He was shouting, and Pope was standing now and shouting too. "Leave my house, sir. Get out of my house, sir. You come here to insult me, sir!"
A sudden horror of himself and Pope seized the younger man. He stiffened and became silent. Never in his life before had he been in a bawling quarrel. He was amazed and ashamed.
"Leave my house!" cried Pope with an imperious gesture towards the door.
Trafford made an absurd effort to save the situation. "I am sorry, sir, I lost my temper. I had no business to abuse you——"
"You've said enough."
"I apologise for that. I've done what I could to manage things decently."
"Will you go, sir?" threatened Mr. Pope.
"I'm sorry I came," said Trafford.
Mr. Pope took his stand with folded arms and an expression of weary patience.
"I did what I could," said Trafford at the door.
The staircase and passage were deserted. The whole house seemed to have caught from Mr. Pope that same quality of seeing him out....
"Confound it!" said Trafford in the street. "How on earth did all this happen?"...
He turned eastward, and then realized that work would be impossible that day. He changed his direction for Kensington Gardens, and in the flower-bordered walk near the Albert Memorial he sat down on a chair, and lugged at his moustache and wondered. He was extraordinarily perplexed, as well as ashamed and enraged by this uproar. How had it begun? Of course, he had been stupidly abusive, but the insult to his father had been unendurable. Did a man of Pope's sort quite honestly believe that stuff? If he didn't, he deserved kicking. If he did, of course he was entitled to have it cleared up. But then he wouldn't listen! Was there any case for the man at all? Had he, Trafford, really put the thing so that Pope would listen? He couldn't remember. What was it he had said in reply to Pope? What was it exactly that Pope had said?
It was already vague; it was a confused memory of headlong words and answers; what wasn't vague, what rang in his ears still, was the hoarse discord of two shouting voices.
Could Marjorie have heard?
§ 9
So Marjorie carried her point. She wasn't to be married tamely after the common fashion which trails home and all one's beginnings into the new life. She was to be eloped with, romantically and splendidly, into a glorious new world. She walked on shining clouds, and if she felt some remorse, it was a very tender and satisfactory remorse, and with a clear conviction below it that in the end she would be forgiven.
They made all their arrangements elaborately and carefully. Trafford got a license to marry her; she was to have a new outfit from top to toe to go away with on that eventful day. It accumulated in the shop, and they marked the clothes M.T. She was watched, she imagined, but as her father did not know she had seen Trafford, nothing had been said to her, and no attempt was made to prohibit her going out and coming in. Trafford entered into the conspiracy with a keen interest, a certain amusement, and a queer little feeling of distaste. He hated to hide any act of his from any human being. The very soul of scientific work, you see, is publication. But Marjorie seemed to justify all things, and when his soul turned against furtiveness, he reminded it that the alternative was bawling.
One eventful afternoon he went to the college, and Marjorie slipped round by his arrangement to have tea with Mrs. Trafford....
He returned about seven in a state of nervous apprehension; came upstairs two steps at a time, and stopped breathless on the landing. He gulped as he came in, and his eyes were painfully eager. "She's been?" he asked.
But Marjorie had won Mrs. Trafford.
"She's been," she answered. "Yes, she's all right, my dear."
"Oh, mother!" he said.
"She's a beautiful creature, dear—and such a child! Oh! such a child! And God bless you, dear, God bless you....
"I think all young people are children. I want to take you both in my arms and save you.... I'm talking nonsense, dear."
He kissed her, and she clung to him as if he were something too precious to release.
§ 10
The elopement was a little complicated by a surprise manœuvre of Mrs. Pope's. She was more alive to the quality of the situation, poor lady! than her daughter suspected; she was watching, dreading, perhaps even furtively sympathizing and trying to arrange—oh! trying dreadfully to arrange. She had an instinctive understanding of the deep blue quiet in Marjorie's eyes, and the girl's unusual tenderness with Daffy and the children. She peeped under the blind as Marjorie went out, noted the care in her dress, watched her face as she returned, never plumbed her with a question for fear of the answer. She did not dare to breathe a hint of her suspicions to her husband, but she felt things were adrift in swift, smooth water, and all her soul cried out for delay. So presently there came a letter from Cousin Susan Pendexter at Plymouth. The weather was beautiful, Marjorie must come at once, pack up and come and snatch the last best glow of the dying autumn away there in the west. Marjorie's jerry-built excuses, her manifest chagrin and reluctance, confirmed her mother's worst suspicions.
She submitted and went, and Mrs. Pope and Syd saw her off.
I do not like to tell how a week later Marjorie explained herself and her dressing-bag and a few small articles back to London from Plymouth. Suffice it that she lied desperately and elaborately. Her mother had never achieved such miracles of mis-statement, and she added a vigour that was all her own. It is easier to sympathize with her than exonerate her. She was in a state of intense impatience, and—what is strange—extraordinarily afraid that something would separate her from her lover if she did not secure him. She was in a fever of determination. She could not eat or sleep or attend to anything whatever; she was occupied altogether with the thought of assuring herself to Trafford. He towered in her waking vision over town and land and sea.
He didn't hear the lies she told; he only knew she was magnificently coming back to him. He met her at Paddington, a white-faced, tired, splendidly resolute girl, and they went to the waiting registrar's forthwith.
She bore herself with the intentness and dignity of one who is taking the cardinal step in life. They kissed as though it was a symbol, and were keenly business-like about cabs and luggage and trains. At last they were alone in the train together. They stared at one another.
"We've done it, Mrs. Trafford!" said Trafford.
She snapped like an over-taut string, crumpled, clung to him, and without a word was weeping passionately in his arms.
It surprised him that she could weep as she did, and still more to see her as she walked by his side along the Folkestone pier, altogether recovered, erect, a little flushed and excited like a child. She seemed to miss nothing. "Oh, smell the sea!" she said, "Look at the lights! Listen to the swish of the water below." She watched the luggage spinning on the wire rope of the giant crane, and he watched her face and thought how beautiful she was. He wondered why her eyes could sometimes be so blue and sometimes dark as night.
The boat cleared the pier and turned about and headed for France. They walked the upper deck together and stood side by side, she very close to him.
"I've never crossed the sea before," she said.
"Old England," she whispered. "It's like leaving a nest. A little row of lights and that's all the world I've ever known, shrunken to that already."
Presently they went forward and peered into the night.