Her sudden emotion, though controlled, was unconcealed and she turned away from him.
“My love is a gentleman, but with him I should feel like a wild bee in a canary cage.”
“What are you saying!” cried Gerald, putting his arms around her. “Orianda!”
“O yes, we do love in a mezzotinted kind of way. You could do anything with me short of making me marry you, anything, Gerald.” She repeated it tenderly. “Anything. But short of marrying me I could make you do nothing.” She turned from him again for a moment or two. Then she took his arm and as they walked on she shook it and said chaffingly, “And what a timid swimmer my Gerald is.”
But he was dead silent. That flux of sensations in his mind had taken another twist, fiery and exquisite. Like rich clouds they shaped themselves in the sky of his mind, fancy’s bright towers with shining pinnacles.
Lizzie welcomed them home. Had they enjoyed themselves—yes, the day had been fine—and so they had enjoyed themselves—well, well, that was right. But throughout the evening Orianda hid herself from him, so he wandered almost distracted about the village until in a garth he saw some men struggling with a cow. Ropes were twisted around its horns and legs. It was flung to the earth. No countryman ever speaks to an animal without blaspheming it, although if he be engaged in some solitary work and inspired to music, he invariably sings a hymn in a voice that seems to have some vague association with wood pulp. So they all blasphemed and shouted. One man, with sore eyes, dressed in a coat of blue fustian and brown cord trousers, hung to the end of a rope at an angle of forty-five degrees. His posture suggested that he was trying to pull the head off the cow. Two other men had taken turns of other rope around some stout posts, and one stood by with a handsaw.
“What are you going to do?” asked Gerald.
“Its harns be bent, yeu see,” said the man with the saw, “they be going into its head. ’Twill blind or madden the beast.”
So they blasphemed the cow, and sawed off its crumpled horns.
When Gerald went back to the inn Orianda was still absent. He sat down but he could not rest. He could never rest now until he had won her promise. That lovely image in the river spat fountains of scornful fire at him. “Do not leave me, Gerald,” she had said. He would never leave her, he would never leave her. But the men talking in the inn scattered his flying fiery thoughts. They discoursed with a vacuity whose very endlessness was transcendent. Good God! Was there ever a living person more magnificently inane than old Tottel, the registrar. He would have inspired a stork to protest. Of course, a man of his age should not have worn a cap, a small one especially; Tottel himself was small, and it made him look rumpled. He was bandy: his intellect was bandy too.