When she reached the bars (four rough chestnut poles held by old horseshoes driven into the posts like staples,—the relic of an old country tradition to keep the distemper from the cattle pastured therein), Stead had already dismounted, and stood waiting for her, and saying, “Letters first,” handed her the package—six in all: two for her mother, one being in the writing of Mr. Dean, and one of the lawyer; one from Lucy; two in strange hands, and the last addressed in the square, upright characters that she had seen once before, this also readdressed by Charlie Ashton.
With a swift movement she dropped them into the pocket of her brown linen pinafore, and, turning backward toward the Moosatuk, let the beauty of the vista—which at that point was framed by the mottled trunks of two gigantic plane trees that linked their gnarled branches across the roadway—take the place of speech for a few moments.
“Then you too love the river, and turn to it as I do,” Stead said, watching her face, and attributing its changeful expression, now wrapt, now alert, to its influence.
“Yes, surely,” she answered, looking far off and beyond, “and I think I must have known it somewhere in dreams, perhaps before ever I saw it. You do not know that when I was only a child I christened all over there, as far as eye can see, my River Kingdom, and said that some day I would be fairy queen of it!”
“Yes, I know; Dr. Russell once told me of your gypsying,—and now?” Stead dropped Manfred’s bridle that he had been holding, and drew a step nearer to the young woman, while the horse, feeling his liberty, began to crop the tender tufts of grass that were growing between the wheel tracks. “Is it not still your kingdom?”
“Yes and no. The kingdom is still there, but fairy days have flown away with their kings and queens, and all of that; it is only a corner of the same big round workaday world, though an enchanted one, and I am only just one woman in it, not even a gypsy queen. The river alone has not changed: when I am quiet, it soothes me; when I am restless and dissatisfied, it moves for me and cools the fever. This winter, when it was frozen and buried, I too felt turned to stone at times, or as if I stood by watching the face of some one I loved who was dead. If the ice had lasted another month, I do not think I could have borne it,” and Brooke, as she gazed, clasped her hands before her with a gesture half supplication, half resolution, that had always been peculiarly her own.