A Bachelor's Comedy

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.”

“How good of you. Dear Andy, how good of you,” said Elizabeth, smoothing the shoulder, of his rough coat with that comforting touch which women keep for their lovers and their children.

“No; it was not good,” said poor Andy, choking a little, “because I never expected to lose you. I thought you loved me.”

Then Elizabeth threw her arms round his neck and sobbed out —

“I do love you. Oh, I do love you!”

So they stood, clasped together, until Andy loosed his arms from about her for a moment; but he took her into them again with a low cry that came from the very depths of his being —

“I can’t let you go!”

Still, in a little while, it became clear to these two foolish – or wise – young people that they must let each other go. Perhaps it was because they stood on the floor of heaven and so saw things beyond the stars, that even their own earthly happiness began to look a small thing beside the destruction of Dick Stamford’s soul.

“What am I to do?” said Elizabeth. “Poor Mrs. Stamford – ”

She broke off, and the memory of that Magnificat in the Attertons’ morning-room swept with desolating conviction across their hearts.

“Why did you accept Stamford when you loved me?” said Andy. “Even if you supposed I didn’t care, you need not have done that.”

“I thought,” said Elizabeth – and here it all came out – “I thought if I could not be happy myself I could make a great many other people happy. I could do some good with my life. I should never have taken Dick Stamford if I had not felt I could do some good with my life in that way. And I knew I could never be happy without you.”

Oh, it was all foolishness, of course; but shadowy generations of good women stood behind Elizabeth as she said that, and the ladder of useless self-sacrifice on which they stood reached very high up: even as far, perhaps, as the dreams of those who know that their first duty is to themselves.

Anyway, there was something rather wonderful about the look of Andy and Elizabeth when they came forth from the shadow of the tree and walked together across the field. Their young faces were a little stern, and the radiance about them seemed in some strange way to be more a white fire of the spirit triumphing over the flesh than any ordinary moonlight.

They walked quietly, and scarcely spoke, but the things which usually seem unreal were near realities, and those things which usually seem real did not matter. Even though they saw the City of Wedded Love, the Enchanted Muddle, in ruins before them, a light streamed from somewhere farther on that made the ruins glorious – a huge altar to the God of Love.

At last they came suddenly, from behind a clump of trees, upon the garden of Gaythorpe Manor. And things began to be real – or unreal – again, according as you may take it.

“How did you get away?” said Andy in a low voice.

“I went to my room with a headache, but when I looked out and saw the moonlight I thought a turn alone would do me good. They’d given me the great guest-chamber where Anne Boleyn once slept; and it has little stone steps leading from a terrace into the garden. So it was easy enough.” Her lip quivered. “I don’t know how women would get on without headaches, Andy.”

Andy smiled tenderly, for all his unhappiness, at the queer mixture which is a woman: and when a man has learned to do that, he understands a great deal.

“Poor little girl,” he said.

But that somehow touched a chord of human and dear things that nearly broke their hearts, and without knowing how, they found themselves clinging together, their faces wet with tears.

“Good-bye,” said Andy, trying to go.

“Good-bye,” said Elizabeth, clinging to him.

Then it was Elizabeth who tried to go, and Andy who held her fast.

They came so, nearer and nearer to the little stone staircase, and when Elizabeth put her foot on the first step, Andy felt as if his life were going from him. Silently she went and silently he watched her go, with beads of sweat standing on his forehead that the night wind changed to drops of ice.

At the top she turned and said —

“Good-bye.”

He tried to answer, but no sound would come from his dry throat – then the door closed, and he went back across the moonlit field.

CHAPTER XXI

It was the day before Elizabeth’s wedding. For three days a gale of wind had been tearing across the country, shrieking through empty houses, rattling loose doors, beating with blasts of sharp raindrops like stones upon unprotected windows – seeming, in a way, to rejoice in its fierce work of changing the enchanted lane past Andy’s house, which had been thick with autumn foliage only three days ago, into something equally beautiful but quite different.

For now it was all over, and the little world rested, tired and lovely, after all the buffeting; there was an exquisite delicacy in the cool sunshine on the fallen leaves, and in the tracery of fine branches on a pale-blue sky, which Andy could not help noticing though Elizabeth was going to be married to-morrow. And it comforted him a little, even in that great sorrow, because there is no grief in life to which such dear sights will not bring a little comfort, when once you learn to really love them.

Andy had been working hard in the wrecked garden for an hour before breakfast, and as he turned to go in he saw the two Simpson children, Sally leading, Jimmy dragging reluctantly, come round the turn towards his gate. So he invited them to walk in and partake of oranges while he ate his bacon; and after awhile, having disposed of her orange, Sally came across to his side with her anxious look on her small face, and said hesitatingly —

“Mr. Deane, I came for something.”

“All right. Go ahead,” said Andy, drinking his tea thirstily and looking as if he had not slept.

“Something partickler,” said Sally. She seemed to find expression a difficulty, but at last continued: “Mother says you earn your living by making people be good. I asked her what you did for a living, and she told me that.”

Andy stared at his small visitor, then glanced out of the window towards the place, beyond the churchyard hedge, where Brother Gulielmus slept in faith: then he sighed and returned to Sally.

“I try,” he said.

“Well, then,” said Sally, dragging Jimmy forward suddenly from his orange, “I want you to begin on him. He’s been so bad the last three days. He doesn’t mean to be, and I didn’t much mind him breaking my dolly, but now he’s pulled the blue china teapot off the table in the best room and smashed that, and we daren’t tell mammy, so we came out. I was minding him,” wept Sally, descending to tears at last, “but how can you mind anybody that won’t be minded?”

Jimmy turned very red and eyed his sister’s tears askance, but he planted his legs wide apart and said sturdily —

“I want to be bad.”

“You don’t love Sally, then?” said Andy.

Jimmy glared at him for a moment, then flew, all arms and legs, across the room and began to pommel such portions of his Vicar’s person as he could reach.

“I do love Sally. I do love Sally. Naughty Parson Andy!” he bellowed.

“Oh, Jimmy,” cried Sally, shocked out of her tears, and clasping her little thin hands distractedly. “You mustn’t call him that. Mammy said he would never let us come here any more if we did – never.”

That did reach Jimmy’s heart.

“No more chocs. No more noranges!” he wept. “I will be a good boy, I will.”

“He can’t help being a bad boy,” wept Sally in concert. “But I brought him for you to make him want to be good.”

“I like you to call me Parson Andy,” said that gentleman, pulling up a weeping parishioner upon each knee, and proceeding to administer choice bits of bread and butter laden with marmalade to each in turn, with the tale of “The White Cat” as a mental restorative.

It was upon this group that Mrs. Stamford was ushered in by the excited little maid-servant.

“Sorry to interrupt you at breakfast, but – ” began Mrs. Stamford. Then she broke off. “What’s this?”

“A lady and gentleman who called to consult me in a spiritual difficulty,” said Andy, rising. “I’ll see them to the door and then I am at your service.”

Mrs. Stamford sat down, her old tweed skirt very wet about the hem with crossing the grass field, and her weather-beaten hat well over her eyes, but her appearance indefinably more emotional than usual.

“I’ve come,” she said without further circumlocution, “to tell you we shall be obliged to have the wedding at Gaythorpe Church.”

“What wedding?” said Andy, though he knew.

“Dick’s, of course,” said Mrs. Stamford, and she might just as well have said, “What a fool you are!”

“Why?” asked Andy, and he had a difficulty even in saying that.

“Because Millsby Church has been so injured by the gale that it cannot possibly be put right in time. Part of the steeple blown down. Roof broken in. I always told Mr. Banks that it would happen.”

“Of course,” said Andy, after a pause which he knew to be growing long and yet was almost powerless to end, “I shall be glad to help you in any way I can.”

“Then if you’ll come with me – I have Sims the head gardener waiting outside – we will go to the church at once and see about the decorations. I have arranged with Mrs. Atterton that we will help with them, as we are so near, though their gardener will decorate the chancel.”

Andy took the keys from their familiar place on the nail in the hall, and as he went up the path past Brother Gulielmus, he had, for a strange second, a feeling as if some voice outside had said, “Be a man. Keep a brave heart, my brother.”

Of course it could only be the association of ideas grown vivid through emotion, but it made Andy square his shoulders and give his best attention to the necessary arrangements for the ceremony.

“Really,” said Mrs. Stamford, when they had finished, “your advice has been quite invaluable. Poor Mr. Banks – ”

“He has not been curate in a fashionable London parish,” said Andy grimly. “We’re used to arranging theatrical performances there.”

And that was the only sign he gave of the bitterness which underlay his ready interest in the decorations.

Mrs. Stamford glanced at her watch and caught up her gloves.

“No idea it was so late,” she said. “Dick is coming by the eleven train. We expected him yesterday, but he was delayed – diamonds not finished re-setting, and he wanted to bring them with him. I do hope he won’t miss the train; it starts so early from London.”

“Oh, he’ll turn up all right,” said Andy calmly – while all his being cried out, “Miss his train – when he is going to marry Elizabeth to-morrow!”

They were almost at the church door now, and Mrs. Stamford turned to give a last injunction about the music, when a queer, hoarse voice which neither of them recognised struck upon their ears, and they turned sharply round to see Mr. Stamford standing in the porch on the arm of his man-servant.

“Ellen,” he said, and then he sank upon the stone seat of the porch, motioning the man to go away.

She sat down beside him, schooling herself to quietness, but white to the lips.

“Yes, James. What is it?”

He opened his hand and held out to her a crumpled sheet of paper which lay upon it.

“Our son,” he said.

Mrs. Stamford took the telegram, and what she saw, though it was bad enough, was so much less terrible than she had feared that she broke out into a passion of weeping that could not be stayed, and she cried through it all —

“He’s alive! He’s alive!”

So long as he lived, whatever he did, there would always be something left in the world for his mother, and she gave the telegram to Andy with a brief “This concerns you, too,” which was bitter enough but not hopeless.

“Sorry to cause trouble. Cannot hope to make you understand. Married to Phyllis Webster by registrar this morning. Will Mother tell Elizabeth at once.”

Then, in a burst of feeling at the end —

“Awfully happy but for complications, hope you and Mother will forgive.”

“Complications,” said Andy stupidly, while the pews raced swiftly round him and seemed to settle, queerly enough, with a thump inside his head, into their accustomed places. “Of course – complications.”

“What is the use of standing and muttering that?” demanded Mrs. Stamford, wiping her eyes. “It’s all terrible – terrible – but we must make the best of it. She is your connection, and respectable, though she has such eyes and stockings, and it might very well have been the back row of the ballet.”

It is only in such moments as these that the raw truth comes out, and it is infectious.

“She is good enough for your son, and she will see that he behaves himself – I know that,” Andy retorted. “She has a will of iron under a fluffy exterior, and that’s exactly the sort to manage him.”

Then Mr. Stamford said agitatedly —

“You must go to Elizabeth. Poor girl! Poor girl! To think that my son – ” he broke off, grey about the mouth, and leaned back against the stone wall of the porch.

Mrs. Stamford pulled her weather-beaten hat farther over her forehead, and started, without another word, down the path; but before she was out of hearing her husband called hoarsely, “Ellen! Ellen!”

She ran back and bent over him as he leaned back, spent, against the stone, and in his bodily weakness and bitter disappointment he whispered to her, “Ellen – I can’t be left – you can’t leave me!”

She saw that it would be quite unsafe either to agitate him still further or to make him move from that seat, and yet – what was she to do? That poor girl – those poor Attertons – they must be told at once – every moment was of value.

Mr. Stamford himself, with closed eyes and fluttering breath, solved the question.

“Let Deane go,” he said feebly. “The parson – it’s the best thing. He can ask to see Atterton and explain – I’m ill – take the telegram.”

“But – ” began Mrs. Stamford, when she saw that her husband could bear no more, and she silently held out the telegram to Andy.

“I can’t,” said Andy.

“You must. It’s your duty,” interrupted Mrs. Stamford in an urgent whisper.

Andy drew a long breath. How could he go on such an errand – he who was in such a turmoil of love and hope and amazement?

“I tell you,” he said desperately, “I wanted to marry her myself.”

“What does that matter? Go!” said Mrs. Stamford.

So he glanced once more at the spent man upon the stone seat of the porch and went.

At first he saw nothing about him, but soon the shock of unexpected joy, which stuns for a while like unexpected sorrow, gave place to realisation. Then every dewdrop, on every little blade of grass he passed, seemed like a joybell ringing; and the fine branches of the leafless trees wrote love letters upon the tender sky, and a huntsman’s horn far off was like love’s herald, ushering in the bride.

But when he stood at the Attertons’ door asking if Mr. Atterton were at home, things became more ordinary; and when the man replied that his master had gone to Bardswell, but the mistress was at home, Andy replied in a state of embarrassed discomfiture that he wished to see Mrs. Atterton alone.

In a moment or two the man returned and ushered Andy into the morning-room where Elizabeth and her mother sat together. After one glance at his face, Elizabeth’s own grew very pale, and she stood with her hands crushed together, not offering to greet him.

“If I might have a moment with you alone, Mrs. Atterton?” said Andy, very grave and nervous.

“My husband!” exclaimed Mrs. Atterton. “Oh – that young horse – I have begged him not – ”

“No, no. It’s not Mr. Atterton – nothing to do with him,” interrupted Andy hastily. “Nobody is hurt. I have only come with a message from Mr. Stamford.”

“Then why did you frighten me like that?” demanded Mrs. Atterton, not unnaturally. “Knowing as you do that my back will not stand shocks of any kind.”

Poor Andy’s sense of doing it as badly as such a thing could be done, was intensified by this to a pitch where he found the greatest difficulty in continuing; and Elizabeth’s wide eyes, dark with startled emotion, never left his face.

“I was to ask to see you alone, Mrs. Atterton,” he said, lamely enough.

“No,” said Elizabeth, speaking for the first time. “I must hear what there is to tell.”

Andy just glanced her way and turned again to her mother – he dared not trust himself to look at her.

“Mrs. Atterton,” he said, “I have been sent by Mr. Stamford, who is so upset that Mrs. Stamford cannot leave him, to tell you that – that – ”

It was of no use – the words refused to come.

“Well?” breathed Elizabeth.

“For goodness sake get on,” cried Mrs. Atterton.

“Stamford was married to Phyllis Webster at a registrar’s in London this morning.”

Andy stood, straight and white, in the middle of the hearthrug; Elizabeth buried her face in her hands with her elbows on the table, very still; Mrs. Atterton sobbed out, “My poor girl! My poor little girl!” and ran to throw her arms round her daughter. But Andy was there first.

“You care?” he said breathlessly. “You’re sorry?”

And the whole world seemed to wait upon her answer as she lifted her face from her hands.

“I’m so happy – I feel as if I should die,” she said.

Then they forgot Mrs. Atterton and everything else but themselves in the lovely view that opened out before them; for they were now almost at the end of that enchanted lane which leads to the City of Married Love – the Enchanted Muddle. And the tall spires towered so close and glorious, the mean streets lay in such a tender haze, the golden gates were so nearly opening, that their happy eyes were blinded to all else in the world beside.

But Mrs. Atterton had not been wandering in the enchanted lane, and she had lived in that city for such a long time that she had forgotten how it looked from the outside, so naturally she felt astonished.

“Elizabeth!” was all she could gasp.

Then Andy and Elizabeth did look back along the shining lane, and see an unimportant figure in the distance which, they vaguely felt, they might find of some importance again, sometime.

“We said good-bye for ever – that night I dined at the Stamfords – it was too late,” explained Elizabeth incoherently.

“Then why?” began Mrs. Atterton, but she could get no further, she was so bewildered.

“I thought I had lost her for ever – and now she’s mine,” said Andy, as much to an astonished universe as to his future mother-in-law.

However, they did manage in the end to make it clear, so far as any one could, how the whole thing had happened; and then Mrs. Atterton was so simply glad with them that even two young lovers in the first engrossment of their new joy could not fail to be touched by her attitude.

“Oh, mother – I don’t believe you care about anything in the world so long as we three children are happy,” said Elizabeth, laughing and crying and clinging to her. And in that moment she realised for the first time something of what it means to be a mother.

“You must take care of her,” said Mrs. Atterton, over her girl’s bent head.

“I will,” was all Andy said, looking straight at her; but some of the dearest and most sacred things in life passed in that unspoken conversation between Andy and Elizabeth’s mother, though neither of them knew it.

At last Mr. Atterton’s voice was heard in the hall, and he, in his turn, went through the same stages of surprise and anger and relief as his wife; and after that Norah and Bill did likewise, until, finally, some one had leisure to feel dreadfully sorry for the Stamfords. But it was Norah who went to the heart of that matter with a clear-sighted —

“So long as Dick’s all right, they’ll be all right. Don’t you worry yourself about that, mother.”

“But they wanted Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Atterton, wiping away a tear.

“Well,” remarked Mr. Atterton, “all I can say under the circumstances is, thank God they haven’t got her.” Then the memory of Dick’s perfidy roused his wrath again, and he muttered fiercely: “That hound – that hound – if he ever comes near me… What did he get engaged to my girl for?”

Norah looked across at him with her odd little smile: “Look here, father, I believe Dick would have given anything to run away that night mother sent him to Elizabeth in the morning-room. I watched him going through the hall when he thought he was alone – I couldn’t make it out, then – but if ever a man was saying to himself, ‘I’m in a dickens of a fix,’ Dick Stamford did at that moment. Only after asking leave a year ago, before he’d even met the lovely Phyllis – ” Norah broke off, leaving the rest to their imaginations, for she was nothing if not suggestive.