She was “good for everything,” the boys declared. Pretty and coquettish herself, she liked to see other girls pretty and coquettish too; and during her visit the Misses Dudley went about with wild flowers in their hair, with dainty bouquets in their belts, with dresses guiltless of a crease, “making much of themselves,” as Bessie phrased it.
How she revelled in that house! How she, so constantly a prisoner among bricks and mortar, loved the freedom and the liberty of that country life! How she stood drinking in the pure, undefiled air, that came floating over the fields and the hedgerows to her! Much as the young Dudleys loved their home, they had not that appreciation of every flower and leaf, of every effect of light and shade, which astonished them in their guest.
Her love of the country was keen and sharp, like the relish of a half-starved man for food.
Here, at last, was a life to be desired—a life idly busy, sinlessly sensuous;—here was a lotus land of indolent industry, bright with sunshine, where the air was full of all delicious perfumes—where the days were happy and the nights calm—where the morning dawned upon a peaceful household—where the moon looked down, not upon a turbulent sea of human woes, sorrows, sins, passions, disappointments, but on the pleasant fields where the grass was springing, and the sheep lay dotted about on the soft green slopes.
The birds in the hedges, the ferns in the dells, the soft cushions of moss, which she would caress with her little hand and touch with her lips, as though such delicious greenery must be conscious of her caresses; the branches waving in the breeze, the whirling of the pigeons in the air, the hundred sounds of the country,—all these things had charms for Bessie which made the Dudleys find her a most appreciative and delightful companion.
Never was there such a girl for a walk, Alick Dudley thought, as Bessie Ormson. If she went out in the early morning, before the sun had risen high enough to have much power, Bessie would stop to look at the cobwebs glittering with dew-drops, at the drooping blades of wet grass, at the tears on the leaves of the dog-roses. Were it later in the day, she revelled in the luxurious warmth; in the far-away tiled roofs peeping red from amongst sheltering trees; in the quiet cattle; in the hush of the noon-tide; and when the afternoon stole on, and the evening shadows began to fall, she delighted in the solemn darkness of the distant woods, in the flow of beck and stream, in the figures of the labourers hieing them, home across the field-paths, in the children grouped about the cottage doors.
“It is peace,” she was wont to say—“perfect peace. I wonder if heaven will be like this!”
There are poets who cannot write a line of verse; there are artists who yet lack the power to reproduce that which fills their souls with pleasure almost amounting to pain. The understanding mind and the skilful hand are not necessarily sent into the world together. The power of appreciating things lovely and beautiful is often divorced from the capacity to create or portray the lovely and the beautiful, or, rather, is not always mated with such capacity; and, although Bessie Ormson possessed no creative or imitative genius, she was yet endowed with that diviner genius—the ability to luxuriate in the thousand works of the great Creator.
And it was this faculty of perception and appreciativeness which, added to her quickness and vivacity, made Bessie such good company that no one in the length of a summer’s day could weary of her. Nothing escaped her—not a flower growing by the wayside, not a cloud fleeting across the sky, not a change of expression on a man’s face, not an unusual cadence in a familiar voice.
With all her sarcasm and frivolity, the girl’s human sympathy was intense; and, perhaps, when the secret of most popularity is exhausted, it will be found only to exist in the fact that the man or the woman popular can enter into and understand the moods and feelings of other men and women.