How delightful the first evening in country quarters always is. How comfortable the wood fire that flamed and sputtered on the parlour hearth, how inviting the meal of tea, new-laid eggs, homemade breads and jams, honey and hot scones spread out upon a spotless cloth around a centre piece of daffodils and early garden flowers. For a rejected suitor I felt singularly cheerful; for a blighted being I made a most excellent meal; and for the desperate misogynist I had determined on becoming I surely felt too much placid satisfaction at Mrs. Anderson's homely talk.
But it was really pleasant to lie back in the capacious leathern chair, while this good woman cleared away the tea-things, and lazily eyeing the fire, listen to the history of herself and her family, of her husband, her children, her landlord, of her courtship, her marriage, her troubles, of the death of her mother in the room overhead the year before last, and of the wedding of her eldest boy Robert which is to take place this summer as soon as the corn is carried.
Such openness of disposition, so often found among people of Mrs. Anderson's class, is very refreshing, and it is convenient too. You know at once where you stand. I wish it were the custom in society. I should then have learned from Catherine's own lips how many fellows she had already sent to the right-about, and I should have given her no opportunity of adding to their number.
I came down very late to breakfast this morning—my first breakfast in the country is always luxuriously late—and I found a tall and pretty young girl busy building up the fire in my sitting-room. I guessed at once she was the "Annie" of whom I heard a long and pleasing account last night. Annie is the image of what her mother must have been twenty years ago. She has the same agreeable blue eyes, the same soft straw coloured hair. But while Mrs. Anderson wears hers in bands at each side of the head, Annie's is drawn straight back to display the smoothest of white foreheads, the freshest of freckled little faces in the world. She is about seventeen, and a sweet girl, I feel sure. Could no more play with a man's feelings than she could torture one of the creatures committed to her care. She has charge of the poultry, she tells me, and is allowed half the profits. Mem.—I shall eat a great many eggs.
April 5.—I have done an excellent thing in exchanging the hollow shams of society for the healing powers of nature. I shall live to forget Catherine and to be happy yet. And there was after all something artificial about that girl. Pretty, certainly, but with the beauty of the stage; now little Annie here is pretty with the beauty of the sky and meadows.
I am delighted with this place. There is nothing like the country in early spring. Suppose I were never to go back to town again, but stay with the Andersons, see them through the lambing season, lend a hand at tossing the hay, swing a scythe at corn cutting (and probably cut off my own legs into the bargain), drink a health at son Robert's wedding, and then during the winter—yes, during the long dark winter evenings when the wind raves round the old house and whistles down the chimneys, when the boom of the sea echoes all along the coast as it breaks against the cliffs—then to sit in the cosy sitting-room, with the curtains drawn along the low windows, a famous fire flashing and glaring upon the hearth, one's limbs pleasantly weary with the day's labour, one's cheeks tingling from exposure to the keen air; would not this be an agreeable exchange for the feverish anxieties and stagnant pleasures of London life?
After a time, a considerable time no doubt, it would possibly occur to Catherine to wonder what had become of me.
April 6.—Easter Sunday. I am writing in my sitting-room window. I raise my eyes and see first the broad window-sill, whereon stand pots of musk and geranium, not yet in flower; then through the clear latticed panes, the bee-haunted garden, descending by tiny grassy terraces to the kitchen-garden with its rows of peas and beans, its beds of lettuce and potatoe, its neat patches of parsley and thyme; then a field beyond. I note the double meandering hedge-line that indicates the high road, and beyond again the ground rises in sun-bathed pastures and ploughed land to the gorse-covered cliff edge with its background of pure sky; a little to the right, yet still in full view from my window, is an abrupt dip in the cliff, which shows a great wedge of glittering sea. It is here that my eyes always ultimately rest, until they ache with the dazzle and the beauty, and then by a natural transition I think of—Catherine.
At this moment she is probably dressing to go to church, and is absorbed in the contemplation of a new hat. I should think she had as many hats on her head as hairs—no, I don't mean that; it suggests visions of "ole clo'es"—I mean she must have almost as many hats as hairs on her head.
How inexpressibly mean and petty this devotion to rags and tags and gewgaws seems when one stands in the face of the Immensities and the Eternities! Yet it would appear as though the feminine mind were really incapable of impression by such Carlylean sublimities, for I saw Annie start for church awhile since in a most terrible combination of maroon and magenta. Her best clothes evidently, cachemire and silk, with two flowers and a feather in her hat, her charming baby prettiness as much crushed and eclipsed as bad taste and a country town dressmaker could accomplish. What I like to see Annie in is the simple stuff gown she wears of a morning, with the big bib apron of white linen, and the spotless white collar caressing her creamy throat. I would lock her best clothes up in that delightful carved oak chest that stands upstairs on the landing and throw the key into the sea; and little Annie would let me do it; she is evidently the most docile of child-women. Catherine, now, had I ever ventured on adverse criticism of her garments, would have thrown me into the sea instead.