“Hugh doesn’t like it,” he would say; “and I think he’s rather out of sorts; so we mustn’t bother him.”
Hugh rewarded him by wondering how he could care for such trifles, and by somewhat despising the comfortable, unsentimental terms of the two lovers, even while he envied them only too bitterly.
Doubtless they were enviable; for in between-times many a sweet morsel fell to their lot, and one shining hour rested in Arthur’s memory in the days to come as the typical instance of the warm home-like sunshine, the everyday happiness, of the summer when he was engaged to Mysie.
Once upon a time—there seems no fitter beginning—on a still, hot summer afternoon, Arthur and Mysie went down the new-mown meadows to the water-side. They were going in a boat down the canal to where it joined the river at a place called Fordham Beeches, where Frederica and Flossy Venning were to meet them, having walked through the woods.
Oxley canal was but a canal. Its waters sparkled over no pebbles, revealed no pellucid depths; but to-day its dull and sluggish face reflected the “blue, unclouded weather,” and the slow oars splashed up living light. The speedwells were hardly faded, the pink bindweed blossomed all over its grassy edges. The flat meadows were green as emerald. Pollard willows hung over one side, and brightly-painted barges were tugged along by the towing-path on the other.
Arthur rowed slowly, and Mysie sat, in her big straw hat, facing him; and they talked of the time when they should live together in the old red-brick Bank House, in Oxley, unless Hugh married; and then there were the pretty little villas on the Redhurst road. They talked of ways and means, pounds, shillings, and pence; and laid their plans, and settled what they would and what they would not do; and how, in a year’s time, Hugh would be satisfied of Arthur’s capacity and steadiness, and would admit him to that share in the Bank proposed for him by his father. And, as they talked, they passed along the back of Redhurst village and past the turnip-fields, where the little partridges were beginning to run and flutter, and Hugh’s bit of copse, where little brown rabbits were already taking their evening airing.
“Too many by half,” said Arthur, and Mysie declared that he was cruel, as their course was stopped by Redhurst lock, rendered necessary by the more broken ground.
The lock-keeper’s little cottage, in a bower of vines, stood on one side; and Mysie blushed as she sat in the boat, for the men smiled as they greeted Arthur and responded to his remark on the rabbits; and the lock-keeper’s daughter—a tall girl, with fair hair flying in the sun—laughed as she curtseyed and called her little sister to “look at Miss Mysie.”
“Alice Wood sees us,” whispered Mysie.
“We can see Alice Wood,” said Arthur, as the nursery-gardener’s smart seedsman strolled by with a parcel, and whispered to the girl, who turned off giggling, shy of the young lady, who gave her a half-sympathetic smile as the boat slowly sank down—down into the cool, damp shadow—down below the steep, dank sides, below the sparkling water—till the great doors groaned back and they shot out into light and sunshine and life, again.