But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.
Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony grief.
Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness--poor John was doubtless now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.
Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.
*CHAPTER III*
*SIBYL AT SILCHESTER*
They had ridden over from opposite directions--he from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of early Christian Britain was then--and now--only marked by two-thirds of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees. There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest--waving fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead--unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and its churchyard.
On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.
Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.
Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.
_Roger_ (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago--a little filled out perhaps.... And _this_ is how we meet. How _utterly_ different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh _how_ you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say _I_ didn't write--when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry--and _now_ I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden--I suppose it was _you_! And this is what women call _fidelity_!"
_Sibyl_ (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case--not mere romantic school girls--they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and _very_ unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years--I should never again get such a chance ... and I really _do_ like Lord Silchester, you don't know _how_ kind he can be--and you can't _really_ care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even _wrote_ to me...."
_Roger_: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the _World_ ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "_Missionary_ meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."
_Sibyl_: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I _did_ post that _World_ to you and got Gerry to address it--and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But _do_ let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I _must_ get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming--she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "_Damn_ her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I _am_ sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find _heaps_ of girls, _much_ nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things--I was so young when you went away--I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their--I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)
_Roger_: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."
_Sibyl_: "Well! I _did_ think I might, and _not_ selfishly. There's papa--more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be able to marry for _ever_ so long...."
(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")
_Sibyl_: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a year, _if_ you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I should have to come home. I _don't_ like roughing it, I should _dislike_ hot countries; and I _hate_ black people.... No, Roger ... dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll--I'll find some really _nice_ girl to marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government--aren't you glad that _horrid_ old Gladstone's _gone_?--He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him, once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from Sibyl's _mariage de convenance_. He'd be _hanged_ if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham----