“Fetherstone can’t control her, for her awe must be founded on respect and she has no respect for him. He is too much a man of her own class in essentials. She fathoms him through and through and don’t see anything superior to herself. If she met her superior, and he with a firm hand over her, she could be modelled into something to astonish the world—the only world she can ever move in.”
So thinks Greville and in the reflections which occupied him believed he knew where that superior could be found. She was meanwhile a fascinating study. Not by any means the woman of pleasure, so he decided—not mercenary, far more impassioned on the heart than the physical side; candid to danger-point when moved; defiant to her own hurt. Rather, she impressed him as one snared far less through temperament than by circumstance and the fact of her astonishing beauty. Such a girl would be attempted, persecuted, bribed wherever she went, and not only so but condemned to something very like starvation if she refused. For instance, what wise woman would take such a Helen into her service; and if she did, how otherwise than as the merest drudge, for the girl was nearly as ignorant and untaught as the wild rabbits in the park. He ascertained that she could read and, after a fashion, write, but no more. Then what choice had she? Who could blame this poor butterfly blown down a chill wind out to sea? All her glorious gifts were natural. It would be a pursuit as interesting as any collecting to pass them in review, catalogue them, and see what they were worth in the market—a better market than the mere sale of her body to the first comer. She was capable of other reaches of beauty than this, he believed. He watched her always.
She came out with the guns sometimes, a thing no lady of breeding would have done, and tramped the deep fallows along with them, and through the copses and spinneys and the dry fern where Sir Harry’s tall deer showed branching antlers. And the hard exercise that would have made a fine lady swoon did but bring the divinest flush to the cheeks of this daughter of the hedgerows, and brightened her great limpid eyes until they beamed like stars. Greville would have given much to know what she herself made of her life, what her hopes were. The best he could see was the chance that one of Sir Harry’s boon companions might take a liking for her when the Up Park episode should finish and so start another connection. Meanwhile he was witness to the queerest scenes, in which he tried to comprehend the girl’s personality and found it baffling.
There was the evening when Squire Weldon of Harting—more than a little overseas—declared and swore he believed that no woman could own such sheaves of hair and he would wager the half of it was false.
“And for why I think so,” says he, with drunken cunning. “I observe you wear always that kind of ribbon bandage to hold it up and hide where the true joins the false—a neat little trick and becoming. Now I knew a woman in Bedford and her hair was to her knees—” and so forth, maundering on, the girl with a book of pictures on her knee pretending not to notice him.
“Emily!” commanded Sir Harry, rousing himself in his chair. “You show that gentleman he’s mistook, for I won’t have my belongings disparaged. I say you’re a perfect beauty, and if any one denies it I’ll prove him in the wrong. Take that ribbon off your head and let them see, one and all!”
He carried so much wine that Greville reflected with an inward laugh ’twas lucky he stopped at the ribbon. Would she refuse? He would like her the better if she did, and he had seen her thwart her master on a lesser matter. She might yet be a Vashti.
The men sat staring and laughing. Did she refuse? Not she! A glow coloured her face—not anger, but pleasure and pride. Her eyes glittered.
“If any one says it isn’t my own I’ll show him what God gave me!” cries she, and began unknotting her ribbon.
We all know that fillet binding her glorious auburn waves. Romney painted it, lingered over it, loved it. It was true Greece, though she never guessed it; the Bacchante’s wear when with girt-up robe she runs through the woods, shouting her wild fellows from their lairs to follow Him of the leopard skin and the thyrsus. We see it to-day in her pictures that cannot die while beauty lives.