On Christmas day in the morning.”
And when they had reached the strawberry beds, she knelt, and plucked a great red berry, and then leapt up again, and held it to her cousin’s lips, saying, “Bite—but spare my fingers.” And so, laughing, she fed it to him, while he, laughing too, consumed it. But when her pink finger-tips all but touched his lips, his heart had a convulsion, and it was only by main-force that he restrained his kisses. And he said to himself, “I must go back to town to-morrow. This will never do. It would be the devil to pay if I should let myself fall in love with her.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve felt terribly dépaysée,” she told him again, herself nibbling a berry. “I’ve felt like the traditional cat in the strange garret. And then, besides, there was my change of name. I can’t reconcile myself to being called Miss Silver. I can’t realise the character. It’s like an affectation, like making-believe. Directly I relax my vigilance, I forget, and sink back into Johannah Rothe. I’m always Johannah Rothe when I’m alone. Directly I’m alone, I push a big ouf, and send Miss Silver to Cracklimbo. Then somebody comes, and, with a weary sigh, I don my sheep’s clothing again. Of course, there’s nothing in a name, and yet there’s everything. There’s a furious amount of mental discomfort when the name doesn’t fit.”
“It’s a discomfort that will pass,” he said consolingly. “The change of name is a mere formality—a condition attached to coming into a property. In England, you know, it’s a rather frequent condition.”
“I’m aware of that,” she informed him. “But to me,” she went on, “it seems symbolic—symbolic of my whole situation, which is false, abnormal. Silver? Silver? It’s a name meant for a fair person, with light hair and a white skin. And here I am, as black as any Gipsy. And then! It’s a condition attached to coming into a property. Well, I come into a property to which I have no more moral right than I have to the coat on your back; and I’m obliged to do it under an alias, like a thief in the night.”
“Oh, my dear young lady,” he cried out, “you’ve the very best of rights, moral as well as legal. You come into a property that is left to you by will, and you’re the last representative of the family in whose hands it has been for I forget how many hundreds of years.”
“That,” said she, “is a question I shall not refuse to discuss with you upon some more fitting occasion. For the present I am tempted to perpetrate a simply villainous pun, but I forbear. Suffice it to say that I consider the property that I’ve come into as nothing more nor less than a present made me by my cousin, William Stretton. No—don’t interrupt!” she forbade him. “I happen to know my facts. I happen to know that if Will Stretton hadn’t, for reasons in the highest degree honourable to himself, quarrelled and broken with his father, and refused to receive a penny from him, I happen to know, I say, that Sir William Silver would have left Will Stretton everything he possessed in the world. Oh, it’s not in vain that I’ve pumped the man named Burrell. So, you see, I’m indebted to my Quixotic cousin for something in the neighbourhood, I’m told, of eight thousand a year. Rather a handsome little present, isn’t it? Furthermore, let me add in passing, I absolutely forbid my cousin to call me his dear young lady, as if he were seven hundred years my senior and only a casual acquaintance. A really nice cousin would take the liberty of calling me by my Christian name.”
“I’ll take the liberty of calling you by some exceedingly unChristian name,” he menaced, “if you don’t leave off talking that impossible rot about my making you a present.”
“I wasn’t talking impossible rot about your making me a present,” she contradicted. “I was merely telling you how dépaysée I’d felt. The rest was parenthetic. So now, then, keep your promise, call me Johannah.”
“Johannah,” he called, submissively.