Magdaléna did not see Trennahan alone again; he did not ask her to ride
with him on the following morning, and left for town immediately after
breakfast. But before taking his seat in the char-à-banc he held her
hand a moment and assured her with such emphasis that he owed the great
pleasure of his visit entirely to her, that her spirits, which had been
in weeds, flaunted into colour and song; and she went at once to her
nook in the woods, feeling that the fire in her mind was nothing less
than creative.
But she did not write for some time. The sun was already intensely hot;
even in those depths the air was heavy, the heat waves shimmered among
the young green of the undergrowth.
Magdaléna stretched herself out lazily and looked up into the green
recesses of the trees. The leaves were rustling in a light hot wind. She
fancied that they sang, and strained her ears to catch the tune. It
looked so cool and green and dark up there; surely the birds, the
squirrels, the very tree-toads,--those polished bits of malachite,--must
be happy and fond in their storeyed palace. What a poem might be written
about them! but they would not raise their voices above that indefinite
murmur, and the straining ears of her soul heard not either.
She sat up and began to write, endeavouring to shake some life into her
heroine, but only succeeding in making her express herself in very
affected old English, with the air of a marionette.
Then mechanically, almost unconsciously, she began the story again. At
the end of an hour she discovered that she had dressed up Trennahan in
velvet and gold, doublet and hose. She laughed with grim merriment.
Ignorant as she was, she was quick to see the incongruity between modern
man in his quintessence and the romantic garments of a buried century.
Also, her hero had addressed his startled friends in this wise:
"I can't stand that rat-hole any longer. I'm going to stay down here
with the rest of you, whether I'm hanged for it or not."
This was undoubtedly what Trennahan would have said; but not the
Cavalier, Lord Hastings of Fairfax. She had a vague prompting that on
the whole it was preferable to,--
"Gadsooks, my bold knights, and prithee should a man rot in a rat-ridden
cupboard while his friends make merry? Rather let him be drawn and
quartered, then fed to ravens, but live while he may."
But she dismissed the thought as treason to letters, and proceeded on
her mistaken way with the Lady Eleanora Templemere. Shakspere and Scott
were her favourite writers; she felt that she must fumble into the
sacred lines of literature by such feeble rays as they cast her. She
liked and admired the great realists whose bones were hardly dust; but
they did not inspire her, taught her nothing.