'"Does not such a day make you long to leave dusty Antwerp behind you, and to roam in the country?"
'"It does indeed; but I dare not think of such a thing—till—till next week," I replied, coyly.
'"Lisette," said he, "were you ever at the village of Elewyt, where the old château of Rubens stands, between Malines and Vilvorde? It is a lovely place, and wild as lovely; not a soul would see us there. Come with me, darling, and let us spend one happy day together."
'"I dare not—I dare not," as a vision of Madame Hoboken, grim, prim, and full of proprieties, oppressed me, though I was secretly overwhelmed with delight at the suggestion of this stolen and, to me, new kind of pleasure—a whole beautiful summer afternoon to be spent hand in hand with Lucien—hand in hand, as we were wont to be when children in the Place Verte or on the Boulevards.
'"Come with me, sweet one," he whispered, "it will never—can never be known. It is less than an hour by railway, and, amid the bosky thickets and gardens of the old château we shall seem to leave the world behind us."
'So strong was the temptation to spend an untrammelled afternoon with my betrothed—he who within a week was to be my husband—that I yielded. I knew that I ran a dreadful risk in being seen alone with him, for Antwerp is one of the most scandalous and gossipy towns in Belgium. In this country the rules are very strict as regards the daily intercourse of ladies and gentlemen, in the mere matters of meeting or conversing, as compared with you in England, where the perfect freedom of the innocent is so great; and hence, I doubt not, your happier marriages; for in Belgium, as in France, we are forced to espouse those to whose inner lives we are strangers, and to whose hearts, before marriage, we can have no key, if it is ever found at all.
'A voiture took us to the train, and we took seats in separate carriages. Already the simple, child-like expedition had an air of guilt, and a tremulous fear possessed me as the train glided out of the station, through a cutting in the fortifications at the Rue du Rempart—the wet fosse was left behind, and we sped through the open country.
'Glorious was the summer day; exhaled by heat, the silvery mist was curling up from the rich pastures, amid which the drowsy cattle stood knee-deep, and from the fertile arable lands, over which the giant sails of the windmills cast their shadows; but my heart—now that I was alone, though separated from Lucien by only a carriage or two—sank lower and lower with vague apprehension, and I restrained my tears with difficulty. I was full of terrors, scruples, and fears an English girl, circumstanced as I was, would fail to comprehend, and after traversing miles of dairy farms, where the summer breeze played so sweetly on the long ripples of verdant grass, we reached the little roadside station, where a path diverged to Elewyt. I gathered courage when Lucien Volcarts joined me, and we found ourselves indeed alone, for we were the only persons who quitted the train, which steamed slowly—as all Belgian trains do—on its way to Vilvorde, and our short but delicious day of rambling and planning, scheming and dreaming out our future, hand clasped in hand, began.
'We saw the old château of Rubens, now falling fast to decay, amid its trees, on the land of which he was seigneur, but we did not go near it, and contented ourselves with wandering amid the sylvan scenery, all of which had the charm of extreme novelty to me. The birds that flew overhead or sung in the hedgerows; the thickets of beech and oak, casting shadows over pools where the trout rose to catch the floating fly; the white, waxen-like lilies floating also on their surface; a little stream pouring slowly between gravel banks and sandstone rocks; deep water-cuts in which the Cuyp-like cattle stood midleg for coolness; the quaint cottages, few and far apart; the carillons playing in a distant spire, were all sources of delight to me—delight all the more that I could turn from them ever and anon to look into the tender and loving eyes of Lucien.
'At one of the cottages, which quite approached the dignity of a small farm, we got some refreshment—bread, milk, and cheese—just as we had been wont to do when children in charge of the same bonne, and the recollection of that made us laugh and all the more enjoy such simple fare; and truth to tell, though so near our marriage day, in the freedom of the hour we felt very much as if we were happy children again; and long we lingered in one spot, I remember, on a grassy bank under a bower of hawthorn, where the flies buzzed and the bees hummed, and the village bells rang softly out, but now it was their evening chime.