Aymer wished for work, but not work of that class. He remembered one golden year spent in London with a friend of his dead father (who had lost his all by horse-racing), where he was permitted to read at will in a magnificent library, and was supplied with money to visit those art-galleries and collections in which his heart delighted. The friend died; the widow had no interest in him, and Aymer returned to the turnips, and sheep. But even in that brief period the impulse had been given; the seed had been sown and had fallen in fertile ground, which gave increase a hundredfold.
The boy—he was but twenty then—was a born genius. He could not help it; it would force him on. What he wanted was books. He could get no money to purchase them; circulating libraries had not yet established agencies upon the open Downs. By a strange contradiction he became a poacher, and the cleverest hand at setting a wire for miles. Tenants were not allowed to shoot in that district, but they might course hares as much as they pleased.
Aymer wired the ground game, sold them to the carriers who went by, and through the carriers got books slowly and one by one from the county town. In this way he bought many of Bohn’s fine series—the finest and most useful, perhaps, ever issued—he read Plato and Aristotle, Livy, Xenophon—the poets, the philosophers, the dramatists of ancient Rome and Greece; and although it was not in their original tongue, the vivid imagination of the man carried him back to their day, and enabled him to realise those stirring scenes, to feel their passions, and comprehend their arguments. He bought also most of the English poets, a few historians, and a large number of scientific works, for he was devoured with an eager curiosity to understand the stars that shone so brilliantly upon those hills—the phenomena of Nature with which he was brought in daily contact. When he had mastered a book, his friends the carriers, who called at the Shepherd’s Bush, took it back to the county town and resold it for half-price, and these small sums went towards fresh purchases.
It may have been that these very untoward circumstances which would, to all appearance, have checked the growth of his mind, actually tended to assist it. He saw—he felt Nature. The wind, that whistled through the grass and sighed in the tops of the dark fir trees, spoke to him in a mystic language. The great sun, in unclouded splendour slowly passing over the wide, endless hills, told him a part of the secret. His books were not read, in the common sense of the term: they were thought through. Not a sentence but was thought over, examined, and its full meaning grasped and firmly imprinted on the memory.
Poor Aymer! How desperately he longed to escape! How the soft summer breeze seemed to woo him onwards he knew not whither! How the sun seemed to beckon, till he fancied he could hear the echo of the surge as it roared on the far-distant beach!
He did escape once—only for a little while, to be forced ignominiously back again, amid the jeers of his acquaintances. This happened before he knew Violet. By dint of catching hares and rabbits, and by selling off an accumulation of books, and by disposing of his gold watch—his only property—he managed to get some twenty pounds, and with that sum went straight to Florence.
It was in spring, just before the warm summer comes, and he revelled in the beauty of Italian skies and landscapes as he travelled. But his destination was the Palazzo, which contains the statue of ideal woman, known as the Venus de Medici. He stood before the living marble, rapt in thought, and then suddenly burst into tears.
This was perhaps childish. He had his faults; he was extremely proud and oversensitive. The sudden transition from the harsh and rude life at World’s End, among the weather-beaten and rough-speaking rustics, to this new world of inexpressible beauty, overcame him. Hastily he brushed those tears away, and recovered himself; but not so quickly as to escape the observation of two sad grey eyes. Inadvertently, as he stood before the statue, he had interfered with the line of sight of a lady who was engaged in sketching. She had paused, and noticing his rapt attention, made no sign that he had interrupted her work. Thus she witnessed his weakness; and being a person of a thoughtful, perhaps too thoughtful, turn, she wondered at and pondered over it.
Day by day Aymer, while his funds lasted and he could stay in Florence, came and stood before the statue, lingering for hours in its close vicinity; so that the artist, as she sketched, had the fullest opportunity of noting the strong contrast between his delicate, intellectual features and slight, tall frame, and the coarse dress he wore. Growing interested, she instructed her attendants to make inquiries, and they easily elicited the name of the stranger, and the place from which he had come.
By a curious coincidence, it so happened that the lady-artist herself was the owner of a family mansion, and moderately large estate but a few miles from Aymer’s home. He was, in fact, perfectly familiar with her name, which was a household word at World’s End, where distinguished names were few; but moving in his low sphere he had never seen her face.
Lady Lechester—Agnes Lechester to her friends—was “lord of herself, that heritage of woe,” and being of an artistic turn of mind, had spent much of her time upon the Continent; another reason being certain unhappy matters connected with the history of the family mansion. She was much struck with the
