She looked at me kindly, but as if she read me through and through. She said: “You have begun again your never-ending contrast between the past and this present. Is it not so?”
“True,” said I. “I was thinking of what you, with your capacity and intelligence, joined to your love of pleasure, and your impatience of unreasonable restraint—of what you would have been in that past. And even now, when all is won and has been for a long time, my heart is sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has gone on for so many years.”
“So many centuries,” she said, “so many ages!”
“True,” I said; “too true,” and sat silent again.
She rose up and said: “Come, I must not let you go off into a dream again so soon. If we must lose you, I want you to see all that you can see first before you go back again.”
“Lose me?” I said—“go back again? Am I not to go up to the North with you? What do you mean?”
She smiled somewhat sadly, and said: “Not yet; we will not talk of that yet. Only, what were you thinking of just now?”
I said falteringly: “I was saying to myself, The past, the present? Should she not have said the contrast of the present with the future—of blind despair with hope?”
“I knew it,” she said. Then she caught my hand and said excitedly, “Come, while there is yet time! Come!” And she led me out of the room; and as we were going downstairs and out of the house into the garden by a little side door which opened out of a curious lobby, she said in a calm voice, as if she wished me to forget her sudden nervousness: “Come! we ought to join the others before they come here looking for us. And let me tell you, my friend, that I can see you are too apt to fall into mere dreamy musing—no doubt because you are not yet used to our life of repose amidst of energy; of work which is pleasure and pleasure which is work.”
She paused a little, and as we came out into the lovely garden again, she said: “My friend, you were saying that you wondered what I should have been if I had lived in those past days of turmoil and oppression. Well, I think I have studied the history of them to know pretty well. I should have been one of the poor, for my father when he was working was a mere tiller of the soil. Well, I could not have borne that; therefore my beauty and cleverness and brightness” (she spoke with no blush or simper of false shame) “would have been sold to rich men, and my life would have been wasted indeed; for I know enough of that to know that I should have had no choice, no power of will over my life; and that I should never have bought pleasure from the rich men, or even opportunity of action, whereby I might have won some true excitement. I should have wrecked and wasted in one way or another, either by penury or by luxury. Is it not so?”
“Indeed it is,” said I.
She was going to say something else, when a little gate in the fence, which led into a small elm-shaded field, was opened, and Dick came with hasty cheerfulness up the garden path, and was presently standing between us, a hand laid on the shoulder of each. He said: “Well, neighbours, I thought you two would like to see the old house quietly without a crowd in it. Isn’t it a jewel of a house after its kind? Well, come along, for it is getting towards dinnertime. Perhaps you, guest, would like a swim before we sit down to what I fancy will be a pretty long feast?”
“Yes,” I said, “I should like that.”
“Well, goodbye for the present, neighbour Ellen,” said Dick. “Here comes Clara to take care of you, as I fancy she is more at home amongst our friends here.”
Clara came out of the fields as he spoke; and with one look at Ellen I turned and went with Dick, doubting, if I must say the truth, whether I should see her again.
XXXII
The Feast’s Beginning … The End
Dick brought me at once into the little field which, as I had seen from the garden, was covered with gaily-coloured tents arranged in orderly lanes, about which were sitting and lying on the grass some fifty or sixty men, women, and children, all of them in the height of good temper and enjoyment—with their holiday mood on, so to say.
“You are thinking that we don’t make a great show as to numbers,” said Dick; “but you must remember that we shall have more tomorrow; because in this haymaking work there is room for a great many people who are not over-skilled in country matters; and there are many who lead sedentary lives, whom it would be unkind to deprive of their pleasure in the hayfield—scientific men and close students generally; so that the skilled workmen, outside those who are wanted as mowers, and foremen of the haymaking, stand aside, and take a little downright rest, which you know is good for them, whether they like it or not; or else they go to other countrysides, as I am doing here. You see, the scientific men and historians, and students generally, will not be wanted till we are fairly in the midst of the tedding, which of course will not be till the day after tomorrow.” With that he brought me out of the little field on to a kind of causeway above the riverside meadow, and thence turning to the left on to a path through the mowing
