When I lifted my cap, and expressed a hope that I wasn’t trespassing, she gave me a cordial smile of a comrade in mischief.
“Yes, you are trespassing,” she said frankly, “but they won’t take any notice if they see me speaking to you. I saw you from my window and I came to prevent any of the servants driving you away.”
I hardly knew which was more delicious, the simplicity or the friendliness of the child angel, as she was named already in my thoughts. That night I heard her story from the good mistress of the farm. She had lost her mother as soon as she was born, and, as sometimes happens, she had lost her place in her father’s heart in consequence. He was then a middle-aged man, his wife had been the only woman he had ever cared for, and she had borne him no other child. Life for him was closed. He resigned himself to let the earldom and the encumbered estate pass to his brother, and shut himself up with his grief in the one habitable corner of his desolate house.
Of Violet he took no more notice than he could help. His sense of duty bade him engage a strict governess, and direct that his daughter should be brought up to marry money, since he could leave her none. The governess conceived that the way to attain this end was to keep the girl in absolute seclusion till a suitable bridegroom was found, and then to thrust her into his arms. The result was that her life had actually been very much like that of a princess in a fairy tale who is immured in a tower and kept from the sight of men. And I had been cast unconsciously for the part of the fairy hero who scales the tower and wins the maiden’s heart.
In the first confusion of the meeting I was far more tongue-tied than she. I guessed, of course, that she must be the daughter of Lord Ledbury, and this was the first time I had ever spoken to anyone of her rank. I was in doubt whether to address her with the word ladyship. I think the awe with which her rank inspired me had a great deal to do with what followed. It lifted her so far above me in my own mind, that I was blind to her growing love, and at first mistook my own love for the devotion of a vassal to his queen.
She talked to me about the ruins, holding me there spell-bound till neither of us could find more to say. At last, when I felt obliged to come away, she asked me wistfully where I was going. And I, who had made up my mind already not to go, if I could find any excuse for staying in the neighbourhood, with any chance of meeting her again, answered vaguely that I didn’t know. I was looking, I told her, for some place where I could put up.
Her whole face brightened when I said that, and she cried eagerly, “There is a farm-house on the hill where they take visitors in the summer, and I don’t think they have anyone yet. I often go past it in my walks, and I haven’t seen any strangers about.”
My heart exulted within me. There was to be no walking tour for me that summer. When one has come within the gates of Paradise how can he want to wander more?
And so I took off my knapsack in the honeysuckle porch of the little farm-house, and stayed on. It chanced for our undoing that the strict governess had gone away for her own holiday a day or two before I came, and did not return till it was time for me to exile myself from Eden. Violet was left alone. No callers had come to the Castle for many years. There were no neighbours in her own station of life within many miles. The clergyman was an old bachelor interested only in butterflies and moths, of which he had a wonderful collection, and blind to everything that went on in his parish. If our romance was watched, and I have no doubt that it was watched by many curious eyes unknown to us, none of the watchers dared to carry tales of his daughter to the Earl of Ledbury. Violet saw her father twice a day at meals, and he never dreamed of asking her how she spent her time between.
The golden month rolled by. The first few days each of us made believe that our meetings were accidental. But soon we ceased to pretend that it was chance that had led her steps up the hill and led mine down them to the wood in which we came together. We explored the hills in company, rousing the partridges from the corn and rabbits from the fern. The wood-pigeons cooed and wheeled above our heads; the robins peeped at us from the hedges and the squirrels from the trees. We stood beside the lonely cromlech named after the mythical hero who held the Saxon hosts at bay, and we looked down into the Golden Valley and saw the peaks of the Welsh mountains far away. And we were happy....