IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A GODDESS
Loveday bore home the milk in a maze of bliss, and staying not for her
supper, for no hunger of the body was upon her, turned and went out
again into the glow of the evening. Had she been as full of sensibility
as a young lady she would have wandered straight away from Upper Farm,
forgotten the milk, and not thought of it again, till, returning with
the upgetting of the moon, her aunt had met her with vulgar reproaches.
What a charming scene could then have been staged, of sensitive genius
misunderstood by coarse-grained labour; of vision-drunken youth berated
by undreaming age! But she was not a young lady, and could derive no
felicity from forgetfulness of such a kind, for with the poor the
urgencies of the immediate task are raised to such compelling interest
that only a genius could neglect them with satisfaction. Therefore
Loveday never thought of forgetting the milk for her aunt, but her
exultation was of such a powerful sort that it upheld her through the
commonplaces of routine without her perceiving the incongruity which
would have jarred on one of a finer upbringing.
She placed the milk on the table, set out the bread and soaked
pilchards, found what was left of the cheese, and went hastily forth
lest her aunt should stay her.
She was bound for the little wood that lay in a fold of the moorland
above the sea. This wood was to her what a City of Refuge was to the
Hebrews of the Old Testament, and, like them, she fled to it when the
world's opinion of what was fit had proved at variance with her own.
To-night she went to it not for sanctuary from others, but to commune
with herself--in truth, for the first time she went not because of what
she had left but because of what she would find. Her bare heels were
winged along the road.
The wood lay lapped in the shadow that the western ridge had cast on it
an hour earlier than the rest of the world's bedtime, ever since the
trees had been there to receive the chill caress, and that was for many
a hundred years. Old Madgy swore that even in her young day the small
folk had still held their revels on the mossy slopes amongst the fanlike
roots, and who knows what larger folk had not fled there to wanton more
sweetly than in close cottages, or, like Loveday, to play the more
easily with their thoughts? The wood alone knew, and it held its
memories as closely as it held the thousand tiny lives confided to its
care; the bright-eyed shrew-mice that poked quivering noses through the
litter of last year's leaves, the birds that nested behind the
clustering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its grassy ditches.
Loveday turned off from the road and approached the wood from the west,
pausing when she reached the smooth grey boulders that were piled along
the ridge. She stood there gazing out over the smiling champaign, pale
and verdant from the farthest rim to the treetops that made as it were a
sea of faint green at her feet, for already in that soft clime the twigs
were misty with young leaf, and on the willows the velvety pearl-hued
ovals had begun to deck themselves with a delicate powdering of gold,
while from the hazels beside her the yellow lambs' tails hung still as
tiny pennants in the evening air. The gold of nature was as yet more
vivid than her green, which still showed tentative, enquiring of April
what of betrayal might not lie in the careless plaits of her garment.
To Loveday, high on her rock, between the gold of the sky and the gold
of the blossom, it seemed that April must of a certainty stay as fair
as this and lead to as bright a May, when that vision of her new self
should become a yet brighter reality. She was confident of April because
she was confident of life, lapped in an aureate glow that seemed to
suffuse the very air she drew into her lungs so that it intoxicated her
like the breath of a diviner ether from Olympian heights. She had seen
beauty, and lo! it had been revealed to her not as a thing apart and
unattainable, but as a quality within herself. Her "difference" had
become a blazon, not a branding.
Lying down on her rock, she told over with the rapture of a devotee the
divine excellencies of Flora Le Pettit; her radiance, her swinging,
shining curls, the wings that spread from her fair arms, the light that
gleamed on her bright brow and in her glancing eyes, but it was not
Flora, but Loveday, who danced before her mind's eye in white raiment,
and held the sorrows of the South in her eyes and the joy of youth on
her lips. Flora was the excuse for that new Loveday, as the beloved is
ever the excuse for the raptures transmuting the lover. Even thus do we
worship in our Creator the excellence of His handiwork, and one would
think that to be alive is act of praise enough to satisfy the most
exigent deity. Flora had called Loveday to life, and Loveday repaid her
with a worship of that which she had awakened, the highest compliment
the devout can pay, would the theologians but acknowledge it.
The sun slipped slower down the field of the sky, now a pale green as
delicate as the leaves burgeoning beneath it, and Loveday drew herself
up in a bunch, knees to chin, her brown strong hands clasped and her
slim feet curved over the slope of the smooth granite. The wood below
was wrapping itself in mystery, and her eyes attempted to fathom its
fastnesses. Ordinarily, she was fearful of venturing into the darkness
under the trees when once the evening had fallen, and it was then she
was accustomed to come out up to her boulder, but this evening she was
strung to any courage, for she walked in that certainty which on rare
occasions comes to all--the certainty of being immune to danger--which
is of all sensations vouchsafed to mortals the most godlike.
She rose to her feet, and swinging herself down from the rock, began the
descent, ledge by ledge, to the shadows below. A last spring, and she
was standing on the dark gold of drifted leaves, that rose about her
ankles with a dry little rustling. It was the wood's caress of greeting,
and she did not reflect that it was also the kisses of the dead.
Indeed, she clapped her hands in the rush of strength she felt, both in
her young muscles and her leaping spirit, and stood proudly listening
to the echo dying away, unaffrighted. She was young and strong and
beautiful; life, not dead leaves, lay at her feet. She was different,
and in her difference lay power, she was at last herself, Loveday ...
she was Loveday, Loveday ... Loveday...
She darted hither and thither through the wood, noting with a pleasure
keener than ever before how soft and sleek the moss was to her feet, how
silky the flank of the beech to her leaning cheek, how sweetly sharp the
intimate evening note of the birds.
And she was quite unfitted to be the goddess of these rustic beauties,
for all her mind could feel in that softness and sleekness and clear
calling was their alikeness to artificiality. She felt thin slippers
on her feet, rubbed an ecstatic cheek against the sheen of satin, and
in her ears echoed no diviner music than the Tol-de-rol Tol-de-rol
of the Bugletown band on Flora Day. Save in her sincerity, she was as
artificial a goddess as ever graced a Versailles FĂȘte ChampĂȘtre. What
were leaf and bird to her but the stuff of her life, whereas white satin
gleamed with the shimmer of the very heavens!
Hers was not, it is true, the milliner's paradise of Cherry and
Primrose, but it was one into which she could only penetrate fitly
clad. What wonder then that, brought up without any tutoring in the
excellencies of Nature, she should display the sad lack of true feeling
so deplored in her later by that nice arbiter of taste, Miss Flora Le
Pettit?