'Do they?'
'They say: 'I know I could have kept up longer', or, 'my buckle broke', all to themselves, when they break down running.'
'And you have noticed that?'
'And, Miss Middleton, I don't wish you were a boy, but I should like to live near you all my life and be a gentleman. I'm coming with Miss Dale this evening to stay at the Hall and be looked after, instead of stopping with her cousin who takes care of her father. Perhaps you and I'll play chess at night.'
'At night you will go to bed, Crossjay.'
'Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He says I'm an authority on birds' eggs. I can manage rabbits and poultry. Isn't a farmer a happy man? But he doesn't marry ladies. A cavalry officer has the best chance.'
'But you are going to be a naval officer.'
'I don't know. It's not positive. I shall bring my two dormice, and make them perform gymnastics on the dinnertable. They're such dear little things. Naval officers are not like Sir Willoughby.'
'No, they are not,' said Clara, 'they give their lives to their country.'
'And then they're dead,' said Crossjay.
Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she could have spoken.
She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Crossjay pointed very secretly in the direction of the double- blossom wild-cherry. Coming within gaze of the stem, she beheld Vernon stretched at length, reading, she supposed; asleep, she discovered: his finger in the leaves of a book; and what book? She had a curiosity to know the title of the book he would read beneath these boughs, and grasping Crossjay's hand fast she craned her neck, as one timorous of a fall in peeping over chasms, for a glimpse of the page; but immediately, and still with a bent head, she turned her face to where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than summer-cloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clustered so thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the beauty of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her to earth. Her reflection was: 'He must be good who loves to be and sleep beneath the branches of this tree!' She would rather have clung to her first impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soaring into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in innumerable columns; but the thought of it was no recovery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child. The sensation of happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory, and would have been had not her present disease of the longing for happiness ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence. The reflection took root. 'He must be good…!' That reflection vowed to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, it presented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she would not have had it absent though it robbed her.
She looked down. Vernon was dreamily looking up.
She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better not wake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their previous chase, and she be the hound and he the hare. Crossjay fetched a magnificent start. On his glancing behind he saw Miss Middleton walking listlessly, with a hand at her side.
'There's a regular girl!' said he in some disgust; for his theory was, that girls always have something the matter with them to spoil a game.
Chapter XII
Miss Middleton And Mr. Vernon Whitford
Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze, at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize awhile with common sense, and take it for a vision after the eyes have regained direction of the mind. Vernon did so until the plastic vision interwound with reality alarmingly. This is the embrace of a Melusine who will soon have the brain if she is encouraged. Slight dalliance with her makes the very diminutive seem as big as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled his throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail: it was her face he had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased from his reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for readmission. There was little for a man of humble mind toward the sex to think of in the fact of a young lady's bending rather low to peep at him asleep, except that the poise of her slender figure, between an air of spying and of listening, vividly recalled his likening of her to the Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the open air provokes your tiptoe curiosity. Men, it is known, have in that state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are bestowed on them, they are teased by a vapourish rapture; what has happened to them the poor fellows barely divine: they have a crazy step from that day. But a vision is not so distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and return to it, play at rich and poor with it, and are not to be summoned before your laws and rules for secreting it in our treasury. Besides, it is the golden key of all the possible; new worlds expand beneath the dawn it brings us. Just outside reality, it illumines, enriches and softens real things; — and to desire it in preference to the simple fact is a damning proof of enervation.
Such was Vernon's winding up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under. Which of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much vanity to trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not gigantic. Especially be it remarked, that he was a man of quick pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental fen-mist. He had tried it and knew that nonsense is to be walked off.
Near the end of the park young Crossjay overtook him, and after acting the pumped one a trifle more than needful, cried: 'I say, Mr. Whitford, there's Miss Middleton with her handkerchief out.'
'What for, my lad?' said Vernon.
'I'm sure I don't know. All of a sudden she bumped down. And, look what fellows girls are! — here she comes as if nothing had happened, and I saw her feel at her side.'
Clara was shaking her head to express a denial. 'I am not at all unwell,' she said, when she came near. 'I guessed Crossjay's business in running up to you; he's a good-for-nothing, officious boy. I was tired, and rested for a moment.'
Crossjay peered at her eyelids. Vernon looked away and said: 'Are you too tired for a stroll?'
'Not now.'
'Shall it be brisk?'
'You have the lead.'
He led at a swing of the legs that accelerated young Crossjay's to the double, but she with her short, swift, equal steps glided along easily on a fine by his shoulder, and he groaned to think that of all the girls of earth this one should have been chosen for the position of fine lady.
'You won't tire me,' said she, in answer to his look.
'You remind me of the little Piedmontese Bersaglieri on the march.'
'I have seen them trotting into Como from Milan.'
'They cover a quantity of ground in a day, if the ground's flat. You want another sort of step for the mountains.'
'I should not attempt to dance up.'
'They soon tame romantic notions of them.'
'The mountains tame luxurious dreams, you mean. I see how they are conquered. I can plod. Anything to be high up!'
'Well, there you have the secret of good work: to plod on and still keep the passion fresh.'
'Yes, when we have an aim in view.'
'We always have one.'
'Captives have?'
'More than the rest of us.'
Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? What aim in view have these most woeful captives? Horror shrouds it, and shame reddens through the folds to tell of innermost horror.
