“Too delighted—singing for joy,” said little Alice, in a rapture at his story of the life that was opening to them, “oh, tell more.”
“Well—yes—and you’ll have such pretty flowers.”
“Oh, yes—flowers—I love them—not expensive ones—for we are poor, you know; and you’ll see how prudent I’ll be—but annuals, they are so cheap—and I’ll sow them myself, and I’ll have the most beautiful you ever saw. Don’t you love them, Ry?”
“Nothing so pretty, darling, on earth, except yourself.”
“What is my Ry looking out for?”
Charles Fairfield had more than once put his head out of the window, looking as well as he could along the road in advance of the horses.
“Oh, nothing of any consequence, I only wanted to see that our man had got on with the horse, he might as well knock up the old woman, and see that things were, I was going to say, comfortable, but less miserable than they might be.”
He laughed faintly as he said this, and he looked at his watch, as if he did not want her to see him consult it, and then he said—
“Well, and you were saying—oh—about the flowers—annuals—Yes.”
And so they resumed. But somehow it seemed to Alice that his ardour and his gaiety were subsiding, that his thoughts were away, and pale care stealing over him like the chill of death. Again she might have remembered the ghostly Wilhelm, who grew more ominous and spectral as he and his bride neared the goal of their nocturnal journey.
“I don’t think you hear me, Ry, and something has gone wrong,” she said at last in a tone of disappointment, that rose even to alarm.
“Oh! tell me, Charlie, if there is anything you have not told me yet? you’re afraid of frightening me.”
“Nothing, nothing, I assure you, darling; what nonsense you do talk, you poor foolish little bird. No, I mean nothing, but I’ve had a sort of quarrel with the old man; you need not have written that letter, or at least it would have been better if you had told me about it.”
“But, darling, I couldn’t, I had no opportunity, and I could not leave Wyvern, where he had been so good to me all my life, without a few words to thank him, and to entreat his pardon; you’re not angry, darling, with your poor little bird?”
“Angry, my foolish little wife, you little know your Ry; he loves his bird too well to be ever angry with her for anything, but it was unlucky, at least his getting it just when he did, for, you may suppose, it did not improve his temper.”
“Very angry, I’m afraid, was he? But though he’s so fiery, he’s generous; I’m sure he’ll forgive us, in a little time, and it will all be made up; don’t you think so?”
“No, darling, I don’t. Take this hill quietly, will you?” he called from the window to the driver; “you may walk them a bit, there’s near two miles to go still.”
Here was another anxious look out, and he drew his head in, muttering, and then he laid his hand on hers, and looked in her face and smiled, and he said—
“They are such fools, aren’t they? and—about the old man at Wyvern—oh, no, you mistake him, he’s not a man to forgive; we can reckon on nothing but mischief from that quarter, and, in fact, he knows all about it, for he chose to talk about you as if he had a right to scold, and that I couldn’t allow, and I told him so, and that you were my wife, and that no man living should say a word against you.”
“My own brave Ry; but oh! what a grief that I should have made this quarrel; but I love you a thousand times more; oh, my darling, we are everything now to one another.”
“Ho! never mind,” he exclaimed with a sudden alacrity, “there he is. All right, Tom, is it?”
“All right, sir,” answered the man whom he had despatched before them on the horse, and who was now at the roadside still mounted.
“He has ridden back to tell us she’ll have all ready for our arrival—oh, no, darling,” he continued gaily, “don’t think for a moment I care a farthing whether he’s pleased or angry. He never liked me, and he cannot do us any harm, none in the world, and sooner or later Wyvern must be mine;” and he kissed her and smiled with the ardour of a man whose spirits are, on a sudden, quite at ease.
And as they sat, hand pressed in hand, she sidled closer to him, with the nestling instinct of the bird, as he called her, and dreamed that if there were a heaven on earth, it would be found in such a life as that on which she was entering, where she would have him “all to herself.” And she felt now, as they diverged into the steeper road and more sinuous, that ascended for a mile the gentle wooded uplands to the grange of Carwell, that every step brought her nearer to Paradise.
Here is something paradoxical; is it? that this young creature should be so in love with a man double her own age. I have heard of cases like it, however, and I have read, in some old French writer—I have forgot who he is—the rule laid down with solemn audacity, that there is no such through-fire-and-water, desperate love as that of a girl for a man past forty. Till the hero has reached that period of autumnal glory, youth and beauty can but half love him. This encouraging truth is amplified and emphasized in the original. I extract its marrow
