; all the windows with drawn blinds on one side of the houses were glittering and shining in the moonlight like golden windows in some enchanted dream. The sky stretched above them, calm and wide and clear, with little waves of gold around the moon. There was scarcely a breath of wind stirring, and Andy stood in the shadow of the tree, quite still, so that he gave no sign of life to the white empty road. Any one passing would have fancied himself quite alone. Any one coming across the field-path from Gaythorpe Manor and standing on the step of the fence might have looked over the still landscape and fancied himself the only waking soul in all that quiet world.

Elizabeth, standing on that step of the fence and looking at the windows of Andy’s house, which were pale golden in the moonshine, evidently thought she was quite alone; and her face appeared stronger and more reposeful than any one who had seen her laughing in the daytime would have thought possible. The clear, bright light seemed to have drawn away the girlish softness of her features, and her tender colouring, and to have left her as she would be if the joys and passions of life had all gone from her.

As she stood there, quite still, in the full moonlight, with a white cloak round her and a white scarf over her head, against the luminous darkness of the sky, she was more like some noble abbess come to life again than a young lady who intended to be married in five days.

And it was no chance resemblance, but a strange, momentary impression of a mental state upon the outward appearance – for Elizabeth would have become an abbess if, with her position and her character and her large private means, she had lived a few centuries earlier. She did so fundamentally belong to that type of woman who says to herself, “If I can’t be happy, I will be good,” which is quite illogical, of course, because that type of woman is always good to start with.

And as she paused, motionless, with her hand at her breast holding the close-drawn scarf, it was clear that the mahogany sideboard, in the guise of a harbinger of fate, had been at it again.

Andy ran forward out of the shadow and said breathlessly, in a voice which he scarcely knew to be his own —

“You were looking at my windows!”

Elizabeth gave a great start, and her face was very white in the moonlight.

“Yes,” she said, half whispering.

“What did you come for?” said Andy, pressing nearer to her.

They stood under a sycamore tree in the lane, but they could not see each other because a cloud sailed across the moon: it was very dark and still. Then the cloud passed – a little wind stirred – and immediately a thousand dusky stars of shadow quivered on the white radiance of the moonlit road.

“Why did you come?” repeated Andy a second time.

There was enough light now for them to see into each other’s eyes, and what they saw there changed, for a moment, that white road with the stars of shadow quivering on it, to the floor of heaven. They forgot, for that one moment, that there was anything in earth or heaven but the love they saw in each other’s eyes.

“Why did you come, dear?” whispered Andy with his arms about her.

“To see your home. To say good-bye,” said Elizabeth. “Oh, Andy, I thought you didn’t care for me. I thought you had changed your mind at the last minute. Why did you keep away until it was too late?”

“I promised Stamford,” said Andy. “We both wanted you, and he had to wait until his year was out. I tried to play fair. I didn’t want to make him lose heart when he had done his best to keep straight.”