“I should like to take you for some pretty ride in the neighborhood,” she explained to Claud after they had again mounted their horses, “but in that case I must ask the way of the groom. Except for a few mad spins late at night, I have been very little outside the park, except in a closed carriage with mamma. You see, there are a good many square miles enclosed round the Chase, so that I get plenty of riding and some capital hurdles and ditches, too. But Sir Philip has forbidden me to go outside at all.”
“Don’t you want to sometimes?”
“Why, of course I do,” she answered simply. “Just because I am ordered not to, for no other reason. In the evenings, when Sir Philip is away, I ride as near the boundaries of the Chase enclosure as possible, and sometimes I can’t resist taking a jump over and cantering along the roads in the early moonlight. Sometimes, as if he knew we were doing wrong, Zephyr flies so fast his hoofs seem hardly to touch the ground, and I am sure, as we flash by the few country folk trudging along the lonely roads, they think we are wraiths, and go home and make stories about us.”
“Why you are a modern version of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ ” he exclaimed, and then quoted in clear, rhythmical fashion:
“ ‘Four gray walls and four gray towers.’
That’s a good description of the Chase, isn’t it? even if in your case they do not ‘overlook a space of flowers.’ And the continuation applies:
“ ‘But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly,
From the river winding clearly,
Down to towered Camelot.
And by the moon the reaper, weary,
Piling sheaves in upland airy,
Listening, whispers, “ ’Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.” ’ ”
She had reined in her horse and was listening in eager delight.
“I have never read a word of Tennyson,” she said. “The only poetry-books allowed me have been Milton and Wordsworth and some selected readings from Pope and Shakespeare. Sir Philip says that reading poetry fosters romantic and ridiculous notions, and that I should only read the poets his mother read, and know the others by name. But I like what you have quoted better than anything I have ever read yet. What became of the Lady of Shalott?”
“Oh, you must not take her for your prototype,” he said quickly. “She used to ‘weave by night and day, a magic web with colors gay,’ and she was never allowed to look out of the window to see the surly village churls, and red cloaks of the market girls, pass onward to Shalott. She had to content herself with seeing their reflections in a magic mirror which hung on a wall in her room. A curse was to fall upon her should she turn from its reflections and gaze on the realities of life, until one day, when there passed by ‘two young lovers lately wed; “I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott.’ ”