CHAPTER XVII.
The bag-affair is quite an old one now—a fortnight old. The bag itself has, I believe, retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor is it much more likely to reissue thence than was one of the frail nuns built into the wall in the old times likely to come stepping out again. Bobby has at length ceased to offer me every object which it devolves upon him to hand me, with a quavering voice and a prolonged stammer, since, though I was at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense, I am now becoming hornily hard and indifferent to it. We have stepped over the boundaries of June into July.
Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers, wherever—since they say nothing is ever really lost—they lie with their stored sweets. To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any one of my nineteen.
Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home—his home, that is—but rather diffidently and tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the proposal will meet with favor in my eyes. He need not be nervous on this point. I, too, am rather anxious and eager to see my house—my house, if you please!—I, who have never hitherto possessed any larger residence than a doll's house, whose whole front wall opened at once, giving one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range, best four-poster, and drawing-room chairs. I have, it is true, seen photographs of my new house, photographs of its east front, of its west front—photographs, in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens, of its woody pool—but, to tell you the truth, I want to see it. I have already planned a house-warming, and invited them all to it, a house-warming in which—oh, absurd!—I shall sit at the head of the table, and father and mother only at the sides—I shall tell the people who they are to take in to dinner, and nod my head from the top when dessert is ended.
To-day I am going to write and secure the Brat's company—that is, later in the day—but now it is quite, quite early, even the letters have not come in. We have all—viz., the boys, the girls, and I—risen (in pursuance of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost as early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going out to gather mushrooms in the meadow, by the river. Indignation against the inhabitants of the neighboring town is what has torn us from our morning dreams, the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion, we have found our meadow rifled before we could reach it. To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal terms. We are all rather gapy at first, more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling. But before long both gapes and grumbles depart.
Who would see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds, that an hour ago were crimson, about his head?
The place toward which we tend is at some little distance, and our road thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered fields, where the buttercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the grass-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately flushed, as if God in passing had called her very good, and she had reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly aloft the open cream-colored trumpets and closed red trumpet-buds of her heaven-sweet crown.
In an instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I feel, with Walter Savage Landor—