CHAPTER III
Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.
To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet rested upon it.
The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to the June sunlight, framing its scrap of landscape, with the windlass of the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child’s figure and the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache, and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.
‘Carry—so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger, she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and skimmed into the back garden.
‘Oh, you silly!’ cried one of the girls; ‘it’s only Paul.’
She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in, patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry, but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress’s bonnet Her hair was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.
‘Paul?’ she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron. ‘Is Paul a cousin, too?’
‘Of course he is,’ said the girl who had called her back; ‘he’s our first cousin, Paul is.’
‘Is he,’ she asked, with demure face and dancing eye—’ is he—in a kissing relationship?’