They sat a while without saying anything, and looked over the water. A shower was travelling across the distant mountain, trailing in a dim silver mist from sky to earth. It sailed nearer, so that drops from the edge of it dimpled the pond not far away.
A boat came toward them, propelled by a pair of strong arms. Elizabeth had heard her grandmother's summons, and was coming home. Her little boat was piled full of boughs of the wild cherry. Strings of its fruit, like strung garnets, glowed through the green leaves. With this was a tangled mass of clematis. She had hung a long spray of the vine over her head and neck, and its silvery-green blossoms glistened in the loose rings of her short, black hair, which it pushed over her forehead, and almost into the laughing eyes beneath. Through this vine, and the blouse that covered but did not hide them, the working of her supple shoulders could be seen. Her smooth, oval face was deeply flushed with health, exercise, and warmth.
She was perfectly business-like in her manner, and attended strictly to what she was doing. Even in passing before the young ladies, and looking directly in their faces, though her lips parted in a smile, she made no other sign of recognition. She brought her boat round in a smooth circle, not without pride, apparently, in displaying her skill, pushed it into a tiny cove, where the long, trailing grass brushed both sides, sprang lightly ashore, and tied it to the mooring-ring.
Then she made her half-embarrassed salutation, and stood wiping away the perspiration that lay in large drops on her forehead, and in little beads around her mouth.
If these three young women had been changed into flowers, the rower would have been a peony, Honora a lily, and Annette—but there is no flower complex and generous enough to be her representative. Be her symbol, rather, the familiar one of the orb just rounding into shape out of chaos. She was less well balanced than Honora, merely because there was so much more to balance. Her freak of searching out an ancestry would never have been acted on, even if her friend had approved it. It was one of those thoughts which need only to be put into words in order to be dismissed. Annette had rid herself of a good many foolish notions in this way, and had been growing wiser than her critics by the very acts which they took as proofs of her weakness.
Miss Pembroke had discovered this, for she looked lovingly. Others were astonished to find themselves awed to-day where they had mocked but yesterday, and professed that they knew Annette Ferrier only to be puzzled by her.
It sometimes happens to people that illusory thoughts and feelings, which, pent in the mind, have an appearance of reality, and even of force, perish in expressing themselves, as the cloud breaks in thunder.
There was another difference between these two: Annette had one of those souls that are born nailed to their cross.
It is usual with hasty and superficial judges, people who, as Liszt says, "desire to promulgate laws in spheres to which nature has denied them entrance," to show what they fancy is a good-natured contempt for these discontented beings who cannot accommodate themselves to life as it is. They mention them with an indulgent smile, and seem to take pleasure in wounding still further these sensitive souls, not aware how clearly they display their own presumptuous selfishness. The ease with which they content themselves with inferior aims and pleasures, they dignify by the name of philosophy and good sense; and they presume to censure those who, tormented by a vision of perfection, and feeling within themselves the premature stirring of powers that can be employed only in a higher state of existence, seem so imperfect only because to be perfect they must be superhumanly great. There are two ways in which this divine discontent may be silenced: the soul may degrade itself, and treat its ideals as visionary; or it may find rest in God. But no ordinary piety suffices; only a saintly holiness, flowing in and around the troubled soul like a sunny and peaceful sea, can lift and bear it smoothly on to that land where nothing sacred is mocked at, and the smiles are awakened by no sight of another's pain.
Annette Ferrier had made this much progress, that she had learned to rely on no one for a sympathy that would satisfy her, and had owned to herself that her heart required other and nobler aims and motives than those which had occupied her. She was half aware, or would have been, if the thought had not been rejected as treasonable, that if she were not already engaged to Lawrence Gerald, nothing would induce her to accept him as her future husband. But she had accepted him, and there was no longer room to doubt or to choose, or even to think of doubting or choosing. It lacked but a week to their wedding-day, and she was making her last preparations. What was worth doing at all was worth doing well, she thought, and resolved to make the occasion a festival one.