Chapter VII.
Such soliloquies as those of the last chapter presently led to dialogue of the same character.
The lady continued to scribble that brief romance, or rather that title of a romance.
“Lady Jane Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall.”
The lover for his part was not a dunce. He soon perceived that it was his business to supply the situations and the talk under this title, and help the plot to grow.
It grew with alarming rapidity.
Tulips were thrusting their green thumbs through the ground in the Dutch gardens of the town when the young people first met. Tulips had flaunted their day and gone to green seed-vessels with a little ruffle at the top, and cabbage-roses were in young bud, when the first act of the drama ended.
The lady was hardly as coy as Galatea in the eclogue. The lover might have been repelled by the large share she took in the courtship. But he was a true, blind, eager young lover, utterly absorbed in a fanaticism of affection. Indeed, if in the tumult of his own bliss he had perceived that the lady was reaching beyond her line to beckon him, this would have seemed another proof that she and he were both obeying a Divine mandate. What young lover disputes his mistress’s right to share the passion?
“I knew it,” he said to her, by and by, — “I knew from the first moment we met, that we must love one another. We are perfect counterparts, — the halves of a perfect whole. But you the nobler. I felt from the moment that pleasant incident of the portrait had brought us together, that we were to be united. I hardly dared give my hope words. But I knew in my heart that the benign powers would not let me love so earnestly and yet desperately.”
These fine fervors seemed to her a little ridiculous, but very pretty. She looked in the glass, where the little Cupids in the onion-wreaths were listening, amused with Edwin’s rhapsodies, smiled to herself, then smiled to him, and said, “Matches are made in heaven.”
“I told you,” he said, “that I had erased the word Perhaps from my future. Now that I am in the way to prosperity and distinction for myself, and that you smile, success offers itself to me drolly. The Great Lawyer proposes to me a quadruple salary, and quarters the time in which I am to become a Hortensius. The Great Merchant offers me three hundred a year at once, a certain partnership, and promises to abandon codfish and go into more fragrant business.”
They laughed merrily over this. Small wit wakes lovers’ glee.
“I like you better in public life,” she said. “You must be a great man immediately.”
“Love me, and I will be what you love.”
“I am so glad I am rich. Such fine things can be done with money.”
“I should be terribly afraid of your wealth, if I was not sure of success on my side. As it is, we have the power of a larger usefulness.”
“Yes,” she said, carelessly.
He did not notice her indifferent manner, for he had dashed into a declamation of his high hopes for his country and his time. Those were the days when ardent youths were foreseeing Revolution and Independence.
She did not seem much interested in this rhapsody.
“I love to hear you talk of England and the great people you knew there,” said she. “Is not Brothertoft Manor-House very much like an English country-seat?”
“Yes; but if it were well kept up, there would be no place so beautiful in England, — none so grand by nature, I mean.”
Here followed another rhapsody from this poetic youth on the Manor and its people, the river and the Highlands.
She was proud of her lover’s eloquence, although she did not sympathize much in his enthusiasms. She had heard rivers talked of as water-power or roads for water-carriage. Mountains had been generally abused in the Billop establishment as ungainly squatters on good soil. Forests were so many feet of timber. Tenants were serfs, who could be squeezed to pay higher rents, and ought to be the slaves of their landlords.
But she listened, and felt complimented while Edwin painted the scenery of her new piece of property with glowing fancy, and while he made each of the tenants the hero of a pastoral idyl. A manor that could be so commended must be worth more money than she had supposed.
“I begin to long to see it,” she said, with real interest. “And that dear old fat Sam Galsworthy, who lent you the horse, I must thank him.”
“Why not go up, as soon as June is fairly begun?”
“Mr. Skaats would not know all the pretty places.”
They looked at each other an instant, — she bold and imperious, he still timidly tender.
“If I only dared!” he said.
“Men always dare, do they not?” she rejoined, without flinching.