Vi did not say a word—there was no need for anything so feeble as words. She clung to him, gazing at him, holding one of his arms fast with her small hands clasped round it. She had been sure he would come; in her heart she had been so wicked as to smile at Mary’s faith the other way, though she did not say a word of the sweet confidence in her own mind. And Mary, who had not been so treated by Providence, and whose love had not been happy, felt a hot flush of anger against the girl who stood there before her with ineffable smiles, not objecting to the young man’s impetuosity, not even answering him a word.
“Violet!” she cried, “come away this instant. Do you know that you are defying both your mother and me?”
“You have always been my enemy, Mary,” cried Val passionately, “and I don’t know why, for I have always liked you. Vi, you are not going to do what she tells you—to follow her instead of me?”
“I am not going to follow any one,” said Vi, detaching herself from his arm with much dignity; then she stood at a little distance, and looked at him with tender glowing eyes. “Oh, Val!” she cried, “but I am glad to see you! I thought you would never come. I knew you would be here to-day. Val, are you well—are you quite well? Oh, what a weary, weary time it has been, when I thought I would never see you more!”
“Then you were thinking of me? and you don’t mean to cast me off, Vi?”
“I—cast you off!—that is likely! Mary, you never were Val’s enemy, though he says so, in his hasty way—he was always hasty. He made me give him my promise here, beneath this tree. I cannot take back my word; I cannot say one thing to you and another to him; and you never scolded me when I said—I—cared for Val, Mary! not a word! She only cried and gave me a kiss.”
“And she ought to give me a kiss too,” said bold Val, going up to Miss Percival, whose heart was melting altogether away in her bosom, and whose efforts to look stern were becoming almost ludicrous. The audacious boy went up to her, while Vi looked on thunderstruck at his boldness, and kissed Mary’s cheek, which flushed crimson under the touch, making that middle-aged woman look a girl again. “How dare you?” she cried, putting up her hand to push him away; but Mary’s strength was not able to resist this. “God bless you!” she said, next moment, the tears coming to her eyes, “you bold boy! How dare you kiss me? Though I am your enemy, I’ve thought of you and prayed for you morning and night ever since I parted from you, Val.”
“I know that very well,” said the young man, composedly; “for whatever you may say, how could you be my enemy when I am fond of you? You have not the heart not to help us, Mary. Come and sit down again and let us think what to do. Here is where we played truant when we were children. Here is where you brought us, Mary—you—when we were older; and here is where Vi gave me her promise. This is the place of all others to meet again. As for any pretence of separating us, how can any one do it? Think a little,” said Val, standing before the fallen tree on which Vi had sat with poor Dick, and from which she now regarded him with soft eyes suffused with light and happiness. “Could they be hard upon her, for the first time in her life, and break her heart? Is that reasonable? As for me,” the young man said, raising his head, while the two women looked at him with tender envy and admiration, “there is no interference possible. I am a man and my own master. So now that you are convinced,” cried Valentine, putting himself beside Violet on the old trunk, which, old as it was, had put forth young shoots of life and hope to make itself fit for the throne of so much love and gladness, “let us consider what is the best means to clear these trifling temporary obstructions out of our way.”
I don’t think there is anything so silken-green, or that makes so tender a canopy over your head, and shows the sky so sweetly through them, as young beech-leaves in May, just shaken out of their brown busks, and reclothing, as if with tenderest ornaments of youth, the big branches that bear them. Stray airs rustled through them; stray sunbeams, for the day was cloudy, came and went, penetrating now and then through the soft canopy—punctuating with sudden glow of light some one or other of those bold arguments of Val’s, which told so well upon his sympathetic audience. Though Violet was not one of the worshipping maidens of modern story, but thought of Val only as Val, and not as a demigod, the soft transport of reunion, the glow of tender trust and admiration with which she regarded that delightful certainty of his, which no terrors shook, gave to her soft face a look of absolute dependence and devotion. She looked up to him, as they sat together holding each other’s hands like two children, with a sentiment which went beyond reason. He was no wiser nor cleverer, perhaps, than she was; but he looked so strong and so sure, so much above feminine doubts and tremblings, that the mere sight of him gave confidence. As for Mary, seated on the green bank in front of these two, who was ever so much wiser and cleverer than Val (he had few pretensions that way), she, too, felt, with a kind of philosophical amusement at herself, the same sense of added confidence and moral strength as she looked at the boy whom she had watched as he grew up, and chided and laughed at—whose opinion on general subjects had no particular weight with her, yet who somehow gave to her experienced and sensible middle-age a sensation of support and certainty, which the wisest reason does not always communicate. Mary looked at the two seated there together, hand in hand, half-children, half-lovers, under the soft shadow of the young beech-leaves, with that “smile on her lip and tear on her eye” which is the most tender of all human moods. Pity and envy, and amusement, and an almost veneration, were in her thoughts. How innocent they were! how sure of happiness! how absolute in their trust in each other! and, indeed (when the case was fairly set before them), in everybody else. Notwithstanding the one terrible shock his faith had received—a shock which happily had worked itself out in bodily illness, the most simple way—Val was still of opinion that, if you could but get to the bottom of their hearts, all the world was on his side. He had no fear of Violet’s mother, though for the moment she had crushed him; and, to tell the truth, after his fever, Val had altogether forgotten Mr Pringle’s offence against him, and all the harm it had brought. Now that offence was more than past, for had it not been confessed and atoned for, a thing which makes a sin almost a virtue? Nor was he alarmed when he thought of the old people at Rosscraig, who had humoured and served him all his life. What was there to fear? “It would be against all reason, you know,” said Val, “if our course of true love had run quite smooth. We were miserable enough one time to make all right for the future; but if you mean to be miserable any more, Vi, you must do it by yourself, for I shan’t take any share.”
When a young man thus makes light of all difficulties, what can a sympathetic woman do? Before many minutes had passed, Miss Percival found herself pledged to brave Violet’s father and mother and overcome their objections. “They have never crossed her in their lives, and why should they now?” said Valentine, with good sense, which no one could gainsay.