An Opera and Lady Grasmere/Book 2/Chapter 4

ARVEY and Lady Grasmere were left standing alone on the station platform, and Lady Horace was beaming down on them from a window of the moving train.

The Countess fluttered a handkerchief.

"I've been very good, have I not?" she asked. "We 've both been very good; and yet Di Waring was personal, even made me blush."

"Lady Horace is a villain," returned Harvey with severity.

The train disappeared round a curve in the line, and Merceron and the Countess turned. The other guests had left in the morning, and Harvey was to take the last train, the 9.46. Mrs. Hodgson would arrive on the following day, for a lengthy visit, here and in London.

"Nearly six hours to mine," said Harvey, as they quitted the station; "I shan't stay in town; I shall go on to my people's from here—it will kill the days."

"And tell them?" She smiled up at him as she spoke. Her smile had grown marvellously tender since that night. No wonder that Lady Horace had noticed the change.

"About what?" he teased.

"About—the designing widow-lady?"

Almost her first direct reference was this to things anterior, to her marriage; and Harvey had of course never broached the subject. He knew that she had been but eighteen on her wedding-day and that she was widow at twenty. Lady Horace had supplied the rest, however:

"The Earl was a father to her," she had once told him, "a dear old gentleman—we were all so sorry. Her mother made the match—an old flame of hers, I fancy,—and Gertrude went to church from the school-room."

"About the designing widow-lady and the defenceless orphan?" Harvey had just replied.

The village looked on at them as they passed, forming a third, dropping curtseys and touching its hat. In the cottage where the light had burned two nights ago, the blinds were drawn. They both noticed this token, but neither remarked upon it. That night was theirs. They skirted the pond, and he met her eyes, with his hand upon the little swing-gate. The churchyard lay before them, white and green in the sunlight—a different place. The peaceful building in the centre showed grey and venerable. The rectory-field followed, with its browsing sheep and the vicar's mare nibbling contentedly at the low grass; then the white roadway with its hedges, tender with budding hawthorn—a different place.

Hancock had already packed his master's things. The few hours that remained would be undivided.

They sipped their tea contentedly after they came in. How good it was to be alone! how good even to be silent thus; with the knowledge that she was in the same room, that an outstretched hand would meet hers, that he was free to look and look and look, and all the while she would be beside him.

"You have never loved anyone else?" she asked, crossing their reverie.

"There was a girl when I was a boy, and we pretended."

"And since then?"

"Only you—I was waiting for you." He answered her in all sincerity; she represented his "ideal woman," the being he had half formulated, half dreamed on these many years.

"And I—I was waiting for you;" she repeated his words slowly, lingering over each one. Then, quickening, "Do you remember," she asked, "those were almost the first words you spoke to me at the Stoke ball? I believe that's why I liked you so ... because I ... I was waiting as well!" She pressed his hand as she spoke. Her voice was uncertain, her eyes downcast. In that moment she had confessed a great deal.

"But I thought you mistook me for Mills? "

"Only half—but I was surprised when you weren't," she answered, deliciously feminine in this juxtaposition.

They walked till dinner-time in the cross-avenue that intersected the one that ran from the lawn to the lodge-gates.

Her hand was on his arm—after all, in a week or two their secret would be everybody's.

Hancock, from the stables, where he was nominally watching the operations of his ally of the week before, had just ventured the opinion that he and his master would not wait so long before their next visit. "It's ten to one against Mills, I fancy," he sagely concluded.

"Five hundred!—not that Captain Mills ain't a gentleman as anybody would be proud of; always tips gold, no harf-crowns with him like that there Mar-quis."

"Well, it's time he did settle down,—not that he's been gay—always lived most quiet and respectable till lately," said Hancock, who always spoke of his master as "he."

"Don't give much trouble, does he?" asked the other, already pondering over altered conditions-of service. "Don't waste all your time wi' things o' no value, does he?"

"Gentle as a lamb, an' only swears when there's no dictionary word fitting."

"Well, I rayther like a good 'damn' myself."

"But you 're a Methodist," suggested Hancock, polite yet clinching.

"I'm not, either—'twas my last place," explained the groom, "and that was Plymouth Brother."

"I 've never heard of them," said Hancock, somewhat impressed by the unfathomed, yet disguising this under the supercilious. "Sounds like a breed of poultry," said he; then, hedging, "but places is difficult," he concluded.

Meanwhile, the lovers in the cross-avenue were discussing subject-matter of a less controversial character.

"I am so glad it should have come like this," the Countess was saying, "and not suddenly and all of a rush. I was afraid at first," she confessed,—"it was magnificent, but it was not love."

"But there was the possibility of losing you!" he answered. "You remember that first afternoon when I wandered about in the rain till I thought of Carter-Page? I had almost lost you then—and it was terrible! I had given up all for you, everything that I had ever done or dreamt of doing."

"You have never told me of that?" she gently urged.

Harvey confessed:

"I had written an opera. I had worked on it for three years, and when I met you it was just finished."

"And the opera?"

"I" he hesitated; "I destroyed it—destroyed everything that you had not shared."

"We will write another," she said.

"Live one, rather; this is the second act!"

His old conception of music-drama, the climax in the central act, still clung to him. He smiled over the involuntary conceit.

"You look like Lohengrin," she said, mirroring his happiness.

"As though I'd been what Mark Twain calls 'grailing'?" he returned, the smile deepening. "By-the-by, we must go and see Sopwith; his opera's due next month. We'll hear it and cheer?" And then he told her more about Oxford and the old life at the rooms in Down Street.

"You have never regretted it?" she asked when they had come to the end.

"No, darling," he answered, cloudless.

"And yet," said she, "I have often thought that you were more fit for something serious than this gadding."

"So does the Marquis; he wants me to go into Parliament!"

Whereat they both laughed.

Harvey did not dress for dinner, but the Countess wore the gown of two nights ago. He recognised it as she entered the drawing-room, and sprang to her side.

"That was good of you, darling," he said, proudly regarding the queenly figure. His near departure smote him. "I want something," he exclaimed, "something that I can always have! "

She took a sheaf of photographs out of a cabinet. He had seen others, but never anything so recent. By a strange coincidence, she had been taken in that very gown.

"Some premonition?" she hazarded, as he looked from her to the pictures, "and I wanted them to be for you."

The man came in and announced dinner.

"These are mine," said Harvey, deliberately choosing each position. He dropped them for the original.

She made him smoke in the drawing-room after their meal. Six quarters of an hour remained to them.

The blinds were drawn, and they sat side by side. Suddenly she arose and opened the piano.

"Play!" she said.

He hesitated.

"For me?"

She returned to the sofa as he sat down.

"For you," he said, fingering the keys.

Instinctively he turned to an episode in Isabella, a song of Lorenzo's that was the culmination of his first act; an impassioned declaration that he had failed in a score of times, till at last, late one afternoon, a lovely face that had passed him in the street had given him the true impulse. The words had come for the mere writing—one of the few things of all his libretto that had lingered:

ran the words.

From Harvey's fingers now fell the original melody, a leaping-board from which he ascended improvising, swayed by a deeper and a richer flood of emotion than the anæmic stream of yester-year. He had left Isabella far below him, had risen to the larger passion of the man who had known those hours in the still churchyard—the stir of the blood as loved heart yearned to loved heart, as the love-warm lips met and sundered.

The Countess listened, spellbound and deathly silent, yet elate and following.

The year's suppressed force, the melody that he had baffled these many months, had resurged all-powerful, sweeping the keys before it. His fingers seemed to run on uncontrolled, as something apart from himself. Effortless and with the ease of a master, he transmuted his exultation into music. This undreamt power, this unsuspected accession that made the instrument sing under his hands like a live thing, outstripping all former experience and manifestation, half-delighted, half-frightened him. It was as though he had suddenly discovered the keys of Life and Death, as a possession, piece and part of himself. He ceased playing and turned in his seat.

The Countess was once more beside him.

"You love me, as I love you—as I love you!" was all she said. Criticism of the rarest.

At last it was half-past nine, and Harvey would have to go and join Hancock, who was already down at the station with the baggage.

They parted indoors and again at the lodge gates, where he left her, turning his head every few steps to catch a farewell glimpse of the dim shape that watched him from the roadway. Again his path lay across the meadow and the churchyard.

"A woman!" he was muttering. "A woman—bless her!"

Harvey was alone in the carriage that took him up to Charing Cross. From all sides Lady Grasmere's portrait smiled upon him. He had distributed the photographs about the seats. They were marvellous good company.