He looked at her ruefully, ready to believe himself disdained. There was mockery in her smile, but there was friendliness too. Amused she might be, and he did not grudge her that: but she was not displeased. Thinking that her air of mischief was perhaps designed to wean him without unkindness from his hopes of her, ‘I doubt it is impossible,’ he surmised, ‘that you should care for me.’
‘Is it?’ said she, still smiling.
Impetuously, with sudden hope, he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you mean, can you mean . . . ?’
‘Nay, sir, but I perfectly agree with you. It is impossible that I should care.’ He withdrew his hand hastily. A flush mounted his cheek. But before he could find words she went on: ‘And even did I disagree, it would not become me to contradict you, would it, Mr Marden? . . . Oh Jack, what a precious booby you are!’ He was at her side again, with his hands upon her. She leaned back, laughing up at him.
There was tenderness already kindled in her teasing eyes, and with the first kiss it became a clear light, and the laughter vanished from them, leaving only the sweet pain of love to reinforce the mute language of her lips. In the touch of those lips, in the light of those eyes, he found wonder and assuaging and the rapture of homecoming. The darkness was cast out of him; his exile from some long-lost and long-forgotten paradise was at an end; he had lost his small lonely self, had found release and fulfilment, in this largeness of love; his spirit and hers mingled with their mingling breath. And now, with the light of confessed love shining in her face, she was a new Celia: a surprised, happy, trustful child, born into a new world. They gazed at each other, and every tick of the clock added another coin to the heaped treasure. Each face, in the other’s sight, was a country at once new and familiar: every small discovery was greeted, in their hearts, with a cry of startled recognition: It’s you, you! Their pulses beat to that music. The wonder was less that they had found each other than that they had ever been made twain at all, so close now, it seemed, was their communion.
‘You have another name, haven’t you?’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Celia Ann.’
‘Celia is cool, and Ann is kind, and both are lovely . . .’
‘And both of us are yours,’ she assured him, ‘if . . .’
‘If!’ he exclaimed, in mock reproach. ‘I’ll have no ifs.’
‘If you are sure you love me,’ she said slipping away from him, ‘and if,’ she added, and with no smile to cloak the warning, ‘if I am myself sure of it.’
‘My dearest,’ he protested solemnly, ‘I am your faithful lover till death, and beyond. You cannot doubt me.’
‘I cannot doubt,’ said she coolly, seating herself at some little distance from him, ‘that you are in a mood now to be faithful. And indeed I heartily wish you may prove so, Mr Marden.’
Mr Marden! Was he become Mr Marden again! He stared in alarm. ‘Celia! My dear!’
A smile reassured him, but she would not let him approach her. She had resumed possession of herself, and the unexpectedness of her demeanour delighted as well as disconcerted him. ‘How cruel you are,’ he said fondly. His enthralment was complete.
Time passed quickly at Fedrum, but Jack Marden and Celia, living in their new world, the world of each other, took small account of its passing. Sooner or later, as he knew, Marden must go back to his Fee, resume supervision of the estate and make arrangements for his wedding, which Celia, without committing herself to a precise date, had promised should not be delayed unduly. He was aware of possessing, in Raphe Gandy, a steward on whose riper wisdom he could depend more securely than on his own, so that a day or two more or less of absence made no great matter. Meanwhile, at Maiden Holt, Brother Raphe was far from dull. Despite his newly assumed duties, which he performed as punctually as might be, he still found occasion for the busy idleness, the fruitful meditation, that was his life’s habit. In this he was aided, against his will and far more than he suspected, by the contriving of Mrs Dewdney the housekeeper, who, being deeply shocked at the sight of His Reverence with sacking tied round his middle and secular mop and pail in his hand, did everything in her power, which was considerable, to frustrate his industrious intentions. So on the fifth day of his stewardship he was able to devote a large part of the morning to the composition of a letter: