II

Five o’clock chimed from All Saints tower as Captain Culvers handed his bride from the carriage at the churchyard gates. It was now over three hours since the wedding had taken place, and the neighbourhood had returned to its normal quietude. When Hastings is crowded with holidaymakers, this unfashionable quarter of the town is comparatively deserted; and in June weather it is forsaken even by its inhabitants for the breezier hills and Marina. A shabby “fly” went crawling along; a few curly-headed, unwashed children came trooping forth from one of the alleys leading off the old-world street; a fisherman in a blue jersey strolled down from the Tackleway and paused for a moment to look at the handsome equipage drawn up alongside the pavement. Otherwise, Captain Culvers and his bride had the street to themselves.

A double flight of steps leads from the pavement to All Saints churchyard, which runs up the side of one of the two hills that dominate the old town. At the foot of these steps Ida paused.

“Let me go alone to my mother’s grave, Sefton; I particularly wish it,” she said; and once more her tone appeared to have more of command than of entreaty in it.

But it was not a request to be met with a demur, so Captain Culvers drew back, and allowed her to pass on alone.

Although the street was in shadow, the churchyard, on higher ground, lay in sunlight still. Very peaceful and picturesque it looked in the silence and brightness of the summer afternoon, with its gravestones gleaming white from out the greenness of the hillside.

The path which Ida followed took a sharp curve at the east end of the church, and she was very quickly out of sight. Captain Culvers stood watching the tall, graceful figure, in its soft grey draperies, till it disappeared, saying to himself what a lucky fellow he was, after all his ups and downs in life, to have fallen on his feet at last.

Then he took out his cigar-case, and telling the coachman to walk the horses up and down, strolled down the street towards the sea.

He knew so little of Hastings, that the fish-market and the tall, black, shiny rope-houses came upon him as a surprise. The odours of the place, however, at the close of this summer’s day were intolerable; so he turned his back on it, and the loitering fishermen, and the lazy, lapping summer sea, and returned to the shadow and quaintness of the old street, with its ancient overhanging houses, and queer byways.

Quarter-past five struck.

“The Captain will be getting impatient, I take it, soon,” said John to Jehu on the box of the carriage, as they saw Captain Culvers pull out his watch and time it by the church clock.

“It’s a big churchyard; there are a mighty lot of tombs there, perhaps the lady has lost her way,” answered Jehu, lazily flicking the flies from his horses’ manes.

Half-past five struck.

A little Italian boy with a barrel-organ and monkey rounded the corner of the street, and began grinding a feeble, droning sort of version of Garibaldi’s Hymn, to which the monkey beat time with toy cymbals, much to the delight of the urchins, who now came trooping forth from all corners.

Jehu pulled up his horses with a jerk at the churchyard gate, saying that half an hour was time enough and to spare for the lady to have lost her way and found it again, deposited her flowers, and returned.

“They’ll lose their train,” whispered John, with a grin. “And then the Captain will lose something else, I take it⁠—his temper.”

Possibly Captain Culvers’s fears had flown in the same direction, for, as he came sauntering up the street, he suddenly paused, pulled out his timetables, and began consulting them with something of a frown gathering on his brow.

A quarter to six struck.

The little Italian boy ended his droning ditty, shouldered his organ and monkey, and departed, followed by a detachment of the admiring urchins.

Captain Culvers threw away his cigar, opened the churchyard gate, and began with rather a hurried tread to mount the steep flight of steps. It had not been swept since the wedding, and Captain Culvers as he went along crushed under his feet the remnants of the rosebuds and daisies that had been scattered for his bride.

Precisely at that moment Juliet, at the garden gates of Glynde Lodge, was saying a laughing goodbye to some of her girl friends, who were telling her that they hoped shortly to be called upon to officiate as her bridesmaids.

“I’m not sure that I hope it,” she answered. “A wedding like this, where everybody does what everybody else has done for generations, would be intolerable to me. I told Ida last night I wondered how she could endure it. No; when I’m married I must do something to make a sensation⁠—wear a nun’s dress, or a riding-habit, or⁠—”

“Juliet!” exclaimed her friend, “if you’re going to do that sort of thing, I shall make a point of getting up in church and forbidding your banns!”

Juliet clapped her hands.

“The very thing! That would be heavenly!” she cried. “I only wish father would do it instead of you, and then there would be some fun in getting married. But there’s no such luck in store for me. Father always approves our choice so exasperatingly, it takes all the delight out of getting engaged. I should adore, positively adore, Clive⁠—not just like him, as I do now⁠—if only everyone in the house would run him down, and tell me I’m throwing myself away on him!”

And Clive was at her elbow, and distinctly heard her closing remarks⁠—heard, but paid no heed to them⁠—assuredly not the lover-like heed that might have been expected from a man just returned to his affianced bride after six months’ absence at the Cape.

“Juliet,” he said, as the girlfriends waved their farewells, and drove away, “tell me a little about your arrangements. How long do you stay here? Remember, I know nothing about anything. Your letters were always so short⁠—”

“So short?” interrupted Juliet, making her eyes very round. “Why, I remember distinctly that the very last letter I sent you covered the whole of a sheet of notepaper!”

“Yes, and from its first to its last word was nothing but a description of a young lady’s dress that had excited your wrath at a fancy-dress ball. You did not answer any one of the questions I asked you.”

“That was her fault for wearing such a dress. It was pink chiffon over⁠—”

“Oh, spare me, Juliet, I’ve had it once! Now will you answer my question? When do you return to town?”

But instead of answering him, Juliet fixed her eyes full on his face and said:

“How white and tired you look! What have you been doing with yourself?”

He gave a little forced laugh.

“Well, you know, a sea voyage isn’t always the most exhilarating thing in the world. One gets awfully bored sometimes, shut up from morning till night with the same set of people.”

“I couldn’t stand it for a week even. I should jump into the sea before I was out of sight of the land. Arthur Glynde has written some lovely verses about what he calls the ‘changeful, restless ocean’; but⁠—”

Clive interrupted her impatiently.

“Never mind about what an incipient young poet has written, just tell me, Juliet, what I want to know. When do you go back to town?”

“Oh, but I do mind very much what this special incipient young poet writes, because he brings his verses to me at least twice a week, and reads them aloud. Yet we are friends!”

The last sentence was added in a seriocomic tone, with a marked emphasis on the conjunction.

Clive bit his lip.

“Once more, Juliet, will you⁠—”

“Oh, don’t say it again,” interrupted the girl. “Well, father and Peggy intend returning tomorrow in time for a luncheon somewhere or other. Some of the servants return tonight, because, of course, Mrs. Glynde’s servants are here, and the house isn’t large, and⁠—oh, by the way, wasn’t it kind of Mrs. Glynde to lend her house in this way for the wedding, and to leave her horses and carriages behind⁠—oh!”⁠—here she broke off abruptly, with a little start⁠—“I have an idea, Clive. A lovely one!”

“Let’s have it. Something sensational of course?”

“Of course, or how could it be lovely? It’s just this. Father and Peggy have set their minds on a quiet early dinner tonight, and have made all their arrangements for returning tomorrow. Now, wouldn’t it be delightful to swoop down on them and insist⁠—yes, insist⁠—on going back tonight? Oh, the battle-royal there would be between me and Peggy! And I should be sure to carry the day. They’re both tired out limp as can be with the fuss of the wedding, and I feel as lively as a cricket and equal to anything.”

“I believe it! But if I were you I wouldn’t go out of my way to have battles-royal with Lady Culvers. They’ll come without any seeking, depend upon it. No, let your father have his dinner in peace tonight. There’s ever so much I want to talk to you about⁠—no end of adventures to tell you. Let us go for a stroll in the orchard⁠—that is the orchard over there, isn’t it?⁠—and then we can talk without fear of interruption.”

But if he had no end of adventures to relate, assuredly she did not hear them that evening as they strolled in the golden haze of the slanting sunlight among the low-growing apple and pear-trees.

“Now I must be on my guard against compliments,” Juliet had said to herself as, side by side, they wandered along the narrow walks.

Her fears were needless. Compliments of the lover-like kind were evidently as far from his thoughts as adventures; for, from the time they swung back the orchard-gate till the clanging of the dressing-bell sent them back to the house, his talk was wholly and solely of one person, one thing⁠—Ida, and her choice of a husband.

In fact, his conversation was simply a continuation of the one begun in the arbour in the early part of the afternoon. His questions were so many and so minute that Juliet at last threw back her head, held her chin very high in the air, and surveyed him with half-closed eyes, as she was in the habit of surveying her stepmother when catechised by her on matters which the wilful girl deemed outside parental jurisdiction.

“Really, Clive,” she said at length, “if you had Ida’s welfare so much at heart you should have managed to arrive a day or two sooner, and have cross-questioned her yourself as to Sefton’s character and the state of her feelings towards him. I can only repeat that Sefton seemed to me very delightful, and I don’t think Ida will ever feel dull with such a charming companion. I don’t know what you mean by being ‘devoted to him.’ She certainly was never enthusiastic in his praises. But then, as you know, Ida and I both take our love affairs calmly.”

While they had been talking, the sun had sunk behind a bank of apricot clouds, and the golden haze which had formed, so to speak, the atmosphere in which they had been walking, had changed in subtle mystic fashion to the silvery mist of twilight.

The clanging of the dressing-bell intercepted Clive’s reply.

With the sound of the bell came the crunch of carriage wheels along the gravelled drive.

“Visitors! How delightful!” cried Juliet. “Goodbye, after all, to the quiet dinner father was counting on. Could anything have happened more propitiously?”

But when they rounded the corner of the house and came in sight of the front door her delight changed to amazement, for there, descending from the carriage, was no chance guest, but the bridegroom of the morning, Captain Culvers himself.