Sinister Street

"It's not I who am obstinate," said Michael. "It's you who are utterly spoiled by the lovelorn Alan."

Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin's summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June Sat.u.r.days of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer's image in this wraith of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa.

Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could remember the lines of Virgil which had matched the Milton. He used to know them so well:

Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae.

There were two complex hexameters, but all that remained in his memory of the rest were two or three disjointed phrases:

Lapsa cadunt folia... ubi frigidus annus... et... terris apricis.

Even at fourteen he had been able to respond to the melancholy of these lines; really, he had been rather an extraordinary boy. The sensation of other times which was evoked by walking like this in Richmond Park would soon be too strong for him any longer not to speak of it. Yet because those dead summer days seemed now to belong to the mystery of youth, to the still unexpressed and inviolate heart of a period that was forever overpast, Michael could not bring himself to destroy their sanct.i.ty with sentimental reminiscence. However, there had been comedy and absurdity also, perhaps rather more fit for exhumation now than those deeper moments.

"Do you remember the wedding of Mrs. Ross?" he asked.

"Rather," said Alan, and they both smiled.

"Do you remember when you first called her Aunt Maud, and we both burst out laughing and had to rush out of the room?"

"Rather," said Alan. "Boys _are_ ridiculous, aren't they?"

"Supposing we both laugh like that when Stella is first called Mrs.

Merivale?" Michael queried.

"I shall be in much too much of a self-conscious funk to laugh at anything," said Alan.

"And yet do you realize that we're only talking of eight

Nothing at all really. Six years less than we had already lived at the time when that wedding took place."

To Alan upon the verge of the most important action of his life Michael's calculation seemed very profound indeed, and they both walked on in silence, meditating upon the revelation it afforded of a fugitive mortality.

"You'll be writing epitaphs next," said Alan, in rather an aggrieved voice. He had evidently traversed the swift years of the future during the silence.

"At any rate," Michael said. "You can congratulate yourself upon not having wasted time."

"My G.o.d," cried Alan, stopping suddenly. "I believe I'm the luckiest man alive."

"I thought you'd found a sovereign," said Michael. He had never heard Alan come so near to emotional expression and, knowing that a moment later Alan would be blus.h.i.+ng at his want of reserve, he loyally covered up with a joke the confusion that must ensue.

Very few people came to the wedding, for Stella had insisted that as none of her girl friends were reputable enough to be bridesmaids, she must do without them. Mrs. Ross came, however, and she brought with her Kenneth to be a solemn and freckled and carroty page. She was very anxious that Michael should come back after the wedding to Cobble Place, but he said he would rather wait until after Christmas. Nancy came, and Michael tried to remember if he had once seriously contemplated marrying her. How well he remembered her in short skirts, and here she was a woman of thirty with a brusque jolly manner and gold pince-nez.

"You _are_ a brute always to avoid my visits at Cobble Place," grumbled Nancy. "Do you realize we haven't met for years?"

"You're such a woman of affairs," said Michael.

"Well, do let's try to meet next time. I say, don't you think Maud looks terribly ill since she became a Romanist?"

Michael looked across to where Mrs. Ross was standing.

"I think she's looking rather well."

"Absolute destruction of individuality, you know," said Nancy, shaking her head. "I was awfully sick about that business. However, I must admit that she hasn't forced her religion down our throats."

"Did you expect an auto-da-fe in the middle of the lawn?" he asked. She thumped him on the shoulder:

"Silly a.s.s! Don't you try to rag me."

They had a jolly talk, but Michael was glad he had not married her at eight years old. He decided that by now he would probably have regretted the step.

Michael managed to get two or three minutes alone with Stella after the ceremony.

"Well, Mrs. Prescott-Merivale?"

"You've admitted I'm a married woman," she exclaimed. "Now surely you can tell me what you've been doing since August and where you've been."

"I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every woman," said Michael. "Alas, you are not!"

"Michael, you're perfectly horrid to me."

"Don't be too much the young wife," he advised, with mocking earnestness.

"I won't listen to anything you say, until I know where you've been. Of course, if I hadn't been so busy, I could easily have found you out."

"Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,"

Michael laughed.

"You shan't stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me."

"By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful news," said Michael. "Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but I've never heard."

"We're going to Compiegne," said Stella. "I wrote to little Castera-Verduzan, and he's lent us the cottage where you and I stayed."

That choice of Stella's seemed to mark more decisively than anything she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.

When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother, talking.

"I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers," she told him. "But if you're going to be here, I could put her off."

Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother's loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.

"No, no, I'm going away again," he told her.

"Just as you like, dearest boy."

"You're glad about Stella?"