"Your aunt goes to-morrow?" he said.
Marjorie admitted it.
"I wish I could talk to her more. She's so inspiring."
"You know of our little excursion for Friday?" he asked after a pause.
She had not heard. Friday was Theodore's birthday; she knew it only too well because she had had to part with her stamp collection—which very luckily had chanced to get packed and come to Buryhamstreet—to meet its demand. Mr. Magnet explained he had thought it might be fun to give a picnic in honour of the anniversary.
"How jolly of you!" said Marjorie.
"There's a pretty bit of river between Wamping and Friston Hanger—I've wanted you to see it for a long time, and Friston Hanger church has the prettiest view. The tower gets the bend of the river."
He told her all he meant to do as if he submitted his plans for her approval. They would drive to Wamping and get a very comfortable little steam launch one could hire there. Wintersloan was coming down again; an idle day of this kind just suited his temperament. Theodore would like it, wouldn't he?
"Theodore will think he is King of Surrey!"
"I'll have a rod and line if he wants to fish. I don't want to forget anything. I want it to be his day really and truly."
The slightest touch upon the pathetic note? She could not tell.
But that evening brought Marjorie nearer to loving Magnet than she had ever been. Before she went to sleep that night she had decided he was quite a tolerable person again; she had been too nervous and unjust with him. After all, his urgency and awkwardness had been just a part of his sincerity. Perhaps the faint doubt whether he would make his request again gave the zest of uncertainty to his devotion. Of course, she told herself, he would ask again. And then the blissful air of limitless means she might breathe. The blessed release....
She was suddenly fast asleep.
§ 12
Friday was after all not so much Theodore's day as Mr. Magnet's.
Until she found herself committed there was no shadow of doubt in Marjorie's mind of what she meant to do. "Before I see you again," said Aunt Plessington at the parting kiss, "I hope you'll have something to tell me." She might have been Hymen thinly disguised as an aunt, waving from the departing train. She continued by vigorous gestures and unstinted display of teeth and a fluttering handkerchief to encourage Marjorie to marry Mr. Magnet, until the curve of the cutting hid her from view....
Fortune favoured Mr. Magnet with a beautiful day, and the excursion was bright and successful from the outset. It was done well, and what perhaps was more calculated to impress Marjorie, it was done with lavish generosity. From the outset she turned a smiling countenance upon her host. She did her utmost to suppress a reviving irrational qualm in her being, to maintain clearly and simply her overnight decision, that he should propose again and that she should accept him.
Yet the festival was just a little dreamlike in its quality to her perceptions. She found she could not focus clearly on its details.
Two waggonettes came from Wamping; there was room for everybody and to spare, and Wamping revealed itself a pleasant small country town with stocks under the market hall, and just that tint of green paint and that loafing touch the presence of a boating river gives.
The launch was brilliantly smart with abundant crimson cushions and a tasselled awning, and away to the left was a fine old bridge that dated in its essentials from Plantagenet times.
They started with much whistling and circling, and went away up river under overhanging trees that sometimes swished the funnel, splashing the meadow path and making the reeds and bulrushes dance with their wash. They went through a reluctant lock, steamed up a long reach, they passed the queerly painted Potwell Inn with its picturesque group of poplars and its absurd new notice-board of "Omlets." ... Theodore was five stone of active happiness; he and the pseudo-twins, strictly under his orders as the universal etiquette of birthdays prescribes, clambered round and round the boat, clutching the awning rail and hanging over the water in an entirely secure and perilous looking manner. No one, unless his father happened to be upset by something, would check him, he knew, on this auspicious day. Mr. Magnet sat with the grey eye on Marjorie and listened a little abstractedly to Mr. Pope, who was telling very fully what he would say if the Liberal party were to ask his advice at the present juncture. Mrs. Pope attended discreetly, and Daffy and Marjorie with a less restrained interest, to Mr. Wintersloan, who showed them how to make faces out of a fist tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, how to ventriloquize, how to conjure with halfpence—which he did very amusingly—and what the buttons on a man's sleeve were for; Theodore clambering at his back discovered what he was at, and by right of birthday made him do all the faces and tricks over again. Then Mr. Wintersloan told stories of all the rivers along which, he said, he had travelled in steamboats; the Rhine, the Danube, the Hoogly and the Fall River, and particularly how he had been bitten by a very young crocodile. "It's the smell of the oil brings it all back to me," he said. "And the kind of sway it gives you."
He made sinuous movements of his hand, and looked at Marjorie with that wooden yet expressive smile.
Friston Hanger proved to be even better than Wamping. It had a character of its own because it was built very largely of a warm buff coloured local rock instead of the usual brick, and the outhouses at least of the little inn at which they landed were thatched. Most of the cottages had casement windows with diamond panes, and the streets were cobbled and very up-and-down hill. The place ran to high walls richly suggestive of hidden gardens, overhung by big trees and pierced by secretive important looking doors. And over it all rose an unusually big church, with a tall buttressed tower surmounted by a lantern of pierced stone.
"We'll go through the town and look at the ruins of the old castle beyond the church," said Mr. Magnet to Marjorie, "and then I want you to see the view from the church tower."
And as they went through the street, he called her attention again to the church tower in a voice that seemed to her to be inexplicably charged with significance. "I want you to go up there," he said.
"How about something to eat, Mr. Magnet?" remarked Theodore suddenly, and everybody felt a little surprised when Mr. Magnet answered: "Who wants things to eat on your birthday, Theodore?"
But they saw the joke of that when they reached the castle ruins and found in the old tilting yard, with its ivy-covered arch framing a view of the town and stream, a table spread with a white cloth that shone in the sunshine, glittering with glass and silver and gay with a bowl of salad and flowers and cold pies and a jug of claret-cup and an ice pail—a silver pail! containing two promising looking bottles, in the charge of two real live waiters, in evening dress as waiters should be, but with straw hats to protect them from the sun and weather. "Oh!" cried Mrs. Pope, "what a splendid idea, Mr. Magnet," when the destination of the feast was perfectly clear, and even Theodore seemed a little overawed—almost as if he felt his birthday was being carried too far and might provoke a judgment later. Manifestly Mr. Magnet must have ordered this in London, and have had it sent down, waiters and all! Theodore knew he was a very wonderful little boy in spite of the acute criticism of four devoted sisters, and Mr. Magnet had noticed him before at times, but this was, well, rather immense! "Look at the pie-crusts, old man!" And on the pie-crusts, and on the icing of the cake, their munificent host had caused to be done in little raised letters of dough and chocolate the word "Theodore."