“Thursday.”
“Three days!”
“It cannot be before.”
She smiled mysteriously and looked at Richard with the same alluring light shining in her eyes. How red and mischievous her lips looked! Jeffray conceived a great thirst for them, but hung back as though his honor shackled him. They were both a little shy of each other, looking long into each other’s eyes and breathing rapidly. Then they heard Dan’s voice calling to his dog, and Jeffray, mounting his horse, smiled at the girl and rode out from the ruins. Bess stood watching him with her bosom rising and falling and her face aglow.
Richard overtook Dan Grimshaw at the ford, and gave him “good-day” as he splashed through the water. The forester’s ugly face clouded as he recognized Jeffray. He touched his fur cap surlily, and appeared puzzled to know what business the Squire of Rodenham had in Pevensel. Jeffray, gathering that Bess was safe, pricked up his horse and took the path through the woods.
XVIII
Shakespeare’s Romeo lost his reason in a night, and, however illogical the intoxications of youth may seem, they are of finer gold than the cold-tempered alloys of age.
Jeffray rode through the woods that evening, and heard the birds singing in the thickets, and saw the gloom creeping up over the mysterious hills, the gray sky cracking in the west to let through the red and molten lava of the setting sun. Thrush challenged thrush on many a glimmering spire, blackbirds piped it mellowly, linnets twittered in the gorse. Soon the plaintive chiding of the wryneck would be heard amid the meadows and the thickets. The wild woods seemed full of sound, of all the joyous outpourings of life, the massed chantings of the forest choristers. The gorse glimmered, wind-flowers shivered in the shade, the cuckoo-flower was unfolding its finials of lilac and white. Overhead the great trees breathed and murmured, tossing their hands to the setting sun.
Jeffray’s whole soul was filled with melancholy delight. Was not this black-haired Bess akin to all this beauty, this starting forth of colors, this uprushing of sound? The light in her eyes, surely it had set his soul on fire. And the sweet scent of her clothes, like hay on a June morning, should he forget it to the day of his death?
He slept but little that night, tossing to and fro—and thinking of Bess. Even when he slept he dreamed of her, and waking—seemed to catch her face looking out at him from the gloom. Ever and again, with a rallying of his loyalty to Jilian, he strove to put the thought of the girl out of his head. It was but the old battle betwixt nature and the sentimental but very jealous ordinances of civilization. On the one hand, romance pleaded, on the other, prosaic proprieties of life propounded the doctrine of peace and respectable monotony.