Part 35 (1/2)

The first beam has struck one of the lofty pinnacles, and made laughter and gaiety of its tercentenary gloom. Now it is laying long shadows about mead and street--shadows of n.o.ble buildings, of cropping cows, of commonplace yet dawn-enn.o.bled houses, and of vernal trees. Far below on the bridge is the pigmy crowd, with the vulgar din of its May horns, blown thus early, in ill-survival of some Puritan custom, to drown the notes of the Latin hymn. But here, high up above the world, is no music but that august one of the loud bells; no sight but the arch of the perfect sky, and the solid grandeur of G.o.d's first best gift to man--new light.

In this stately dawning they stand together, he and she, despite the crowd, virtually alone; for Prue has drawn away Freddy to point out to him what is indeed startlingly obvious, the rocking of the tower under the vibration of the bells. Several undergraduates--more indeed than not--are taking off their college caps, and flinging them down over the battlements. The wind blows colder with the sunrise, but they pay little heed to its chill admonishment. With their bare young heads they stand laughing and leaning down to watch the fate of their mortar-boards. Most alight on the college roofs; one sticks on a pinnacle, greatly to its owner's delight. There is a noise of young voices, exclamations, bets, jolly laughter, on the crisp morning air. And meanwhile Talbot and Margaret stand staring at each other, silent at first; for how from such a torrent of words as he has to pour out before her can he choose which to begin with?

At last, 'I--I--did not expect to meet you here,' he says stupidly.

'Nor I you.'

'Are you staying in Oxford?'

'Yes, at the Mitre. Freddy was very anxious that we should come, and so Lady Roupell brought us.'

She answers him quietly, in a rather low voice, but she does not on her side originate any question. Can it be that she is struggling with a difficulty in any degree akin to his own? Urged by this dazzling possibility; urged still more by the shortness of the time--since what security is there that Prue may not be back upon them at any moment with some fresh discovery about the tower or the bells?--he hazards a speech of greater significance, of such significance in his own eyes that he trembles almost as much as the bell-rocked tower in making it.

'At the moment I first caught sight of you, and before that, I was thinking of you.'

'Were you?'

'I suppose that there are few things in the world more unlikely than that _you_ were thinking of _me_?'

She hesitates a second. He sees by a sort of distress in her sweet, candid eyes, that she would like to be able to tell him that she had been thinking of him. But she evidently had not, and is too honest to be able to feign that she had.

'I was not thinking of you at that moment,' she answers reluctantly; 'I was too much out of breath with my climb,' she adds, with a rather embarra.s.sed laugh, 'to be thinking of anything.'

'Oh, Peggy,' cries Prue, breaking in upon them, in realisation of Talbot's fear, 'he has thrown his cap over too! Is not it foolish of him? Is not he sure to catch cold? And I do not see how he is ever to get it again.'

'As to that, dear,' replies Freddy philosophically, gracefully winding his gown about his neck and over his head, 'I am not at all anxious, as it was not mine.' So saying, he again draws away his little sweetheart, or she him, and the other pair are a second time alone. But for how long?

'Are they--are they--_all right_?' inquires John, recalling what strides to intimacy he had formerly made by the agency of Prue's love affairs.

'I think so,' she answers doubtfully; 'it is hard to say; pretty right.'

'_She_ looks as if it were all right.'

'Yes, does not she?' returns Peggy eagerly. 'Is not she improved? Is not she wonderfully prettier than when last you saw her?'

Talbot hesitates a second. He knows, of course, that Prue has a face; but whether it is a pretty or an ugly one, a bettered or a worsened one since last he looked upon it, he knows no more than if it had never been presented to his vision.

'Whether you see it or not,' says Peggy, a little piqued at his unreadiness to acquiesce, 'it is so; everybody sees it.'

'But she always was pretty, was not she?' asks he eagerly, trying to retrieve his blunder. 'Could she be prettier than she always was? and happiness is mostly becoming.'

He looks wistfully at her face as he speaks, as if he would not mind trying the effect of that recipe upon his own beauty--so wistfully that she turns away with a sort of confusion; and, resting her hand on the battlement that is still swaying almost like a s.h.i.+p on a sea under the bells' loud joyaunce, looks down. The sun has risen higher. Opposite him his pale sister is swooning away in the west. Before his proud step the spring green grows vivider. The smoke from the morning fires new lit, curls, beautiful as a mist, above the enn.o.bled dwelling-houses, swallowing what is vulgar from sight, as unworthy of the new King's eyes.

The two young people stand tranced for a moment or two side by side without speaking; then Peggy says in a low voice, and with an apparently complete irrelevance to anything that had gone before:

'The lavender-bush is dead.'

'_Dead?_'

'And the mowing-machine is broken,' adds she, beginning to laugh, though a little tremulously. 'Jacob says it has never been the same since you meddled with it.'