“May I speak?” asked he.
“No. I am much older than you, because I am thirty-eight, though I don’t look it, and you needn’t say that. And all through those fourteen years which separate us I have been always learning one thing—that happiness lies in being busy. Years——”
Then the romantic, the picturesque, that always beats in Celtic blood—and she was half Irish—came to her tongue.
“The years, or time, whatever it is, are like a golden river that flows round us,” she said. “You may just sit in it, as you are doing, and watch the golden iridescent stream flowing and combing round you. That is letting it run to waste. But use your brain, Hughie, and let your brain talk to your fingers, and let your fingers pull a bit of the water into your grasp, and that which you thought was only just water, just the passage of time in this heavenly world, is a real tangible thing, a golden thing, and your fingers will make a golden something—a book or a statue or a song—out of it. You must mould and carve this bit of time, and when it is finished you will let it float down again on the golden river of time, and those who come after will see it and handle it.”
He did not want to interrupt now. Peggy, as he well knew, was “doing” something for more hours in the day and for more days in the year than any one he knew, and it was not often that this vein of romance surged to the surface. She had quite forgotten, it must be confessed, the missionary enterprise on which she had set out an hour ago at her sister’s suggestion. Just now she was speaking not from another’s wish, but out of her own heart.
“Oh, we ought all to be so busy!” she said, “grasping at the golden time and moulding it, every drop of it, into golden images! Also, when we do that, we are not only using time, we are saving it. It is all ours, and it is only spent and wasted when we let it go by. Whatever we make of it is invested; it becomes things of gold that float down on the golden river. Ah, don’t you see, Hughie?”
He was grave, too, now.
“Then do I waste time when I tell the children fairy-stories and sing to you?” he asked.
“No, you dear; but make bigger things. Write your book of fairy-stories, which you said you were writing—only I didn’t believe you! Or win a punt race even—only I didn’t believe you! Take hold of the world somehow, sing to it, or—or do anything to it,” she added, afraid she had betrayed her knowledge.
Hugh was extremely susceptible, using that word not in the confined sense of being easily influenced by a woman, but in the larger meaning of being quick to be caught by an idea. To be a weather-cock is a phrase that has had attached to it a sense, if not opprobrious, at any rate a little depreciatory; but in reality to be fitted with that simile is the highest praise, since it implies the wonderful sensitiveness of the temperament that is never other than artistic. To catch and to record the faintest breeze that blows is a better gift than to stand four-square like a tower and defy the winds of heaven. It is not denied that the four-square towers are eminently useful, and, as far as usefulness of this sort is concerned, the weather-cock is not in any way comparable to them. Yet the blowing and breathing of the winds is perhaps worth record, and the towers do not show it. And if Hugh was obstinate, as Peggy had declared he was, he was obstinate perhaps with the deadly obstinacy of weather-cocks, which, however much the world in general shouts “Northeast!” will continue to register southwest if it seem to them that the wind is coming from that quarter. There may be clattering and screaming, as she had said, but the weather-cock goes on exactly as before. On this occasion Hugh, perhaps because he had received commands, did not argue and even when Peggy said “Well, what have you got to say?” only pleaded her original command in defence. But his tongue had been in his cheek before, and as he punted her back again for lunch it again came out.