Chapter II: Part 2

"No," I answered. I was thinking that God had made the morning for lovers to walk in--the mist had not lifted, the sun shimmered golden through it. It seemed to encase us in soft amber radiance. I had that only-two-people-in-the-whole-wide-world-to-day feeling, which must be so absolutely wonderful when you want to be quite, quite alone with a man and he wants to be quite, quite alone with you. I was watching a cobweb sewn with dewdrops; there was a sweet and foolish peace in my heart. I could only remember that Cheneston was going to stay.

"What are you going to do about it, Pam?"

"Oh--carry on," I said. I tried to speak lightly.

"You feel like that about it?"

"Well--we can't break the engagement at once. It would be perfectly awful for both of us--especially me. People would say I was only waiting for you to go to France to--to rot."

"You funny little soul! Pam--I--I blame myself for all this. You seem only a kid to me--until you sing."

"And then?" The golden mist seemed to dance towards me.

"And then I know you are a woman--with all a woman's rotten wiles, the little feline habit of plucking at a chap's heart-strings in order to amuse yourself. There's only one good woman in the world--my mother."

"I--I had no idea you had a mother!"

"Why should you have?" he demanded curtly. "She is a great invalid, she lives at Cromer Court near Totnes, in Devon."

"Does she know about--us?"

"She knows nothing," he said briefly. "There is nothing for her to know. My God! look!"

I looked. We had walked down to the sea, near Brennon House bathing-tents. The Gilpins had built a little diving platform, and on it, her hands above her head, stood Grace Gilpin.

Half mermaid, half angel, she looked. She wore a black bathing-dress, and a beach gown of brilliant violet lay behind her, a little pool of exquisite colour.

No pen can do justice to her, only the brush of a Sargeant or one of those people who have things on the Academy walls that make everybody else's work look dud. I think if I had been an artist I would have burst into a passion of tears--something rose in my throat because she was so lovely; perched there, gold and black, between the misty blue sea and the misty blue sky, all the colour in the morning seemed to be enmeshed in her hair and her beach gown, and the next minute she had dived into the water.

I looked at Cheneston--and I looked away.

If only I might gleam and shine, if only I might palpitate with youth and beauty and stand twixt sky and earth a thing of loveliness! But I knew that no one would stand and stare if I stood where Grace Gilpin had stood a moment before; they would only say: "There's a girl bathing--but she'll find it pretty fresh."

Cheneston was speaking.

"Life isn't fair. One does a thing in pique or temper, or because one's pride is hurt; one thinks the effects will only last a minute, and they last for months and years--they are far-reaching, they involve other people, till sometimes it seems one cannot light a match or perform the most trivial office without involving other destinies and lives. Kid--I never guessed, that night, that all this would happen."

"In a way we're sort of pawns," I said. "It isn't any good fussing, is it? You'll be sent out with this battery for sure, and then things will settle themselves--won't they? I ought to go home to mother and tell her that father went off quite cheerily. She knows, because Mrs. Gilpin went back to her."

I went home. It seems all singularly lacking in tenseness and emotion, it seems common-place--it seems as if I had skipped the great moment and hurried on with the "afterwards"; but there was no great moment, it was all afterwards-ish.

Things went on the same as usual, Cheneston, Grace Gilpin, and I went about together; she had a new man in place of Mr. Markham, a man called Dickie Wontner. The only change I find is in myself.

Oh! I get so angry when people talk of the "peace of love"--there is no peace in it. Maybe there is when you are married, I don't know and probably I never shall; but love is revolutionary, it robs you of your power of concentration--it may only be that you dust the same thing twice, or you put things down and can't remember where you put them, or you forget to take an interest in your friends and lose them without knowing it; but the fact remains that you are only living with half of yourself, the other and more vital half is continually padding round after the beloved like a little invisible dog.

I love Cheneston. I write it honestly. It is almost the only thing in my life I am proud of. Sometimes I feel that my love is compounded of blue sky and sunshine, and everything that is big and honest and glittering in nature.

He does not care one little scrap for me.

He loves Grace Gilpin.

I want them to be happy together, but I do not wish to sit in the front pew at their wedding, or watch them fashion life together afterwards--I want to run right away then, to the utter-most corner of the earth.

I don't believe the world is round; I believe that somewhere there are little corners for lovers who are not loved, and there neither moonshine, nor sunshine, nor star shine shall worry them, neither the scent of flowers nor the dear, shrill, heart-plucking songs of birds; there shall be no memory of the quivering, glowing _beauty_ and _wonder_ of life, which is not for them, but there shall be work--useful, honest work--in which to find forgetfulness and fresh courage.

I am hunting for a corner to run away to when my time comes.

*VI*

No one has heard from Walter Markham.

He has no relations here, it is true--but it's funny he hasn't written.

He is in Mesopotamia; perhaps the mails have been sunk or he has dysentery or something.

Grace is always asking Cheneston if he has heard, and whenever Cheneston answers he avoids looking at me.

Sometimes I honestly think Cheneston thinks I might have cared for Mr. Markham, perhaps did care for him, and my supposed engagement to himself spoilt and prevented things ever coming to a head.

I know Cheneston is horribly unhappy.

I know Grace is equally wretched.

Neither of them knows how miserable I am, or that I suspect they are.

Sometimes life seems so strange to me, peopled by a lot of actors and actresses all living little lies.

I know Cheneston will never tell Grace that his engagement to me is only a farce. He has a fierce sense of honour, it makes him regard all sorts of things that other men do every day as utterly and absolutely impossible.

Sometimes I have thought of going to Grace and telling her the whole story of the mistake from beginning to end; but it might make things even more impossible for Grace, because it isn't the sort of story a woman should tell a woman.

I wish I could learn to care for one of the boys and they for me, it would simplify matters; but not one of them is a bit keen. Their eyes shine when I sing--but they shine because of the memories I bring of other girls.

I am just "a nice little thing" and "a perfect sport"--and it is as safe as being the mother of sons too old for the Army.

Mother is getting a trifle impatient. She twitters about weddings sometimes, and comes and sits on my bed and shows me pictures of bridal gowns from sixpenny illustrated weeklies. Poor mother! it's going to be a bitter blow. Sometimes I feel a little criminal about it. I read a book the other day in which the heroine finds herself in "a ridiculous position, unbelievable and unsurpassed in fiction"--I laughed until I cried. She had only got to use a pennyworth of honesty and a pinch of common sense to get out of her position; I am wedged tight in mine.

Fantastic problems often demand fantastic solutions.

Meanwhile, winter is coming on, frost is crisping the leaves, this morning the dahlias in our little garden were black and sodden.

_Later the same day_.

I have found the solution--and it is even more fantastic than I had dreamed of.

I know that Mrs. Gilpin, Grace, young Wontner, Cheneston, and one or two other men who were at Gilpin's to-night, think I am in love with Walter Markham in Mesopotamia and he with me--in spite of the fact that I was engaged to Cheneston when he went out.

I saw the Way Out for Cheneston quite suddenly, and grabbed it before it was too late.

I am sure that to-morrow Cheneston will come to me and ask me outright if I love Markham, and then he will release me---- Oh, I don't know what will happen! There will be a horrible row with mother, and I am sure Grace will marry Cheneston before he goes out.

They were all talking about Markham, and saying how weird it was that no one had heard a single word since he left England.

"He's not the sort of man to drop his friends, either," Mrs. Gilpin said; then she turned to me, laughing. "Come now, Pam, you were in his confidence--haven't you heard?"

"Yes," I lied suddenly, "I've heard."

Everyone exclaimed.

Grace Gilpin was wearing pearl grey crepe de Chine and old Mechlin lace; she leant forward in her low chair and stared at me; her face was very pale, her wonderful eyes wide.

"You didn't tell us, Pam!" she said, her voice thrilled, that queer silver voice that always seemed to laugh. "Why ever didn't you tell us?"

Cheneston was staring at Grace. He was white too. I had a queer idea that a minute before Grace had seemed very far away from him and I had brought her near.

One or two of the men were looking at Cheneston furtively, to see how he took it.

"Yes, why didn't you tell us, Pam?" Cheneston said.

Suddenly I realised that they were all thinking what I meant them to think--that Walter and I were unconfessed lovers.

I had achieved my effect.

"I--I didn't wish to," I said, and burst into tears.

And now I am wondering what is going to happen, what everyone will say and do, particularly Cheneston and mother.

I wish I could find a corner of the earth now to crouch in, and I want it to be dark and utterly silent, so that I may think and find out where I stand.

*VII*

Sometimes I wonder what humans are fitted with imaginations for; they are a great nuisance and utterly unreliable. I was fitted with a high-power imagination--it overbalances me sometimes, swings me down to misery and nearer to the face of ecstasy than I was ever meant to go. I spent a sleepless night wondering what would happen after my confession that I had heard from the renegade Captain Markham, and my inexplicable tears; by the time I rose I had all the results planned out, beginning with the interview with Cheneston, in which I implied my love for Walter Markham, and ending in a sort of grand finale scene with mother, in which elegance and reproaches and jasmine scent mingled, and my clothes, all I had cost, and my obvious lack of chic and charm were hurled at my head.

None of these things happened.

Grace Gilpin and her mother drove by in the high dog-cart as I was taking Pomp and Circumstance for their morning run; they stopped and chatted, but neither of them referred to Walter Markham, or Cheneston, or the little scene I had enacted in their drawing-room the previous night.

I am one of the people who never "click" in their effects.

I had meant to be so frightfully subtle over Walter Markham when the idea first flashed into my mind. I meant to leave my little audience with the vague impression that there might be something in it, that I might have found in Walter Markham's society I had made a mistake in getting engaged so quickly to Cheneston Cromer--I just wanted to make it easy for Cheneston to break off the engagement.

I was so sure he would come to me and ask me if his first suspicions were correct and Walter and I cared for each other; then I would be delicate and subtle again, and hint at devotion, nothing settled, nothing sure.

I had wanted the delicacy of a butterfly, and I had trodden as earnestly and thoroughly as an elephant--a whole herd of them.

I had tried to be subtle and I had achieved blatancy.

I'm more schoolgirl than woman of the world; sometimes I get so mad with myself I wish I could be another person, and meet myself out, and be fearfully subtle and humiliating.

All the morning I was strung up to concert pitch waiting for things to happen, and nothing happened. I had a feeling that the end of my little interlude with Cheneston was nearly over. I tried so hard to be philosophic about it.

We were going for the last picnic of the season with the Gilpins and Morrisons. We were going to motor out to the White Woman's Cave and have lunch there. Cheneston was coming too; the new battery was not in camp yet, and he was at a loose end. Several of the officers had been invited, and I had looked forward to it.

"You'll wear your lemon linen coat and skirt and your big black sailor, won't you, Pam?" mother said, wandering into my room as I was changing. "Dear, dear! how ragged the garden looks! Winter will soon be here, and then we shall have to see about coats and skirts and things for you. Pam, there isn't any hitch, is there?"

I slipped on my exquisitely cut linen jacket.

"Hitch?" I repeated.

"You've not been doing anything stupid--because, remember, your father and I have had considerable expense in----"

"What have you heard?" I said hardily.

"That you had a certain friendliness for Walter Markham, and that, although no one else has had the honour of being reminded of his existence, you have been hearing from him."

"Well!" I said, my voice sounded like reinforced ice. "Who has been gossiping?"

"I heard it," said mother uncomfortably. "I--I should wear that quaint little collar with the quaint spotted border, Pam."

So already the idea was gaining ground, the little rumour was gleaning strength as it floated along. Pam Burbridge was in love with Walter Markham, they wrote; perhaps they were waiting till he came back to break it off. The Burbridge-Cromer engagement had been too sudden to be lasting. Rather hard on Cromer; still, it was pretty obvious where he would console himself, and a far more suitable match in every way. I could hear them.

I looked at the successor chosen by popular opinion when she and her mother came to call for me. She wore a curious sea-green hand-woven linen; instantly I knew why--it was the colour of the water in the White Woman's Cave. She wanted to make another exquisite picture for Cheneston and the subalterns to gaze at.

"Carver is following with the lunch in the dog-cart," she said. "Melon and salmon mayonnaise and pineapple, and cold pheasant and quail, and all sorts of lusciousness. Climb in, Pam. Captain Cromer and the boys are motoring over. Isn't it a ripping morning? I heard from Walter Markham this morning. He says it's the first letter he's been able to write since he got out there. They seem to have had a ghastly time."

"Yes," I said, "they have."

"Oh--of course," Grace said, "you heard. You said so last night, didn't you? I forgot. Do you like Walter Markham?"

"I like him awfully," I said earnestly. I tried to bring all sorts of things into my voice, but I only sounded, as usual, like a guileless but honest schoolgirl.

"So do I," said Grace Gilpin. Her face was half turned away, exquisite tendrils of gold fluffed about her face and hat--there were cherries on her hat, they seemed no redder than the curve of her wonderful mouth.

"If I were a man I should want to eat you," I said suddenly. "Grace--what does it feel like to be able to make any man you meet feel like that?"

"Are you being catty?" Grace said. She looked at me with surprise in her beautiful eyes.

"I--I don't know," I said miserably. "I think I'm trying to be."

Grace turned.

"Pam, have you really been hearing from Walter Markham?" she said quietly.

I looked beyond her, up at the great bunch of blackberries gleaming like black diamonds in the sun. They seemed like a bunch of eyes watching me.

Suddenly I felt good; I felt as if my silly little soul were enlarging and bubbling to the surface. I knew why Grace asked--she asked for herself and Cheneston, she wanted to think I cared for Walter Markham.

"Yes," I said, "I have."

"Does--Captain Cromer know?" she said.

"You heard me say I had heard from him last night in your drawing-room."

"I know, and then you burst into tears. I was so glad you did."

"Why?" I asked, startled.

"You saved me from doing the same thing, you did it first."

We went into the White Woman's Cave while the maids laid the lunch on the smooth, springy grass. More guests had been invited than I expected, but Cheneston had not yet turned up.

The walls of the White Woman's Cave are smooth and dark, and the sea purrs through it and licks the smoothness with a little kiss, and the light comes through the roof and lights the water so that it gleams like pale green fire.

It was wonderful and a little uncanny, like a theatrical scene, and it was cold in there, and the daylight and the sunshine seemed far away.

"And to think a woman lived here for years," one of the girls said.

"Her lover died and she wanted to get away from the world."

"How romantic!" said another girl. "Look, here's Major Morrison and Captain Cromer."

I think she thought that much more romantic. As she spoke Grace Gilpin moved. I don't know whether she did it purposely; perhaps the instinct to frame her beauty is implanted in her. She stood so that the green light from the water, fairylike and phosphorescent, held her in a shimmering glow of opalescent fire. She had taken off her hat; her coronet of fluffy, tendrilly gold hair shone like a halo, and her dress gleamed like a mermaid's sheath; she seemed neither of heaven nor earth, a betwixt and between creature made for man's undoing.

"I wish I were an artist, Grace!" Cheneston said.

Her pretty silver laughter floated out.

"Oh! Why?"

"He would paint you as a spirit of the cave," Major Morrison said.

As we came out into the sunshine I saw that Cheneston was very white. He gripped my arm.

"Pam," he said, "I must talk to you, child. I'm nearly off my head!"

"Lunch," I said feebly. I was suddenly inexplicably scared. I seemed to have brought the atmosphere of the cave into the sunshine with me.

"Confound the lunch!" he said violently. He turned to Grace. "I must talk to Pam," he said. "May we have a quarter of an hour's grace?"

"Oh--certainly."

"Begin without us if we don't come."

"Very well," she acquiesced.

"Come," said Cheneston curtly.

So he had been thinking things over, and he was going to ask me about Walter Markham, and tell me that he and Grace had discovered they cared for each other.

I wondered if I could manage to look merry as a marriage-bell with a funeral going on in my own heart. I discovered that to be a quaint little thing with a snubby nose has its advantages: you're not expected to furnish a big display of facial emotion.

"I can't walk any more," I said. My knees were trembling; I felt horribly, unromantically sick. It was my great hour, the hour of my renunciation, and I had no great feelings, only little squeamish, physical ones.

"Sit down, then," he said.

I sat down with a flop, under a crab-apple tree that was like a flame, and there was blue sky above us and golden bracken all around us, and when it swayed we could see the sea, like slits of turquoise through golden fretwork, and it seemed to me the stillest place in all the world.

"Pam," he said, "my mother is very ill--dying," and he turned from me and buried his head in his hands.

I sat very still. It was so absolutely unexpected, and by-and-by I clutched the bracken on either side of me and I prayed inside myself: "Don't let me go on feeling so dreadfully like his mother--or I shall put my arms round him and cuddle him!"

And I knew then that I loved Cheneston with the only sort of love that is real and lasting--I loved him as if he were my little, little boy. I loved him when he was my strong, decisive young knight. I loved the mystery in him, and the strength of him that I didn't understand; but I loved him best of all, most sweetly and dearly of all, when he was just my hurt boy.

I don't think I see things romantically. I suppose it's in keeping with my appearance. I never see love as something that is remote and cold and miles away. I would go to the ends of the earth with Cheneston, and I would love to nurse him when he's got a cold. I would love to go to his house in Norway, but I would also adore to make toast in front of the kitchen fire with him if the maid was out. I suppose my love is homely like myself, but it seems to me that once you've got love you can't tuck it up with the stars when you order dinner and help make the beds--you don't even want to, it makes you absolutely enjoy ordering dinner and making the beds, that's the splendid part about it.

Love makes ordinary every-days, full of ordinary every-day tasks, into high-days and festivals full of little sacred services and missions.

"Pam," he said. He lifted his head and looked at me. "I'm sorrier than ever, my poor little soul--since last night. You see, I always thought that Walter Markham cared, but I didn't know that you did. Kiddie, you're such a splendid little sport, and I'll help you all I can; but if you can't stick it, dear, I'll understand."

"Stick what?" I said.

He put his hand over mine, and I felt it tremble, and somehow the trembling made me very strong.

"I'm an only son," he said. "I think I've been rather a bad egg, debts and cards, wandering over the face of the earth, a sort of rolling stone, running away from my niche. It's worried the poor old mater. You see, Cromer Court is rather a topping old place, family for generations and all that. She wanted me to settle and marry and all that. Grief of her life that I didn't."

"Yes," I said.

"She's splendid, absolutely fine. Pam, somebody has told her--about us. She wrote me a wonderful letter this morning--it broke me up--about us."

"About us?" I said idiotically.

"Someone wrote to her and told her I was engaged to you. She wants to see my future wife. She's dying. I had a telegram from my cousin down there. Her letter was so wonderful. She said she would die happy knowing. Pam--is it too much?" His eyes were full of tears.

"It's nothing," I said. "I understand."

"Pam!" he said. "Best woman in all the world! Pam, there's something about you--it upsets all my theories; I seem just a pretty helpless sort of rotter."

I tried to find the right words to say.

The bracken swayed, a delicate, golden trellis broken here and there into turquoise like a mosaic; the birches shook their golden spangles; and the little harebells, their stems invisible in the welter of gold, swayed like jewels on invisible chains: all the world was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and its wonder was throbbing in me, and all I could say was:

"When is the next train?"

*VIII*

I am writing this in my bedroom at Cromer Court, at a Queen Anne desk, and by-and-by I am going to climb in a Queen Anne bed to watch the firelight flicker on the white panelled walls, on the quaintest chintz I have ever seen covering the chairs and the great divan, and fluttering like restless wings over open windows--pale green linen, the colour of young leaves, with bunches of white-heart cherries scattered over it.

I feel simple as a milkmaid and good as a nun in this dear old house, and I have never felt so happy. It is a precarious happiness. I should think the wives of the husbands home on leave feel it the last two days. It is a sort of happiness that freezes you while you are hugging it to you because of its warmth, and turns and rends you while you are caressing it--painful and beautiful at the same time.

I saw Cheneston's mother to-night for a few moments.

She is like one of those exquisite miniatures in the Academy that no one but miniaturists ever stay long enough to examine; her skin is like a child's, her eyes are Cheneston's eyes grown infinitely gentle--those queer hazel eyes that look, in a miniature, as if the paint had never dried.

"So this is Pam," she said, looking up at me, and her voice is like Cheneston's, grown faint and gentle; it has the same curious quality that makes you feel thrilled, and causes all the little nerves in your spine to "ping" as they do at an exciting play. "My son," she said, "I am so proud--such a vain old woman!--proud that you should have won such a woman--the only sort of woman that could ever have held you, son."

They have no gas or electric light here, only candles in silver sconces. I looked up suddenly and saw the perspiration glistening in beads on Cheneston's forehead. She took my hands.

"Pam," she said, "you're a wonderful little person--half gallant boy, half elf, and the other part sheer mother. The gallant boy in you will be his pal, the elf will keep him your eternal lover, and the mother--will keep him on his knees to you." She looked up at me whimsically, tenderly. "The Cromers are a woman's life-work--they run away for years and leave you to break your heart, and they come back and fill the hall with tusks and elephant-leg umbrella-stands, and expect you to go mad with them over the trophies. The elf in you will still the call of the wild in Cheneston, he will not dare to leave you, and the mother that broods in your quiet eyes." She turned to Cheneston. "You mustn't lose her--she's the one woman in the world for you--the only woman."

Then the nurse came back and signed to us to go.

Old Mrs. Cromer gave me a wonderful smile, and in that smile I suddenly realised how beautiful, how magnetic she had been. It was a smile of the most extraordinary and amazing happiness.

"Your father," I said, when we got outside, "your father went away from her?" I wanted to see if I had understood the significance of the smile.

"He took her," he said hoarsely. "She was his star, his goddess."

To-night we dined alone downstairs.

I wore my grey taffeta with the tiny bunches of pink apple-blossom and the little pink georgette fichu.

I felt that nothing else in my wardrobe was in keeping with the atmosphere of the Court.

Cheneston changed into ordinary evening dress. It was the first time I had seen him out of khaki. It sounds foolish and snobbish to say he looked a very gallant gentleman, as if I were trying to write an old-fashioned novel; but it is the only phrase that exactly describes him.

I felt an extraordinary atmosphere of noble sweetness, it seemed to throb through me. I was shiningly happy in the very inmost corner of my soul.

Cheneston is a perfect host; so many men leave off being the wives' hosts after they have married them. I had a feeling that Cheneston never would.

We talked of books--funny, dear old-fashioned authors like Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell and Jane Austen. When we rose he looked at me.

"You, woman, are wonderful," he said tersely: "you have only blown in here, and yet you belong to it, you are of it."

"And to-morrow I shall blow away again," I said.

"And to-morrow you will blow away again, he acquiesced.

"Can you imagine Grace Gilpin here?" I said suddenly. "Can you imagine her beauty in this setting?"

"It is unimaginable," he said curtly.

"She is beautiful," I persisted. I had an idea that my words must come sobbingly, because my heart was sobbing.

"She is the most beautiful thing I ever saw," he agreed. "They are bringing us coffee in the drawing-room."

I think the drawing-room is the biggest room I have ever been in; it is so long and narrow; the walls are white panels, and the carpet pale grey, and the chintz is the same grey with a little fierce blue lobelia bobbing about on it, and there is priceless blue Chinese porcelain everywhere, and a wonderful and enormous grand piano, and there were great bowls of white jasmine everywhere.

I sat down at the piano and ran my hands over the keys, and Cheneston spoke.

"Pam--please don't sing. I--I beg you not to sing."

"I won't if you don't wish it."

"Thank you."

But after they had brought in the coffee old Mrs. Cromer's nurse came and begged me to leave the door open and sing. I looked at Cheneston.

"Yes," he said. "Tell mother Miss Burbridge will sing." Then he looked at me; his face was very white. "Can I fetch you music, Pam?" he said.

"No, I don't need it, thank you."

He opened the french-windows, and the air that blew from the sea and the red fields of Devon swept into the room in a cloud of jasmine scent, and through the diamond panes I saw the stars twinkling--and suddenly I lost Pam Burbridge and the pretty room. I became something that had kinship with the stars and the hot scent of jasmine, something that was houseless and homeless and free; I walked beside Cheneston through Elysian fields, I talked to him and had no need of words. We were mates, we who had never been lovers.

I stopped. I was quite alone, and someone was rapping on the floor, and I heard the nurse's voice over the stairs. "Miss Burbridge, will you come?"

I went slowly. I was trembling and a little afraid.

I found the old lady sitting up in bed, and Cheneston with his arms round her supporting her at the back.

"Pam," she said, "I was frightened, dear--so frightened. I had to send for you. You and Cheneston had lost each other--I heard it in your wonderful voice, child, I saw it in the boy's face when he came to me. What is it? What is it?" she looked at us piteously. "I feel something is there. I know it! Something that shouldn't be there! I feel it!"

"Nonsense, dearest," Cheneston said.

"There is," she persisted. "I am frightened for you both. Why do I fear you losing each other?--you who were made for her, and she who was made for you."

"You are nervous," he said. "You are worrying yourself unnecessarily."

She caught his hands.

"I am afraid for you, my dears," she said. "Cheneston--let me see you married before I go. Let me be quite sure you have not missed the supreme happiness."

"We cannot do that, mother--there are many things to be thought of."

"White satin and bridesmaids, wedding bells and marriage settlements do not make a marriage, children. Pam, what is the obstacle?"

"Nothing," I said desperately. "Nothing."

She looked at Cheneston; Cheneston laid her down very gently.

"You are worn out, dearest," he said. "You must rest now."

She did not refer to it when I saw her the next morning. She looked frailer than ever by day, a wraith woman with jewelled eyes.

I breakfasted alone; a thin, fine rain drove against the windows like sea-spray. In the garden I could see the michaelmas daisies bowed, great clumps of amethyst, the chrysanthemums gleamed tawny red. Autumn was later here, but in the rain gold leaves kept falling, and the pearly white of the jasmine from the front of the house strewed the path, and here and there the petal of a passion-flower, like an exotic beetle's wing.

I put on my little rainproof coat and sou'-wester and went out.

I walked through the orchards, where wet apples gleamed like jewelled fruit wrought in ruby and emerald, where yellow plums hung like waxen fruit, and the late pears like amber ornaments. I walked through little spinneys where the wet gold made your eyes ache. I saw the red fields waiting for ploughing and fields heavy with the late crops through the rain like a soft coloured map: and I saw the sea, queer and grey as an aged woman, through the trees--and as far as I could see it all belonged to the Cromers, and the words of an old poem came to me, something about "a goodly heritage, bound by the sea and netted by the skies."

I stopped to speak to a little child, and it answered me in the soft up-and-down of the Devonshire dialect; and I knew I could have been happy with Cheneston here--not with the satisfied happiness of those who possess a chippendale drawing-room suite, a parlourmaid, and a car, but happy as those who inherit the earth. I could have been happy with a glorious, keen, swelling happiness.

I turned home. It smelt as fresh as if all the earth had been newly turned that morning, and as I turned a sunbeam struggled through and flickered uncertainly.

I found a letter waiting for me--two letters, one from mother and one from Grace Gil pin.

Mother's was characteristic. She hoped Mrs. Cromer was a nice woman and approved of me. Were the estates extensive? Had Cheneston a big rent roll? The end was typical. "I cannot see what you gain by postponing your marriage. It cannot enhance your value in Cheneston's eyes. It is always as well to remember that the world is full of girls, and an engaged man is not regarded in the same light as an engaged girl. I shall be very glad to hear that you have come to some sensible decision. Your father writes that he has struck an expensive mess, and that he has not been lucky at bridge lately. He is playing "pirate"--it has superseded auction; try to learn it if you can, social assets are never to be despised."

Pirate at Cromer Court! I smiled.

I sat down on an old oak chest in the tiled hall and opened Grace Gilpin's letter. The sun was shining brilliantly now; the twinkling raindrops that fringed the windows and hung glistening on the strands of jasmine were reflected on the red tiles in wriggling little shadows, like tadpole ghosts. I took off my wet mackintosh and my little sou'wester, and fluffed up my hair with my fingers.

Grace's letter was very much to the point.

"Walter Markham is home wounded. He is at Lynn Lytton Hospital, Long Woodstock, Near Manchester. What are you going to do about it, Pam?"

Well, what was I going to do about it?

What _could_ I do about it--except pray that Cheneston didn't get to know until he didn't want me any more.

I sat down stupidly and stared at the letter.

I had a sudden vision of Grace writing, her golden head bent, seeing in the missive and Walter Markham's presence in England the chance of freedom for herself and Cheneston; believing Cheneston loved her and I loved Walter Markham; believing that our engagement was just an emotional mistake, never guessing it wasn't an engagement at all!

A great many engagements are emotional mistakes. Why not ours?

Cheneston came out of the door on the right, I suppose it was his study. He held a letter in his hand. He was in khaki again, and he looked ill and worried.

"Good-morning," I said. I noticed he had his Burberry over his arm, and his service cap and a small dispatch case under his arm.

"You've heard?" he said.

"What?" I said stupidly, and my heart began to beat very rapidly.

"That Markham is in England--wounded. Oh! Pam--you shan't suffer, because you've been so splendid and wonderful. You ought to be with him; but he'll spare you, and understand when he knows."

"Where are you going?" I said desperately.

"Up to Lynn Lytton to tell him I understand that you care for each other, that you've told me all about it, and that we're not engaged to each other. To tell him how absolutely superb you've been, and why you're here. My God! Pam, do you think I'd ever forgive myself if I mucked up your life, dear!"

*IX*

"You--you mustn't go to Walter," I pleaded desperately. "I--I want to go myself."

I had one thought; it was so vivid that it seemed like something dressed in scarlet floating on a grey sea of little thoughts and fears all inextricably mixed--it was that I must get to Walter Markham first and _explain_.

"Pam," Cheneston said gravely, "are you afraid of my being clumsy and not making things clear to him?"

I nodded. I couldn't speak. The idea of Cheneston being clumsy, Cheneston with his fine, fierce, almost uncanny insight into things, had me by the throat.

"I see," Cheneston said slowly. "Little Pam, I hate to think I have made you afraid for your happiness even for one minute. You are so worthy of happiness--so absolutely great! He'll understand, dear, how simply priceless you've been to--come here. He's bound to understand." He looked down at me with fierce anxiety in his hazel eyes, he seemed desperately questioning his own belief in Walter Markham's broad-mindedness.

"I'll make him understand," I said. "Don't worry, I'll make him understand."

A sudden flood of fierce protective love swept over me. I wished for the hundredth time that I might be big and Cheneston little--ever so little--that I might take him in my arms roughly and tell him not to look like that. I felt I could go to Walter Markham and explain everything, I could sit by his bedside and skin my very soul--but I couldn't help feeling, even then, it would be easier to do something bigger and less painful, something more actually physical than soul-skinning.

I never found it very easy to show my feelings to people; the bigger they are the more tightly corked they seem. I often wished for, and sometimes I've cried because I haven't, little frothy feelings that bubble over into little easy caresses and kind words and pretty compliments and easy things like that. It rather hurts me to get to the surface, I seem to have to tug from such a long way down.

"I'll drive you to the station," Cheneston said. "I shall tell mater you've got to go up to Town on business."

"I'll tell her," I answered hastily.

I knew she would sense Cheneston's disquiet; women lie to women better than men to women. She took my departure more quietly than I had anticipated. There was a lovely expression on her dear face--it was as if her soul was smiling to itself while she was grave. She patted me with her lovely soft hands.

"And you will be back early to-morrow, dear, funny little girl? It's odd," she said, "I see a cloud between you and Cheneston. When I first saw it I was frightened, but now I know it is not made by your hearts--it is only a cloud your silly brains have made, child, and it will go. You are going to dissipate some of it to-day."

"Yes," I said, "I am."

It was true. In that at least I didn't lie. I was going to explain the truth to Walter Markham, and I was going to make it easy for Cheneston to marry Grace Gilpin.

She held my hand against her face. The charm of her was like a beautiful, strong current--I can't explain; all the things I long to express and cannot, the things I suffer so for my inability to voice and demonstrate, seemed gloriously easy. I put my arms round her and pressed her face to mine. I loved her with a dear and full love.

"My little Pam!" she said. "My dear, funny little soul!" Then she said sharply and fiercely: "Oh, Pam, it's cruel if we women who are sent into the world with out-size hearts and feelings meet the wrong men! I met the right one!" A note of triumph crept into her voice. "And Cheneston will understand that in your dear tiny body is a soul and a heart too big and strong. People call it the artistic temperament--it isn't really that, it means that something that is shut up and sealed with other people until they get to heaven where nothing can hurt is left open--maybe it's left open accidentally, maybe it's meant--and those people suffer more than the rest of the world, and are more gloriously glad, and out of the glory and the travail of their souls they give to the world wonderful music, or wonderful pictures, or wonderful books. _And they are not like other people_, Pam! They are very great and very little at the same time, and not one in a thousand can understand how life hurts, and how glorious it is when it is glorious. Cheneston will understand; that is why you and he must never, never run away from each other--you dear, funny little soul!"

Then I heard Cheneston calling.

We drove to the station almost in silence. He took the high dog-cart, and we could see over the hedges; they sparkled with thousands of raindrops, and the late dog-roses seemed like phantasies wrought in vivid coral, and blackberries like black diamonds and rubies jewelled the world, and every bird seemed singing and every cricket chirping for sheer gladness of the newly washed day.

He told me he had had an extension of leave.

I was so happy. I have never had a feeling that I did not want to share--I can't explain. I just want to pass on every bit of loveliness that comes into my life. We passed lots of children picking blackberries, and I could have cried because I wanted to kiss them so, or give them something, or just tell them I thought they'd get the loveliest lot of blackberries I had ever seen--because I was up in the world, sitting above the hedges with Cheneston.

We passed a little girl who had spilt all her blackberries and was crying, and I took off a little gold bracelet I had on and flung it to her.

I shall never forget the ecstatic look in her small, grimy face.

"You see," I said quickly, "I'm sorry if you think I'm mad, but--but she was crying, and now she is happy. She will be awfully happy all day."

I'm never sorry for the impulsive things I do, but I am nearly always sorry because people don't understand. It seems to me like rubbing all the lovely bloom off a butterfly's wing just to demonstrate that it is a butterfly.

"I don't think you're mad," he said, smiling.

If I had had anklets as well as bracelets I could have given them away this morning. He helped me down at the station; he was just a little constrained, so I knew he was feeling tremendously full of feeling, just as I was.

"Modern life doesn't give a fellow much of a chance. I have rather absurd notions about you at this minute--I should like to be Sir Walter Raleigh, and put my cloak down for you to walk on. You don't know how humble you make me feel, Pamela Burbridge."

I felt myself sort of melting towards him.

"What can I do to show you how splendid I think you are?" he said. "You wonderful small person!"

And something inside me wanted to say, "Exchange all this chivalrous gratitude for just a tiny bit of love"; but I sat on the something's head _hard_, like a good girl, and I said:

"Why, you can get me my ticket; the booking-office is open now."

There is nothing more cheerless and depressing than going to a place you don't know and arriving all alone. If only there is a pillar-box in the vicinity where you have once posted a letter, or a tea-shop where you bought chocolates, it establishes a feeling of intimacy. At Long Woodstock I felt an alien of aliens, an Englishwoman in a foreign country.

I swallowed a cup of tea and had a wash on the cheerless northern station; then I took a mouldy old fly that smelt of innumerable weddings and funerals, and set out for Lynn Lytton Hospital, and as I travelled past the rows of grey stone houses I felt myself shedding my high-flown courage of the morning feather by feather, until I became the reserved, nervous little coward I had always been. Furthermore, I began to feel very sick.

I feel with intense earnestness that Charlotte Corday and Nurse Cavell and Christobel Pankhurst, and those wonderful women who fought in the Russian Army, could never have felt sick as I can feel sick, or they would have stopped in the middle of their heroic deeds and gone home to bed.

I can think of nothing more unheroic than to feel sick on all the great and emotional occasions of your life.

We seemed to climb Lynn Lytton, it was high up on a hill, and by the time we reached it the birds were twittering their benedictions and the first stars were netted in the tree-tops.

I told the cabman to wait, and climbed some steps--they seemed like the steps of the Monument.

I am glad the door opened at once, or I would have turned and bolted down them like a rabbit.

I must have been feeling pretty bad, because there was some late clematis clinging to one of the pillars of the portico, and they seemed to me in the twilight like large and particularly meaty spiders.

I want so badly to write of the heroic sentiments and thoughts I had, but I was sick, and the clematis looked like fat spiders, and I wanted to run away. That is the honest truth.

"I want to see Captain Markham," I told the sister who came to the door.

"It is after visiting hours," said the sister gently. "Are you his wife?"

"No--he hasn't a wife."

"His sister?"

"No--just--just----"

"I see," said the sister very gently. "Please come in," and I saw that she did not see--she thought that Walter Markham and I had sentimental relations.

She took me into a little grey distempered room hung with orange curtains, and sent the matron to me. She reminded me of snow, so deep that it could never, never melt--kind snow, deep enough to be soft.

"Are you Pam?" she said.

I looked up, startled and taken unawares.

"Yes," I said briefly, and stared.

She sat down; she was a large woman, and there was a soothing placidity about all her movements.

"I thought so," she said. "Captain Markham has been calling for you night and day--if we could have ascertained your other name we should have sent for you, but when he was conscious he said there was no Pam." She looked at me thoughtfully. "So you are Pam," she said.

I nodded. "But it couldn't have been me he was calling for. I--I--why?"

"He is very ill," she said, "that is why I am going to let you see him to-night. I do not think he will live till morning."

I saw that she told me purposely without preamble.

I sat numbed. I could only repeat stupidly: "But it couldn't be me he wanted."

I felt as if she were passing to me some imitations of her aloof snowiness. I, too, felt a little unreal.

"I think you have turned up at the right moment," she said. "Please come, and don't be surprised if he doesn't know you." She put her hand on my shoulder. "Don't give up hope," she said; "nothing is certain--not even in science and surgery."

I think it is in one of Tennyson's things there comes the phrase "into the jaws of Hell"; it crept into my mind when I saw Walter Markham.

I have never seen anything so terrible or so pathetic. He was conscious.

"Why, it's Pam!" he said weakly. "Dear little, funny little Pam." Then earnestly, with a terrible effort to concentrate. "Are you real?" He took my hand and felt it tremblingly. "You're real," he said.

The matron left us alone.

He was in a tiny room by himself, the blind was up and the big window looked on to a great hill, like the hunched shoulder of a giant.

"Why did you come?" he said. "Why did you come?"

I knelt beside the bed. I was trembling and I felt sicker than ever.

Above the titanic shoulder of the hill the tiny bare white shoulder of the moon shrugged itself into view.

"I can't!" I pleaded. "Not now."

"My dear, you must. If I go out to-night I go out--wondering."

I began to tell him. I told him all about meeting Cheneston in the searchlight, and how the mistake about our being engaged had started. I told him that Grace Gilpin and Cheneston loved each other. I told him all about somebody writing to Cheneston's mother and telling her that Cheneston was engaged to me. I told him how fearfully ill she was, and that I had gone to Cromer Court because she so passionately wanted to see her son's future wife.

"But why did you come to me?" he said.

The moonlight was sweeping down the hill to us now, an incoming tide of limpid silver. I looked out of the window desperately.

"I told Cheneston you and I cared--I wanted him to feel free to marry Grace. This morning he--he was coming to you--Cheneston was--he was so afraid you would misunderstand my being at Cromer Court, and think I had ceased to care for you. Also this morning I had a note from Grace Gilpin telling me you were here, asking me what I was going to do about it."

"And they--Grace and Cromer--believe there is some understanding between us, that we grew to care for each other when the four of us went about together?"

"Yes," I said desperately; the hill suddenly seemed to tip towards me, it seemed to carry with it the smell of iodoform and disinfectant.

And then the amazing and paralysing thing happened: Captain Markham suddenly put his arm round me.

"Well," he said, "isn't it true, Pam! My God! child, isn't it _true_? Don't I love you?--you ridiculous child, you wonderful, wonderful thing with your strange crooked little mouth and your great eyes! Oh! Pam, my little, little girl--didn't you know I cared!"

The hill tipped back into place like a giant sitting back on its haunches, and the silver tide seemed to ripple down it to ultimately engulf us.

*X*

Love is a cloak and is made in different styles; some people wrap themselves tightly in it, and there is only just enough to go round them: it is their cloak, and if Cupid himself, dimpled and in his birthday suit, came and sat beside them on the top of a motor-bus in the rain, they wouldn't go shares. For other people Love is a large cloak, voluminous and overlapping, and capable of sheltering, warming, and comforting quite a lot of people round the hem.

My heart ached for him as I sat beside him. He held my hand very tightly with his thin fingers, almost like a frightened child, and I had a feeling that he feared to drift out and I was his anchor, and I wished that I could drift out with him.

"Pam," he said once or twice, and I had a feeling as if he were saying "Mother," and I answered, "Yes, dear," and by-and-by he smiled and whispered again, "Pam."

The matron kept coming in and out. Once or twice she fed Walter Markham with a teaspoonful of brandy, once she brought me a cup of bovril; she seemed just the same as when I first met her hours ago, like warm snow immeasurably deep.