Chapter IX: With Aunt Maggie in Farewell

I

It was past eleven when Percival got back to "Post Offic." He had been absent seven hours. He felt himself removed by thrice as many years from the moment when he had flung away from Aunt Maggie to work off by active exercise the feelings aroused in him when, to his demands that he must be doing something with his life, she had prayed him only wait.

Day then, night now, and he as changed.

The mood he brought her was unlike any he had proposed should be his case. On Plowman's Ridge before he saw Japhra he had imagined for his return a petulant, a trying-to-be-calm scene in which he should repeat his purpose that an end must be made of the purposeless way of life in which she was keeping him. By Fir-Tree Pool, with wise Japhra propounding how a man must encourage his spirit and defeat his flesh, he had imagined himself gentle with dear Aunt Maggie; gently showing her what restlessness had him, persuading her to his ends, or, of his love for her, accepting her wishes. Now he was come back and neither case was his. Day then, night now, and he as changed. Now he had lived that hour with Dora in the drive; now he had kissed her; now had heard her breathe "I shall always love you." Gone every thought of petulant distress; gone Japhra's counsels--gone boyhood, manhood come!

The change was stamped upon his face, figured in his air. Aunt Maggie looked up eagerly as he entered. She had waited him anxiously. He stood a moment on the threshold of the room and looked at her with steady, reckoning eyes. She saw; and she greeted him fearfully. "Why, Percival, dear, how very late you are," she said.

He replied: "It took me longer to get back than I expected."

His tone matched his aspect and the look in his eyes. Aunt Maggie's voice trembled a little: "You must have been a long way, dear?"

"A good many miles," he said, and came forward and went to his place at the table where supper was laid, and sat down.

"Are you very tired, dear?--you look tired."

"No--no, thank you, Aunt Maggie."

His voice was absent--or stern; and absently--or sternly--he looked at her across the table.

She caught her breath and hesitated, and began pathetically to try by brightness to rally him from his mood.

"At least you must be terribly hungry," she smiled. "Here comes Honor with just what you like."

A tray tanged against the door, and was borne in by Honor, uncommonly grim of the face.

"Now wasn't that clever of Honor!" Aunt Maggie went on. "Five minutes ago--after waiting since seven--she said she knew you would be just in time if she began to cook the trout then; and here it is ready, and most delicious, I'm sure, just as you arrive."

Honor's actual words had been: "Time and tide wait for no dangerous delays, Miss Oxford, and I don't neither--not a single instant longer. I'll put these troutses on now which ought to have been on at ten minutes to seven, and I'll cook 'em, and cook 'em and cook 'em till I drop fainting on my own kitchen carpet and till they're nasty black cinders that will serve him right. Lost his way! lost his nasty bold temper! It's no good talking different to me, Miss, not if your voice was tinkling trumpets, it isn't!" She had burst in with her tray prepared to repeat her wrath to Percival's face, but caught the appealing look in Aunt Maggie's eyes, perceived that something was seriously amiss with Percival, and exchanged her heat for the affection he had won in her from the first moment, years before, of his arrival--the sweetest bundle of shawls--at "Post Offic."

"Cooked to a turn, Master Percival, dear," Honor said, uncovering before him the steaming dish.

"And only just caught," Aunt Maggie smiled. "Rollo brought them in just before supper time."

And Honor: "And want it you do, as I can see. Nasty pinched look you've got, Master Percival."

And Aunt Maggie: "And look at that beer, dear. You'd scarcely think it was a new cask, would you? As clear as crystal."

And Honor: "Ah, 'Pitch that cask about,' I says to the man when he delivered it. 'Pitch that cask about, my beauty, and you can pitch it back into your waggin', I says. 'Young master don't want to eat his beer with a knife and fork, not if you do,' I says sharp."

And Aunt Maggie: "You see what care we take of you, Percival, although you leave us all day long."

And Honor: "And now I'll just get your slippers down for you. Nothing like slippers when you're tired. And then you'll be to rights."

II

So these fond women, perceiving him amiss, strove, as women will, to heal him with their sympathy; and reckoned nothing--as is woman's part--that he nothing responded to their gentleness nor anything abated his set and brooding air. The world may be chased up and down to find men conspired to soothe a woman's brow and scarcely will disclose a single case. Men weary or wax impatient of such a task. But every household at some time shows women gently engaged against a bearish man. It is the woman's part--womanly as we say: using a rare word for a beautiful virtue.

At another time--in the days before that evening's magic, in the life that preceded his present only by that hour in the drive with Dora--Percival had long been won from moodiness by their solicitude for him. Not now! Those days were only a single hour gone; its events sundered them from the present by an abyss that had a lifetime's depth, a lifetime's breadth from marge to marge. New feelings were his and they enveloped him against old appeals as a suit of mail against arrows. New prospects held his eyes and they blotted out homelier visions as the changed scene of a play is dropped across an earlier background. He was not preoccupied and therefore unaware of the loving sentences addressed to him. His case was this--that he was a new man, and as a stranger, therefore, listening to affections that did not concern him. That he found himself insensible to their appeal was not that he loved Aunt Maggie less or had suffered abatement of the affection he had for hot-tongued, warm-hearted Honor. None of these. It was this only--that he loved another more; this only--that the fires of his love had sprung out in a new place and there burned with heat infinitely more fierce than the flame where formerly his affections had warmed their hands.

III

Such of his meal as he required--and that was what habit, not appetite, demanded--he ate in silence. To silence also Aunt Maggie went, shortly after Honor had left them. She attempted once or twice to continue to persuade him from his mood--protested that he was eating nothing; sought to rally him with little scraps of gossip, with questions touching his afternoon. Of no avail. Presently she clasped her hands together on the table before him, and only watched him, and only sought to discover from his face what thing it was his face betided, and only felt her fears increase.

When he was done he pushed back his chair and she dropped her eyes, for his were now upon her and had the steady, reckoning look she had observed--and feared--when he regarded her for that moment at his entrance. She could not endure the feeling that he watched her, and watched her so. "You will go to bed soon, Percival," she said. "You do look so tired."

He replied: "I am not tired. I have something to ask you first, Aunt Maggie;" and after a pause he went on: "Aunt Maggie, I was telling you this afternoon that I thought I ought to be doing something. Well, more than that I thought I ought to be doing something, and more than merely telling you--because I know I was in a great state about it and went off in a great state."

She answered, "Yes, Percival?"

"You said there was plenty of time for that."

"Yes, Percival."

"There isn't, Aunt Maggie." And he went on quickly: "there isn't plenty of time to think about what I am going to do. I am not a boy any longer. Even if I started to-morrow I should be starting late. Every one at my age is doing something."

His tone was firm and quiet but was kind. She said that which made it take a harder note.

"Percival, you need only wait," she said, "till you are twenty-one."

She saw his face darken in a change as swift and chill as sudden shadow along the sea. "Oh, that!" he cried. "That! I don't want to hear that any more or ever again! Is that all you have for me?"

She clasped and unclasped her hands on the table before her. He waited several moments for her answer. Then he said: "And what am I to do till then?"

She told him: "Only wait with me, Percival."

He said very quietly: "No, I will not wait. I will not stay with you. I am going away."

The stress that each suffered was broken out of them by his announcement. The thought of losing him, the thought of how a word, revealing her secret, would keep him, broke from her in her cry: "No, no, Percival! Oh, Percival, no!"

Her sudden voice and its anguish smote him to his depths in his own stress as a sudden cry in the night that shocks the heart. He uttered in a voice she had never heard--most hoarse, most atremble: "Oh, understand! For pity's sake try to understand. I am so that I will never sleep again--never again till I have earned my sleep. Oh, understand that I am a man!"

She saw his dear face, his handsome face, his face that she loved so and was to lose unless she spoke, all twisted up as though he writhed in pain. She cried: "Percival, don't look like that. I can keep you. I cannot let you go."

He looked at her with eyes that told his anguish of this scene and of his spirit. "You cannot keep me," he said. "I am going."

She breathed: "By telling you I can keep you."

He said: "Tell me, then."'

She began, her tongue heavy as a key is rusty that is to turn in a lock closed eighteen years; "Rollo--" she began, and stopped.

He had for a moment believed that she intended to tell him this matter affecting his future that he knew must be delusion--some wonderful plan, as wonderful as impossible, such as a woman leading Aunt Maggie's retired life might have--whose delusion, having it before him, he could at last show her. But at her "Rollo," disappointed, he broke out, "Oh, what has old Rollo to do with it?"

Her voice was making a stumbling effort to hold on at turning the key. But his "Old Rollo" caused her to halt, afraid, as one turning a key in very fact might halt and draw back at a footstep.

He saw her face go grey with the hue of ashes. "Aunt Maggie!" he cried, and got up quickly and went to her. "I don't mean to be unkind. I must go. I cannot stay. But I'm not going angry--not running away. I love you--love you, you know how I love you. Just think of it as going on a visit. It's no more than that. I'm going with old Japhra--that's not like going, being with him, is it?"

She just said: "When, dear?"

"Darling, in the morning. At daybreak."

IV

She began to cry, and clung to him. But it was more than losing him had made that ashy hue in her face that had wrung his heart. It was realisation of a sudden thing that menaced her revenge--a thing suddenly arisen in its long, long path whose end she now was reaching. Thinking, when the hour came, the more dreadfully to strike Lady Burdon, she had deliberately made possible and had encouraged the friendship between Percival and Rollo. Had she gone too far? What when she told Percival and he saw it was "Old Rollo" he was to displace, "Old Rollo" upon whom he was to bring disaster--what if--?

She dared not so much as finish that question.