‘All the same, Victoria, I won’t eat my lunch.’
‘Dear friend, dear, dear friend, if I might only say to you all I want to say! But why do you trouble me so, why do you try to make me do wrong?’
It was my turn to jump up now, and to take her hand, which she did not refuse.
‘Victoria, who can contend against you? You play by your own rules, and mine seems the sharper’s game. Come, the hunger strike is over; hand up the fruit.’
Victoria peeled the bananas, and I ate them. This arrangement was nearly as good as the best. It was glorious sunshine again in her face, as in the sky above. ‘Not more than others I deserve, yet God hath given me more,’ was my humble grace.
By-and-by, but all too soon, I was left to my reflections once more. Victoria withdrew, on the understanding that I should work at my lecture during her absence. I watched her to the foot of the slope, fixing myself in an attitude of meditation when she turned to watch me. I saw her skirmishing with a band of infant wanderers who wanted to climb to my study, and heading them off, with much ingenuity, into an orchard beyond the Ridge.
I really tried to work, but it was impossible. The sounds and sights of the fête came up to me, on my lofty post of observation, from all the peopled region of the Isle, and from the more distant summits on the other side, that rose like towers from the wall of rock. Distance subdued every laugh and shout, every cry of bird or beast, into perfect harmony with the rhythmic beat of the waves; and the sounds seemed but varied modes of musical silence. There was the same harmony in the tints, seen through the wide stretches of summer mist. It was sometimes almost impossible to say where the flowers ended, and the men and women began. You might tell it only by the motion of the figures darting in and out of the patches of blossom, as pursuers and pursued. The pairs that sauntered soon became absolutely one with the landscape, as they moved further from the point of view. It was exquisite to the sense and to the soul, as an image of the unity of nature. Sky and earth and sea, man and woman, flower and tree, seemed but so many forms and manifestations of one universal element of beauty, each separate perception of the beholder realising them in a uniform impression, in its own way. I was busy with this fancy, face downwards in the grass, and trying to work it out in consultation with a wild-flower, when Victoria surprised me again. If she had sought my life, it would have been hers, for she was within a yard of me, before I knew that she was there.
‘Princess, hear my confession before you begin to frown. I have done nothing; nothing—nothing done! Now I will begin, just whenever you like. Only I cannot work here; I must go somewhere else.’
‘Home to your own room?’
‘Stuffy!’