Encouraging to those who could press the question, but he had not even courage to get the first nay. It was the “golden bullet”—the lack of the power to spend—the miserable poverty which pressed upon him with a leaden weight. He did his best to follow infallible Will’s advice. He snared twenty hares and sold them; he had still a small gold pencil-case left—it had belonged to his mother. He sold that also.
On foot he walked forty miles to Reading, and spent the whole proceeds in the purchase of a pair of fine jet bracelets, which his instinct told him would look well upon Violet’s white wrist. When he had got them, came the difficulty—how could he give them to her? At last he employed a shepherd lad to leave a parcel for Miss Waldron.
He kept away several days, but love was more powerful than shame. He went.
With Violet he strolled up the long shady filbert walk, with the clusters, now ripe, hanging overhead. His heart beat fast, but he said nothing. On her part she was silent. Suddenly she lifted up her arm and reached after a cluster of the nuts high up. Her sleeve fell down; the beautiful arm was bare to the elbow, and there was the bracelet!
Her eyes met his; a lovely colour suffused her cheek. An uncontrollable impulse seized him. He caught her hand and kissed it. Why linger? No one can tell how these things come about. Their lips met, and it is enough.
That was the happiest autumn Aymer ever knew. Even now he looks back at its sweetness with a species of regret. The sunshine was warmer, the blue of the sky richer, the yellow mist that hung over the landscape softer, the bee went by with a joyous hum, the crimson-and-gold of the dying leaves was more brilliant than ever it had been before or since. Love lent his palette to Nature, and the world was aglow with colour. How delicious it is to see everything through the medium, and in the company of a noble girl just ripening into womanhood! I remember one such summer—
But age with his stealing steps
Has clawed me in his clutch.
She was very beautiful; it is hard to describe her. It was not perhaps so much the features, the hue of the hair, the colour of the eye, the complexion, or even the shape, as the life, the vitality, the wonderful freshness which seemed to throw a sudden light over her, as when the sunshine falls upon a bed of flowers:—
Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells,
With rosy, slender fingers backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom, her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches
Floated the glowing sunlights as she moved.
The modern taste for catalogues compels me to name the colour of her eye and hair. Her eye was full, large, and lustrous; that deep black so rarely seen—an eye that gave quick expression to the emotions of the heart—that flashed with laughter, or melted with tenderness. Her hair was not quite golden; it was properly brown, but so near the true golden that a little sunlight lit it up with a glossy radiance impossible to express in words. The complexion was that lovely mingling of red and white, which the prince in the fairy tale prayed his lady-love might have, when he saw the crimson blood of a raven he had slain, staining the translucent marble slab upon which it had fallen. The nose was nearly straight; the lips full and scarlet. She was tall, but not too tall. It is difficult for a woman to have a good carriage unless she be of moderate height. Enough of the catalogue system.