All of which Captain Coventry answered to the best of his capability, the whole while cogitating how he might contrive his next meeting with the vicar's daughter. At last a casual reference to the coming sale of work presented an excellent opportunity.
"I wonder if I might bring my mother and my sister to the show?" he asked with diffidence. "They take such a keen interest in things of that description." And he explained how easy it would be to manage if he chartered a conveyance for the afternoon. Naturally the idea met with cordial encouragement, and led to further interchange of personal information. By the time Captain Coventry had begun to feel that he could, with decency, remain no longer, he was on most friendly terms with the Reverend Mr. Forte and Rafella, the clergyman's only child.
CHAPTER II
IN THE GARDEN
Until the day of the sale of work at Under-edge Vicarage Coventry lived through the hours as one in a dream, dominated by the mental vision of a gentle girl, by his ardent longing for the moment when he should see her face again. He realised that he had actually fallen in love at first sight, admitted the fact to himself with grudging reluctance, seeing that hitherto he had scoffed at belief in such a possibility--like a person who suddenly sees a ghost after contemptuous denial of the supernatural.
He intended to make the girl his wife. She might not be accomplished or clever; her education must necessarily have been limited, reared, as she had been, so apart from the world. Yet if she were ignorant in the accepted sense of the word, she must also be innocent, guileless, unacquainted with evil--white and unsullied in thought and experience. He had no desire for an intellectual wife; in his opinion the more women knew the more objectionable they became. George Coventry was the kind of man who could contemplate matrimony only under conditions of supreme possession, mental as well as physical. What his wife learnt of life he must be the one to teach her; there must be no knowledge, no memory in her heart of which he might have reason to feel jealous in the most remote degree. There was something of the Sultan in his nature.
Perhaps he was not actively conscious of the stringency of his attitude towards the female sex; now, at least, he merely felt that he had "struck" the very kind of girl he should care to marry, and he harboured no manner of doubt in his mind but that Rafella Forte was all she appeared and all he conceived her to be--a sweet and simple creature, his ideal of a bride.
His instinct was not wrong. The vicar's daughter was a sweet and simple creature, oblivious, if not wholly ignorant, of evil--and of much besides. She made her own clothes, frequently she cleaned her own and her father's boots; she had driven in no vehicle more exalted than the village fly, had ridden nothing better than a donkey or a bicycle, had attended no entertainment more exciting than a local tea party or a penny reading. It was sinful, she thought, to powder one's nose, or to wear shoes with high heels, or to cut one's hair in a fringe--then a fashion that still was in favour. Her hats were kept on with elastic, and she seldom looked long at herself in the glass.