So little place had Sir Arthur Gerardine in the life of Rosamond—Rosamond, the widow of Harry English!
CHAPTER IX
Full winter seemed to have come in a night; everywhere rime lay white upon the land, every blade was a frosted silver spear. Not a leaf yet kept the summer green; shrunken, brown and yellow, they hung by their brittle stems; it was a still morning, and he who had ears to listen to nature sounds, all through the woods could have heard ever and anon the sigh of one, falling here and there. A dim blue winter sky held the world; the sunshine was serene and faintly warm, like the heart of a good old man. The air was like iced wine to drink, invigorating, tingling through the veins. It painted Aspasia's cheeks a splendid scarlet. It filled her with the spirits of all young things, foals and kittens and cubs; so that she could hardly keep from prancing down the iron path, from cutting steps on the stiff grass to hear it crackle beneath her feet.
As Bethune looked at her, he thought she was as pretty as a winter robin in her brown furs. Her eyes glistened as she flung quick glances at him; her dimples came and went; her teeth flashed as she chattered at headlong speed. They were going to Sunday service at the village church, a couple of miles away, and Baby was setting forth with a delightful sense of vigour and freedom.
Those whose fate binds them to cities can have no idea of the delicate joys of the country walk, with the beloved one—him or her—who fills the thoughts. Alas! for the poor wench that has no better pleasure than to tramp along the crowded street. What does she know of the loveliness of "solitude for two," of the dear sympathy of nature, perfect in every season with the heart that is of her clay?
Not, indeed, that Miss Cuningham acknowledged even to herself that Raymond Bethune was the present lord of her mind, much less her beloved. Nevertheless, the glamour of that hour that strikes but once in a lifetime was upon her. Love, first love, the only love, comparable but to the most exquisite mystery of the dawn, of the spring; happiness so evanescent that a touch will destroy it, so delicate that the scent of it is obliterated by fulfilment; so utterly made of anticipation, of unrealised, unformed desire, that to shape it, to seize it, is to lose it—is it not strange that we, to whom such a gift is granted, receive it, nearly all of us, not as we should, on our knees, but grossly, greedily, impatiently, ungratefully, hurrying through the golden moments, tearing apart the gossamer veil, grasping the flower from the stem before its unfolding? No wonder that to most the day that follows on this dawn should be so full of heat and burden; the fruit of this blossom so sour to the parent that the children's teeth are set on edge; that, behind the veil, the vision should prove dull, flat, and unprofitable!
Now Aspasia, though a very creature of earth and one that knew no transcendental longings, had kept the pure heart of her childhood; and therefore this hour of her first love, all vague, all unacknowledged, was wholly sweet.
They knelt, Bethune and she, side by side, in the small bare church. She flung him a look of comical anguish over the grunting of the harmonium and the unmelodious chants of the village choir. She struck into a hymn herself, in a high clear pipe, as true as a robin's song. A pale young clergyman, with protruding eyeballs, led the service with a sort of anæmic piety; grand old Bible words were gabbled or droned; grand old Church prayers, with the dignity of an antique faith still resounding in them—who, that heard, seemed to care? It was the Sunday routine, and that was all.
Bethune saw the girl's fingers unconsciously practising musical exercises on the ledge of the pew; when their eyes met once, she made a childish grimace. She, for one, was frankly bored. As for him, had he any faith? He had hardly ever thought even of putting the question. He went to the Church service of his country as a matter of course, as his grandfathers had done before him. It was part of the etiquette of his military life. Now and again he had been moved to a solemn stir of the feelings during some brief soldier's ceremony: the hurried funeral perhaps of an English lad far away from homeland. But so had he been moved by the bugle-call, by the hurrah on the field. Life and death, love and religion, what did they mean? What are we, when all is said and done, but the toys of a blind fate?
There is but one thing sure in the uncertainty, he told himself, but one staff in the wilderness, one anchor in the turmoil—duty.