The Matchmaker (40 page)

Jean was sure that Alda had considered nothing of the sort, for she was so anxious to bring off her scheme that she had looked no further than the wedding-day. I should be left alone with a strange man, thought Jean, sighing, and shutting up the book in which she had read not a word for the past twenty minutes, and if I did refuse him, she would be so cross.

Walking homeward across the meadows, Mr. Waite gave his
full
attention to his decision. If he did not marry Jean, some fortune-hunter would; he had feared this since the day of their first meeting and, from a casual remark once made by Alda—Mrs. Lucie-Browne—he knew that she feared it too. He had not felt so strongly upon any subject but the Egg Board for years: Jean needed protection from prowling males, the firm needed a man’s guiding hand, and he would supply both.

She herself presented no difficulties. Her nature was gentle and attractive, and unspoiled by silly ideas about a woman managing her own affairs. It was a long time since he had met a girl who approached so closely to his Ideal, and owing to the extraordinary but fortunate circumstance that no one had so far succeeded in Snapping Her Up, she was fancy-free (at least, he presumed that she was fancy-free; she wore no ring; she never dropped hints or blushed or anything) and his for the asking! He would wait for a few weeks, until their acquaintanceship had ripened into a solid friendship, and then he would speak.

Owing to his rapid pace across the grass and his confident thoughts, Mr. Waite’s expression was unusually cheerful as he entered his dark and chilly cottage, and even the look which the chickens gave him when he brought their food half an hour late could not sober him. The vague sensation that had troubled him earlier in the evening, that there was some obstacle in the way of his proposing to Jean, some reason why he should explain something at length and carefully to her, had passed completely away.

That night Fabrio lay upon his side in his hard bed, wide awake, and staring into the dimness that was less than completely dark because of the light from the spring moon. It was nearly midnight: the uneasy quiet of the long hut, filled with tainted air, was broken by snores and sometimes the heavy movements of a restlessly sleeping man. Fabrio’s heart beat fast, and now and again he sighed, but it was with joy. He had decided: he
would
ask Sylvia to be his wife. She did not hate him; she would not have smiled at him so kindly only this evening unless she liked him; perhaps she even loved him, and that coldness, that rough way of talking, that fury when he kissed her, had been assumed to hide her love. Girls often did that. And she would be glad when he asked her; girls always were. And prisoners often married the women of the country where they were held captive: had he not seen half a dozen such cases in the newspapers?

It was true that he had no money beside the four and eight-pence halfpenny guarded for him by Mr. Hoadley, but, Mother of God! he was young, he was strong, he knew how to work, and when he returned to Italy there would be work for everyone. It was a pity to disappoint Maria, who had no doubt begun to hope, after all these letters, that he would marry
her
, but a man had to marry the one he wanted, and he wanted Sylvia.

He would creep about no longer, quiet and wretched; he would sing as he worked and show her that he was one to be admired, and when the time of harvest came, and they worked side by side in the fields under the hot sun, he would ask her to be his wife. He sighed tremulously, and muttered a prayer, and fell asleep at last with his tousled chestnut head thrust into the pillow in a way that would have stifled anyone but a foreigner.

A young man lounged in a great basketwork chair in the gardens of a club on the other side of the world, his eyes shaded by a linen hat from the fierce sun of a South African morning, a tall icy drink by his side, and an unopened copy of a newspaper, whose wrapper bore English stamps, on his knees.

He had slightly prominent greenish eyes, a big nose, a wide mouth that often laughed to show good teeth, and an easy, casual, gay manner that might make a sensitive heart doubtful of
holding him down
. Presently he began to read the newspaper, and presently he saw in it a piece of news that he re-read. When
he
had finished with the paper, he yawned, and pushed it aside, stretched, and pulled his hat further over his eyes, then opened a writing-case and dashed off a letter.

We must now return to Sussex.

ALDA CONTRIVED TO
have her talk with Ronald about Louise and Roman Catholicism, but she found him so agreeably impressed by what he called “this improvement in the children” that he was inclined to make light of Louise’s enthusiasm, and when Alda admitted that she had not noticed any change for the worse in the child’s character, he advised her not to take the matter seriously. He broke the good news that he was actually in negotiation for a house in Ironborough which might be theirs by the autumn; a secret that he had kept until now, when the arrangements had reached a hopefully advanced stage, and he pointed out that when the family left Sussex the influence of the convent must disappear.

Alda was left with a sensation of slight bafflement. She was pleased, of course, that he was pleased, and of course she liked Louise and Jenny to be cheerful and busy and progressing, but she wished that they could have been equally cheerful and busy without going to school. School had undoubtedly taken them away from herself. They still loved her dearly and liked to be with her, but she was no longer the foreground and the background too; the Sisters, and Damaris Bernais, and a convent wit and daredevil named June Wilson, were the foreground, and had been for weeks. Alda resented this; refused to admit her feeling to herself; and took to making much of Meg, who received her attentions placidly.

They made of the unexpected fortnight’s leave a second
honeymoon
, even going to Ironborough for some days to visit Alda’s people and inspect the house for which Ronald was negotiating. Fine weather and the knowledge that the children were safe and happy in Jean’s care sent them off on their journey content.

Jean was relieved to see them go. Ronald had insisted upon the same old creature who slaved for Mr. Waite coming in three times a week to clean Pine Cottage, and Jean felt it tiresome that at this time, just when she wanted to take a detached view of Mr. Waite, she should have to listen to a highly undetached running commentary upon him from old Miss Dodder (no relation, as she was careful to explain, to the feckless half-wit Dodders before mentioned); the trouble he took with they birds, up half the night with they; his kindness to Miss Dodder herself, paying her half-wages when she had the sciatica; so pleased with anything you done for him; so well-spoken; not like some people; and so on. Even so, thought Jean, did Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper at Pemberley, praise Mr. Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet, but the latter knew (or thought she knew) just where she stood: she did not have to make up her mind whether to accept the man or not, for she had already refused him.

Jean’s own indecision had the effect of presenting Mr. Waite to her in a more romantic light: she now coloured when she saw his tall form at a distance digging in the rough vegetable plot surrounding his cottage, or coming down in the lane to give the children their evening’s lesson, and sometimes a glance from him or his casual touch would cause her heart to flutter.

Mr. Waite observed the colour and suspected the flutter, and was pleased. He had started upon his courtship, and as the days went by he made his intentions plain; he did not intend that she should misunderstand him. He sought her out at unexpected times with a present of four eggs or a colossal cabbage; he waylaid her as she was crossing the meadows with her basket of small purchases and offered her
In Touch with the Transcendent
, which she had not the courage to decline, and more than once
after
the children were in bed he strolled across on some pretext of lending a newspaper or returning an electric torch and lingered by the gate (too careful of her reputation to enter the house) chatting with her and smoking a manly pipe and looking, in his rough country clothes and tall boots, an attractive figure.

If only his nature had been warmed by laughter and rashness! if only he had not been so solemn, so careful, so disapproving, so conventional, so stiff, how easily she could have loved him! But she was a little afraid of him. In what kind of a house would she have to
settle down
with him if she accepted him? What orderly, trim, organised establishment in which no one ever thumped on the piano or sprawled or rearranged the furniture? She felt like a small sheep being rounded up by a large, handsome, purposeful sheepdog.

He, for his part, found it easier to pay her attentions because he was not in love. He had never, to his knowledge, been in love, but throughout his forty-odd years there had been certain women of whom he had strongly disapproved, and when he thought of these women, who all belonged to the same type, he always congratulated himself upon having avoided “getting caught,” and that was as far as his thoughts ever carried him. Mr. Waite, in short, was a Sleeping Beauty: upon such sleepers of both sexes the awakening kiss often has unexpected results.

He was relieved that Major and Mrs. Lucie-Browne were away just now, for he preferred to carry out his courtship as far as was possible in private. And it was progressing favourably: she showed emotion at his presence and yet she welcomed him; she had returned
In Touch with the Transcendent
with the assurance that it was
a marvellous book
, and she was suitably grateful for the cabbages and the eggs. It did occur to him once or twice to invite her out, but there was nowhere in the neighbourhood that suited his own solid yet rich tastes, formed in a wealthy provincial town during the boom years of the ’2O’s; the pictures he scorned, Brighton considered sordid and flashy and
he
did not choose to spend several pounds on taking her to dine at a roadhouse. Such an action would have seemed to his standard of behaviour slightly insulting; like bribery, like scattering grain before a chicken to lure it into the run. No; she must accept him as his everyday self; and then no one would be able to say afterwards that he deceived her or made out that he was richer or gayer or livelier than he was.

He took the same attitude about compliments. He had always told himself that what he approved in a woman’s appearance was Neatness and No Paint, and he certainly was not going to praise in Jean what he did not approve. He sought about for some part of her to praise; she was always neat; yes, he could truthfully praise that, and so the first compliment he paid her was a grave: “You need not do that; you are always perfectly tidy,” uttered one evening as she glanced in her handbag mirror. A few days later he remarked, in a slightly uncertain tone, that her hair was a pretty colour.

“Gosh, that isn’t its real colour,” answered Miss Hardcastle cheerfully, suppressing a slight impulse to ba-a-a, “it’s brown, really.”

“To match your eyes,” keeping his own fixed steadily upon her. “Why dye it?”

“For fun,” she retorted firmly, determined, on her side, that he should not be
completely
deceived as to her true nature. “Don’t you ever feel you’d like to dye yours?”

She was relieved to hear him give his short laugh, but she knew, as well as if he had told her, that if she married him she would have to give up dyeing her hair.

And all this—her lack of ease with him, her suspicion that he might be proposing to her for her money—was unimportant compared with the fact that he did not come first in her feelings.
There
, Mr. Potter lingered.

Easter fell while Ronald and Alda were still away. Jean bicycled in with the children to Sillingham church on the morning of Easter Sunday, with Meg seated upon a little carrier at the
back
of her own machine. Their ride was a joyful progress along roads white with the dust of a week’s sunshine, through the radiant light of full spring, and on every side such companies and troops of flowers!

The ride began a period of some sixty hours, during which her imagination was invaded by all the blossoms of spring and her nostrils were never empty of their confused exquisite scent, while their curved or hollowed or pointed petals and their stems, supporting round hearts packed with seed, presented themselves in her mind’s eye just before she fell asleep in patterns and single devices of marvellous beauty.

In the afternoon she went out with the children to pick flowers. They roamed across the meadows and entered the woods that covered the low hills; the sunlit slopes left bare by the soldiers who had felled the trees were now high in young bracken, and they pulled up a few stiff fronds, but mostly they picked bluebells and windflowers and daffodils; their hands became stained with saps and juices from the leaves and roots; they picked white and dark violets and tied them in little bunches and tucked them in amidst the bunches of larger flowers, and Meg filled a miniature basket, made for her by Emilio, with orchids and celandines on a bed of dark moss tipped with gold.