Those happy days in lovely Florence passed like a dream. Even by living on a few fruits and a little bread alone, the scanty stock of money he had carried with him could not be made to last forever. Barely a month of pure, unalloyed pleasure—pure in every sense of the term—and poor Aymer, who knew not how to get employment in a foreign city, was obliged to return, and Agnes Lechester saw him no more standing in rapt admiration before the famous statue.
Aymer reached Dover with five shillings in his pocket, and walked the whole of the distance, one hundred and fifty miles, to World’s End, often sleeping out at night under a rick. Slight as he was in frame, he possessed considerable power of enduring fatigue, and had a way of lounging idly along the road, abstracted in thought, and so walking mile after mile, till he woke up at his destination.
They laughed him to scorn at World’s End. The poor fellow wandered about in the daytime on the Downs, hiding in the fir copses, lying on the ancient earthwork entrenchment, and dreaming of his fair Florence, so many hundreds of miles away. He grew dejected and hopeless till he saw Violet. Then in time, the very destiny he deemed so harsh in confining him to that rude spot seemed even superior to the glorious possibilities he had hoped for. For Violet took the place of the marble goddess; yet there never was a beauty less like the Venus de Medici. Lovely as are the ideals men have created for themselves, it sometimes happens that Nature presents us with a rare gem, surpassing those cold conceptions of the mind as far as the sun is above the earth.
II
Violet returned from a long visit to friends near London just about the time that Aymer reached home, weary and footsore, from Dover. Although The Place, as Jason Waldron’s house was called, was but two miles from World’s End, Aymer had never seen her. She was but rarely at home, for Waldron had given her the best education money could buy, and this necessitated much absence from her native hills. But, education and visits over, Violet, with a happy heart, returned to the dear old home at last.
It was on one lovely afternoon in May that Aymer saw her for the first time. He was lying upon the ground hidden in the brake which grew round the hedge of a fir copse on the Downs. Through this copse there ran a narrow green lane or track. He was reading his favourite little book of poetry—one that he always carried in his pocket—the tiny edition of Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets, published by William James Brown, thirty years since, and now out of print.
Somehow the spirit of those sonnets and that peculiar poetry had penetrated into his mind. The little book was annotated on its narrow margin with notes in his own handwriting, and he knew the greater part of it by heart. He had just read the sonnet beginning—
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.
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And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As she belied with false compare,
when the sound of horse’s hoofs made him look up.
A lady, riding on a black horse, had entered the green lane, and was passing slowly at a walk. It was Violet. Waldron. All that English beauty which seemed to pervade the poetry of wonderful Will, to Aymer’s fancy appeared to be hers. She passed him, and was gone, but her presence was left behind.
Aymer could not have analysed her then—if asked, he could have barely recounted the colour of her hair. Yet she dwelt with him—hovered about him; he fed upon the remembrance of her until he had seen her again. By slow degrees he grew to understand the reason of her surpassing loveliness—to note the separate features, to examine the colours and the lines that composed this enchanting picture. A new life dawned upon him—a new worship, so to say.
It happened that Martin Brown had some business to transact with Jason Waldron. Waldron bore the reputation of being a “scholard;” he was known to be comparatively wealthy; he did not mix with the society of World’s End; and he was held in some sort of awe by the rude and uneducated residents in the locality.
Much as he despised that useless Aymer Malet, Martin in his secret heart felt that he was better fitted to meet and talk with Mr. Waldron than himself. Aymer was, therefore, accredited to The Place. He went with no little trepidation, knowing that it was Violet’s home, and sharing to some extent the local hesitation to meet Waldron, who, being an invalid, he had never seen. Mr. Waldron received him with a cordial courtesy, which quickly put him at his ease. When the grey-haired, handsome old man, sitting in his Bath-chair in the shadow of a sycamore tree, extended his hand and said: “I had some slight knowledge of your father, Mr. Malet—he came of a good family,” poor Aymer forgot his coarse dress, and exhibited the bearing of a born gentleman. He could not help admiring the garden in which he found his host. This evidently genuine admiration pleased Waldron extremely, for the garden had been the solace of his retired manhood, and of his helpless age. He began to talk about it directly.
“It is the trees,” he said; “it is the trees that make it
