At the earnest invitation of Sir Oliver, Juxon consented to remain at Milverton till the evening. The day passed pleasantly away. The worthy knight recovered his usual spirits; Mistress Alice her composure; and Katharine Heywood, having much secret content and thankfulness at heart, looked like some gracious angel of peace and goodness.
It was a day of bliss to Juxon:—one never forgotten, but marked white for ever. He was one of those men who felt a reverence and tenderness for woman; and, whenever he addressed them, his eyes, his voice, his whole manner plainly manifested respect. He expected in the female character gentleness, purity, and charity; and yet, by some strange inconsistency, he shunned the society of women, was seldom to be seen in those gay and glittering circles where they shone, and where he might have been soon disenchanted of his cherished illusions.
His residence in a sequestered parish in the country afforded him few opportunities of visiting where ladies were to be met; and being fond of all sports and manly exercises, and so ripe a scholar as to find study and the chase a pleasant relief to each other, he had not as yet been careful to seek opportunities of increasing his female acquaintance.
Whatever there was of silent and maidenly reserve in sweet Katharine herself towards common strangers, and upon ordinary occasions, vanished at a time like this, in the presence of so manly, so modest, and so frank a man as George Juxon. As the family sat that day at table, not a shade of embarrassment was visible in any of the party:—Sir Oliver was in high good humour; the boy Arthur looked at their guest with those honest eyes which, in boyhood, fear not to show either like or dislike; and the little girl Lily, permitted that day to dine in the hall, sat without shyness opposite to Juxon, and shunned not his smile or his word of notice.
The day wore on:—he walked with the ladies upon the verdant and velvet paths in the flower garden,—he paced the terrace with Sir Oliver,—and his presence was felt by them all as a strength and a comfort.
The shade upon the dial had stole silently, but swiftly, forwards, and touched upon seven in the evening, when he ran up to the chamber of Cuthbert to press his hand at parting; and having afterwards said his farewell to the ladies on the lawn, he descended to the court-yard, accompanied by Sir Oliver and the boy Arthur, mounted the gallant roan gelding upon which he had hunted his way down on the morning of yesterday, and again shaking the hand of his host, and accepting a warm invitation to repeat his visit soon and often, George Juxon rode out of the gates at Milverton with a very new and strange feeling.
The free animal, on which he rode, was impatiently checked as often as it broke from the measured walk at which it was now the pleasure of his master to travel homewards; and, whatever might be the cause, he was not allowed to perform in less than two hours a distance to be very easily accomplished within one. The reverie of Juxon was unbroken during the whole ride. The evening was mild, and the hedgerows were green, and the air was perfumed here with the scent of violets, there with the fragrance of cottage gardens or blushing orchards, and upon the woody or open parts of the road with the rich incense of the fresh-blown May.
The news of Sir Charles Lambert’s violence had reached his parsonage before him; and in the stone porch his old housekeeper met him as soon as he had dismounted, with as much anxiety as if he had narrowly escaped murder himself. The good old body, with that genuine philanthropy of feeling which is as natural as their breathing to kindly natures, learned the safety of Cuthbert, whom she had never seen or heard of before, with a lively expression of motherly joy; and Juxon was roused to remember how very narrowly the youth had missed an early and melancholy fate. Truth to say, so much of pleasure had grown up within these two days from the very circumstances arising out of the assault on Cuthbert, for her young master now to dwell on, and there seemed to open before him so pleasant a prospect in future intercourse with the family at Milverton, that, perhaps, he hardly felt enough for the present sufferings of the unfortunate patient.
His thoughts, however, were soon diverted from Milverton, and from himself, by the entrance of his old gardener, to say the May-crown, which was kept in the summer-house, had been taken away, and that he had found a written paper on the shelf where it stood. This the old man handed to his master, saying he could not read it, but guessed it boded no good for the coming holyday, and that he had been gathering flowers to dress out the old May-pole to little purpose. George Juxon took the paper, upon which, in a stiff, quaint hand, were written these lines:—