Fiander's Widow: A Novel

by M. E. Francis

The great field, all glittering green save for the brown strip which testified to recent labours, stretched away for many goodly acres. On a lesser slope beneath he could see the roofs of Littlecomb Farm and its appurtenances, but the sight of the amber and ruddy outlines awakened in him now no feeling of repulsion. During the past weeks he had laughed himself out of his whilom fancy for the fascinating and disappointing widow; he had even taken himself to task somewhat severely for his strictures on that unconscious young woman. Was it her fault, after all, that her outer parts belied her real self? Why had he been so unreasonably angry because she had failed to correspond to the high estimate which he had formed on slight and inadequate premises? She was a very beautiful creature, and, no doubt, good enough in her way; if she was common-place, and had a sharp eye for the main chance, she would make the better wife to a practical farmer. He would in all probability get on well enough with her when she became his aunt, but meanwhile life was too full of congenial work and ever-growing interest to admit of his wasting time in improving his acquaintance with the future Mrs. Sharpe.

He had thrown himself into his new pursuits with characteristic energy, and found them daily more and more engrossing. He possessed a gift not often to be met with in the cultivator of the soil—a love of Nature for her own sake—a sympathy with her moods, not from the practical, but from the poetical standpoint. Clouds and sunlight, frosts and dew, meant more to him than to his brother-toiler; the very odour of the damp earth, the fragrance of the bursting buds in copse and hedgerow, of the crushed herbage beneath his feet, intoxicated him. The homely thud of the horses’ hoofs as they trod the furrow, the ripping up of the green sod as he drove the plough through it, the mere consciousness of his own vigour and life and manhood dominating this solitude, filled him with a kind of ecstasy. ‘This is what I want,’ he had said to himself over and over again that morning; ‘this is what I have always wanted!’

He had finished his breakfast now, but he permitted himself the luxury of repose for a few moments longer. He threw himself back on the bank, his head resting on his clasped hands, and his eyes gazing up, up, through the interlacing boughs of the trees, outlined now with shifting silver in the morning light, through the ethereal leafage, still half unfolded, up to the heights of delicate blue beyond. He had fancied that there was not much breeze this morning; yet, as he lay thus quiet he could hear a faint rustling in the undergrowth, and the occasional crackling of twigs—a squirrel perhaps; but when was a wood known to be absolutely still? Besides the incidental noises attending the passage of living things—flying, running, creeping—the creaking and swaying of boughs, the fluttering of leaves, had not such places a mysterious movement and vitality of their own? Was there not always a stir, a whisper, in their midst produced by no ostensible cause?

Smiling upwards, his head still pillowed on his hands, Richard was meditating on some half-forgotten page of Thoreau which seemed to bear upon this fancy of his, when suddenly a woman’s figure appeared on the crest of the bank close to him, and without warning sprang down beside him. Rosalie Fiander, with the skirt of her print gown gathered up so as to form a receptacle for the mass of primroses which she had been gathering, and the fragrance of which was now wafted to Richard’s nostrils—Rosalie Fiander, with minute dewdrops clinging to her dark hair, with morning roses on her cheeks, and the morning light shining in her eyes—a vision of grace and beauty, more captivating even than the glowing pictured Rosalie of the cornfield or the stately heroine of Yellowham Woods.

Richard sat up, the colour rushing over his sunburnt face; he had divested himself of hat and coat, his waistcoat hung loosely open, and his shirt was unfastened at the throat. For a moment Rosalie did not identify him; then, as he slowly rose to his feet, she too blushed.

‘I beg your pardon; I did not know anyone was here. I had a half-hour to spare before breakfast and ran out to pick some primroses. This is my wood, you know,’ she added hastily; ‘I am not trespassing unless when I take a short cut home across your uncle’s field.’

Ploughman Richard, with his bare brown arms and ruffled head, was not at all alarming. She scarcely recognised in him the trim, severe young man who had called on her ceremoniously a few weeks before, still less the mysterious personage who had driven her home from Dorchester, who had said such strange things, and looked at her so oddly—Isaac Sharpe’s nephew was just like anybody else after all. Being blithe of heart this bright spring morning, she smiled on him pleasantly, and, lowering the folds of her gown, displayed the primroses.

‘Are they not lovely? I like them better than any other flower—in fact, I love them. Almost the first thing that I can remember is holding on to my mother’s finger while she took me up to a bank of primroses; afterwards, when I grew old enough to pick them for myself, oh, the delight, each spring, of finding the first primrose!’

Now, curiously enough, the gay tone and easy manner had the effect of filling Richard with wrath; the very grace of her attitude, the child-like candour of her eyes were to him obnoxious, the more so because he could not repress a momentary thrill of admiration. He knew how much they were worth; he knew the sordid nature beneath this attractive disguise.

‘Primroses are fine things,’ he said, with assumed carelessness. ‘You should have picked some before the nineteenth; then you would have had a good sale for them.’