Part 2 (1/2)

CHAPTER V

AN IDYLL OF ALICE SUNs.h.i.+NE, WHICH REALLY BELONGS TO THE LAST CHAPTER

If the Reader has heard enough of the amourettes of the young gentleman upon whose memoirs I am engaged, let him skip this chapter and pa.s.s to the graver chapters beyond. My one aim is the Reader's pleasure, and I carry my solicitude so far that if he finds his happiness to lie outside these pages altogether, has no choice among these various chapters, but prefers none to any, I am quite content. Such a spirit of self-abnegation, the Reader must admit, is true love.

Perhaps it was an early unconscious birth-impulse of the true love some day to be born in his heart, that caused Narcissus to make a confession to his Miller's Daughter, on one of their pretty decorative evenings, when they sat together at the fireside, while the scent of the climbing roses, and the light of the climbing moon, came in at the window.

The immediate effect of the confession was--no wonder--to draw tears.

And how beautiful she looked in tears! Who would dive for pearls when the pearl-fisheries of a woman's eyes are his to rifle?

Beautiful, beautiful tears, flow on--no dull, leaden rain, no mere monotonous deluge, but a living, singing fountain, crowned with such rainbows as hang roses and stars in the fine mist of samite waterfalls, irradiated by gleaming shafts of lovely anger and scorn.

Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden's eyes pierced Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears. There was thunder, too; the earth shook--just a little: but soon Narcissus saw the white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers. For all her sorrow, his was the peace of confession. His little lie had been acknowledged, his treason self-betrayed.

And it was this.

I have hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, wors.h.i.+pped many saints. At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller's Daughter had drawn into her lovely face so much of the beauty of the world. Alice Suns.h.i.+ne, shall we call her, was perhaps more of a cherub than a saint; a rosy, laughing, plump little arrangement of suns.h.i.+ny pink and white flesh, with blue eyes and golden hair. Alice was not overburdened with intellectuality, and, like others of her s.e.x, her heart was nothing like so soft as her bosom. Narcissus had first been in love with her sister; but he and the sister--a budding woman of the world--had soon agreed that they were not born for each other, and Narcissus had made the transfer of his tragic pa.s.sion with inexpensive informality. As the late Anthony Trollope would finish one novel to-night, and begin another to-morrow morning, so would Narcissus be off with the old love this Sunday, and visibly on with the new the next.

Dear little plump, vegetable-marrow Alice! Will Narcissus ever forget that Sunday night when the church, having at last released its weary wors.h.i.+ppers, he stole, not as aforetime to the soft side of Emily, but to the still softer side of the little bewildered Alice. For, though Alice had wors.h.i.+pped him all the time, and certainly during the whole of the service, she had never dared to hope that he would pa.s.s her das.h.i.+ng, dark-eyed sister to love _her_--little, blonde, phlegmatic, blue-eyed Alice.

But Apollo was bent on the capture of his Daphne. Truth to say, it was but the work of a moment. The golden arrow was in her heart, the wound kissed whole again, and the new heaven and the new earth all arranged for, in hardly longer time than it takes to tell.

In youth the mystery of woman is still so fresh and new, that to make a fuss about a particular woman seems like looking a gift-horse of the G.o.ds in the mouth. The light on the face of womanhood in general is so bewilderingly beautiful that the young man literally cannot tell one woman from another. They are all equally wonderful. Masculine observation leads one to suppose that woman's first vision of man similarly precludes discrimination.

Ah me! it is easy to laugh to-day, but it was heart--bleeding tragedy when those powers that oughtn't to be decreed Alice's exile to a boarding-school in some central Africa of the midland counties.

The hemorrhage of those two young hearts! But, for a time, each plastered the other's wounds with letters--dear letters--letters every post. For the postal authorities made no objection to Narcissus corresponding with two or more maidens at once. And it is only fair to Alice to say, that she knew as little of the Miller's Daughter as the Miller's Daughter knew of her.

So, when Narcissus was reciting _Endymion_ to his Miller's Maid, it was not without a minor chord plaining through the major harmonies of the present happiness; the sense that Alice was but fifteen miles away--so near she could almost hear him if he called--only fifteen miles away, and it was a long three months since they had met.

It now becomes necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flas.h.i.+ng airy wheel is the most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county--road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his mystic tryst; he thought of the seven-leagued boots, the flying carpet, the wis.h.i.+ng-cap, and the wooden Pegasus,--so called because it mounted into the clouds on the turning of a peg. As he pa.s.sed along by mead and glade, his wheel sang to him, and he sang to his wheel. It was a daisied, daisied world.

There were b.u.t.tercups and violets in it too as he sped along in the early morning of an unforgotten Easter Sunday, drawn, so he had shamelessly told his Miller's Daughter, by antiquarian pa.s.sion to visit the famous old parish church near which Alice was at school.

Antiquarian pa.s.sion! Well, certainly it is an antiquarian pa.s.sion now.

But then--how his heart beat! how his eyes shone as with burning kohl!

That there was anything to be ashamed of in this stolen ride never even occurred to him. And perhaps there was little wrong in it, after all.

Perhaps, when the secrets of all hearts are revealed, it will come out that the Miller's Daughter took the opportunity to meet Narcissus'

understudy,--who can tell?

But the wonderful fresh morning-scented air was a delicious fact beyond dispute. That was sincere. Ah, there used to be real mornings then!--not merely interrupted nights.

And it was the Easter-morning of romance. There was a sweet pa.s.sionate Sabbath-feeling everywhere. Sabbath-bells, and Sabbath-birds, and Sabbath-flowers. There was even a feeling of restful Sabbath-cheer about the old inn, where, at last, entering with much awe the village where Alice nightly slept--clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, --Narcissus provided for the demands of romance by a hearty country breakfast. A manna of blessing seemed to lie thick upon every thing. The very ham and eggs seemed as if they had been blessed by the Pope.

It was yet an hour to church-time, an hour usually one of spiteful alacrity; but this morning, it seemed, in defiance of the clock, cruelly unpunctual. After breakfast, Narcissus strolled about the town, and inquired the way to Miss Curlpaper's school. It stood outside the little town. It was pointed out to him in the distance, across billowy clouds of pear and apple-blossom, making the hollow in which the town nestled seem a vast pot-pourri jar, overflowing with newly gathered rose-leaves.

Had the Miller's Daughter been able to watch his movements, she would have remarked that his antiquarian ardour drew him not to the church, but to a sombre many-windowed house upon the hill.