Volume One—Chapter Four.
On the River.
The fair rower, vigorously bending to the oars, soon brings through the bye-way, and out into the main channel of the river.
Once in mid-stream, she suspends her stroke, permitting the boat to drift down with the current; which, for a mile below Llangorren, flows gently through meadow land, but a few feet above its own level, and flush with it in times of flood.
On this particular day there is none such—no rain having fallen for a week—and the Wye’s water is pure and clear. Smooth, too, as the surface of a mirror; only where, now and then, a light zephyr, playing upon it, stirs up the tiniest of ripples; a swallow dips its scimitar wings; or a salmon in bolder dash causes a purl, with circling eddies, whose wavelets extend wider and wider as they subside. So, with the trace of their boat’s keel; the furrow made by it instantly closing up, and the current resuming its tranquillity; while their reflected forms—too bright to be spoken of as shadows—now fall on one side, now on the other, as the capricious curving of the river makes necessary a change of course.
Never went boat down the Wye carrying freight more fair. Both girls are beautiful, though of opposite types, and in a different degree; while with one—Gwendoline Wynn—no water Nymph, or Naiad, could compare; her warm beauty in its real embodiment far excelling any conception of fancy, or flight of the most romantic imagination.
She is not thinking of herself now; nor, indeed, does she much at any time—least of all in this wise. She is anything but vain; instead, like Vivian Ryecroft, rather underrates herself. And possibly more than ever this morning; for it is with him her thoughts are occupied—surmising whether his may be with her, but not in the most sanguine hope. Such a man must have looked on many a form fair as hers, won smiles of many a woman beautiful as she. How can she expect him to have resisted, or that his heart is still whole?
While thus conjecturing, she sits half turned on the thwart, with oars out of water, her eyes directed down the river, as though in search of something there. And they are; that something a white helmet hat.
She sees it not; and as the last thought has caused her some pain, she lets down the oars with a plunge, and recommences pulling; now, and as in spite, at each dip of the blades breaking her own bright image!
During all this while Ellen Lees is otherwise occupied; her attention partly taken up with the steering, but as much given to the shores on each side—to the green pasture-land, of which, at intervals, she has a view, with the white-faced “Herefords” straying over it, or standing grouped in the shade of some spreading trees, forming pastoral pictures worthy the pencil of a Morland or Cuyp. In clumps, or apart, tower up old poplars, through whose leaves, yet but half unfolded, can be seen the rounded burrs of the mistletoe, looking like nests of rooks. Here and there, one overhangs the river’s bank, shadowing still deep pools, where the ravenous pike lies in ambush for “salmon pink” and such small fry; while on a bare branch above may be observed another of their persecutors—the kingfisher—its brilliant azure plumage in strong contrast with everything on the earth around, and like a bit of sky fallen from above. At intervals it is seen darting from side to side, or in longer flight following the bend of the stream, and causing scamper among the minnows—itself startled and scared by the intrusion of the boat upon its normally peaceful domain.