"I hope everything was to the colonel's satisfaction?" resumed Mrs. Kershaw, with an angular smile.
"He would have been hard to please if he had not been satisfied," returned the major, with grovelling servility; and, taking up his hat, tried, by a flank movement, to get between the enemy and his line of retreat.
"I am sure he is a real gentleman, and knows how to behave as sich. It is a pleasure to deal with liberal, right-minded people, what isn't forever haggling over sixpences and shillings. But, between you and me, sir, though I am none of your soft-spoken, humbugging sort, I never did meet the match of Miss Ella—Mrs. Wilton, I mean—she is that good and steady, a wearin' of herself to the bone for any one that wants. And for all the colonel's a fine man, and a pleasant man, and an open-handed man, if ever he takes to worriting or bla'guarding, I would help her through the divorce-court with the last shilling that ever I've scraped together rising early and working hard; you mind that."
With these emphatic words, Mrs. Kershaw flung the door suddenly wide open, and the major, bowing, hastily shot into the street, with a rapidity more creditable to Mrs. Kershaw's eloquence than his own steadiness under fire.
CHAPTER XI.
Oh! the bliss of those early days! The strange sweetness of their new companionship! The weather, too, was propitious—balmy and mild, though spring was yet young, with unutterable freshness and hope in its breath and coloring. The delicious sense of safety from all intruders; the delight of being at home with Ella; of winning her complete confidence. Never before had Wilton tasted the joy of associating with a woman who was neither a toy nor a torment, but a true, though softer, comrade, whose every movement and attitude charmed and satisfied his taste, and whose quick sense of beauty, of character, and of the droll sides of things, gave endless variety to their every-day intercourse.
Theirs was no mere fool's paradise of love and kisses. Sketching and fishing, the days flew by. Wilton had decided that the little inn at Vigères was too noisy and uncomfortable to be endured, and Ella had found lodgings in the house of a small proprietor, who sometimes accommodated lovers of the gentle craft, and, moreover, found favor in the eyes of the landlord and his bright-eyed, high-capped Norman cook and house-keeper, her fluent French and knowledge of foreign housewifery exciting admiration and respect. It was a straggling, gray-stone edifice, just outside the village, with a very untidy yard behind, and a less untidy garden in front, where a sun-dial, all mossed and lichen-covered, was half buried in great, tangled bushes of roses and fuchsias; on this a large, scantily-furnished salon looked out, and beyond the garden on an undulating plain, with the sea and Mont St. Michel in the blue distance, with a dark mass of forest on the uplands to the south—a wide stretch of country, ever changing its aspect, as the broad shadows of the slow or quick-sailing clouds swept over it, or the level rays of the gradually lengthening sunset bathed it with the peculiar yellow, golden spring light, so different from the rich red tinge of autumn. Winding round the base of the abrupt hill on which Vigères, like so many Norman villages, was perched, was a tolerably large stream, renowned in the neighborhood, and, though left to take care of itself, still affording fair sport. It led away through a melancholy wood and some wide, unfenced pasturage, to the neglected grounds of a chateau, with the intendant of which, Wilton, aided by Ella, held many a long talk on farming, politics, and every subject under the sun.
These rambles had an inexpressible charm—a mingled sense of freedom and occupation. Then the repose of evening, as night closed in; the amusement of watching Ella at her work or drawing; to lead her on to unconsciously picturesque reminiscences; to compare their utterly different impressions and ideas—for Ella was not self-opinionated; though frank and individual, she was aware her convictions were but the echo of those she had heard all her life, and she listened with the deepest interest to her husband's, even while she did not agree. These pleasant communings were so new to Wilton, so different from all his former experience, that perhaps time has seldom sped on so lightly during a honeymoon. Ella was utterly unconventional, and yet a gentlewoman to the core, transparently candid, and, if such a term can be permitted, gifted with a noble homeliness that made affectation, or assumption, or unreality of any kind, impossible to her. Whether she made a vivid, free translation from some favorite Italian poet at Wilton's request, or took a lesson from him in tying flies, or gave him one in drawing, or dusted their sitting-room, or (as Wilton more than once found her) did some bit of special cooking in the big, brown kitchen, while Manon looked on, with her hands in her apron-pockets, talking volubly, she was always the same—quiet, earnest, doing her very best, with the inexpressible tranquillity of a single purpose. Then the shy tenderness and grace of her rare caresses—the delicate reserve that had always something yet to give, and which not even the terrible ordeal of wedded intimacy could scorch up—these were elements of an inexhaustible charm—at least to a man of Wilton's calibre.