Walking fast on his round he rehearsed such little speeches, and if she made an unanticipated answer he was baffled and confused. He suffered from an extreme shyness when face to face with her.
Then all at once his overwhelming admiration gave him a hot flow of language. Beginning the old cumbrous facetiousness about her correspondence, he blurted out the true thoughts that he had begun to entertain.
"You didn't ought to want for letters, miss, and you wouldn't—not if I was your letter-writer. I'd send you a valentine every day of the year."
As he spoke, he looked at her with burning eyes. He was astonished, almost terrified by his hardiness; and what he detected of its effect on her threw him into an indescribable state of emotion.
Rough and coarse he might be, and yet not truly disagreeable to her fine senses; his freckled face and massive shoulders did not repel her; no instinct of the lovely princess turned sick at these advances of the wild man of the woods. Under his scrutiny she showed a sort of fluttered helplessness, a mingling of beauty and weakness that sent fiery messages thrilling through and through him, a pale tremor, a soft glow, a troubled but not offended frown; and from beneath all these surface manifestations the undeveloped woman in her seemed to speak to the matured manhood in him—seemed to say without words, "Oh, dear me, what is this? I hope you haven't taken a real fancy to my whiteness and slenderness and tremulousness; because if you have, you are so big and so strong that I know you'll get me in the end."
That was the crucial moment of his marvelous life. After that all his dreams fused and became one. He felt as if from soft metal he had changed into hard metal. And, moreover, the stimulus of love seemed to induce a vast intellectual growth; things that had been difficult of comprehension became lucidly clear; prejudices and ignorances fell away from him of their own accord. A shut world had suddenly become an open world.
As a grown man he returned to the benches of evening school. He learned to write his beautiful copper-plate hand, and knocked the bottom out of arithmetic and geography. Then came sheer erudition—the nature of chemical elements, stars in their courses, kings of England with their Magna Chartas and habeas corpuses. Nor content even then, he must needs grapple with Roman emperors and Greek republics, and master the fabled lore concerning gods and goddesses, cloven-footed satyrs, and naked nymphs of the grove. But he understood that, in spite of all this culture, in spite, too, of his greater care for costume and his increased employment of soap and water, Mavis was still enormously above him. The aunt, a smooth-tongued little woman whom for a long time he regarded as implacably hostile to his suit, made him measure the height of the dividing space every time that he called at North Ride Cottage. Plainly trying to crush him with the respectability both of herself and of her surroundings, she showed off all the presents from the Abbey—the china and glass ornaments, the piano; the photographs of Mr. Barradine on horseback, of the late Lady Evelyn Barradine in her pony-carriage, of Mr. Barradine's guests with guns waiting to shoot pheasants. And she conducted him into and out of the two choicely upholstered rooms which on certain occasions Mr. Barradine deigned to occupy for a night or a couple of nights—for instance, when the Abbey House was being painted and he fled the smell of paint, when the Abbey House was closed and he came down from London to see his agent on business, when he wanted to make an early start at the cub-hunting and he couldn't trust the servants of the Abbey House to rouse him if he slept there.
"Last time of all," and Mrs. Petherick rubbed her hands together and smiled insinuatingly, "he paid me the pretty compliment of saying that I made him more comfortable than he ever is in his own house. I said, 'If we can't let you feel at home here, it's something new among the Pethericks.'"
It seemed that the bond between the humble family and the great one had existed for several generations. It was a tradition that the Pethericks should serve the Barradines. Mavis' grandfather had been second coachman at the Abbey; her aunt's husband had been valet to Mr. Everard and made the grand tour of Europe with him; aunt herself was of the Petherick blood, and had been a housemaid at the Abbey. It also seemed to be a tradition that the acknowledgment made by the Barradines for this fidelity of the Pethericks should be boundless in its extent.
Aunt spoke of the Right Honorable Everard as though she held him like a purse in her pocket, and Dale at one period had some queer thoughts about this old widow of a dead servant for whom so much had been done and who yet expected so much more. She said Mr. Barradine had charged himself with the musical training of another niece, and he would probably not hesitate to send Mavis to Vienna for the best masters, should she presently display any natural talent. Her cousin Ruby sang like an angel from the age of ten; but Mavis so far exhibited more inclination for instrumental music.