Rossmoyne Part 48

"You don't _hate_ me to touch you, do you?" asks he, rather hurt.

"Oh, no, indeed!" hurriedly. "Only----"

"Only what, darling?"

"I hardly know what," she answers, looking bewildered. "Perhaps because it is all so strange. Why should you love _me_ better than any one?--and yet you do," anxiously, "don't you?"

The innocently-expressed anxiety makes his heart glad.

"I adore you," he says, fervently; and then, "Did no one ever place his arm round you _before_, Monica?"

He finds a difficulty in even asking this.

"No, no," with intense surprise at the question, and a soft, quick glance that is almost shamed. "I never had a lover in my life until I met you. No one except you ever told me I was pretty. The first time _you_ said it I went home (when I was out of your sight," reddening, "I ran all the rest of the way) and looked at myself in the gla.s.s. Then,"

naively, "I knew you were right. Still I had my doubts; so I called Kit and told her about it; and she," laughing, "said you were evidently a person of great discrimination, so I suppose she agreed with you."

"She could hardly do otherwise."

"Yet sometimes," says Monica, with hesitation and a downcast face, "I have thought it was all mere fancy with you, and that you don't love me _really_."

"My sweetheart, what a cruel thing to say to me!"

"But see how you scold me! Only now," nervously plucking little bits of bark from the trunk of the tree, "you accused me of dreadful things.

Yes, sometimes I doubt you."

"I wonder where I leave room for doubt? Yet I must convince you. What shall I swear by, then?" he asks, half laughing: "the chaste Diana up above--the lovers' friend--is in full glory to-night; shall I swear by her?"

"'Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, lest that thy love prove likewise variable,'" quotes she archly; "and yet," with a sudden change of mood, and a certain sweet gravity, "I do not mistrust you."

She leans slightly towards him, and unasked, gives her hand into his keeping once again. She is full of pretty tender ways and womanly tricks, and as for the best time for displaying them, for this she has a natural talent.

Desmond, clasping her hand, looks at her keenly. His whole heart is in his eyes.

"Tell me that you love me," he says, in a low unsteady voice.

"How can I? I don't know. I am not sure," she says, falteringly; "and,"

shrinking a little from him, "it is growing very late. See how the moon has risen above the firs. I must go home."

"Tell me you love me first."

"I _must_ not love you; you know that."

"But if you might, you could?"

"Ye--es."

"Then I defy all difficulties,--aunts, and friends, and lovers. I shall win you in the teeth of all barriers, and in spite of all opposition.

And now go home, my heart's delight, my best beloved. I have this a.s.surance from you, that your own lips have given me, and it makes me confident of victory."

"But if you fail," she begins, nervously; but he will not listen to her.

"There is no such word," he says, gayly. "Or, if there is, I never learnt it. Good-night, my love."

"Good-night." A little frightened by his happy vehemence she stands well away from him, and holds out her hands in farewell. Taking them, he opens them gently and presses an impa.s.sioned kiss on each little pink-tinged palm. With a courteous reverence for her evident shyness, he then releases her, and, raising his hat, stands motionless until she has sprung down the bank and so reached the Moyne fields again.

Then she turns and waves him a second and last good night. Returning the salute, he replaces his hat on his head, and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, turns towards Coole--and dinner. He is somewhat late for the latter, but this troubles him little, so set is his mind upon the girl who has just left him.

Surely she is hard to win, and therefore--_how_ desirable! "The women of Ireland," says an ancient chronicler, "are the coyest, the most coquettish, yet withal the coldest and virtuousest women upon earth."

Yet, allowing all this, given time and opportunity, they may be safely wooed. What Mr. Desmond complains of bitterly, in his homeward musings to-night, is the fact that to him neither time nor opportunity is afforded.

"She is a woman therefore to be won;" but how is his courtship to be sped, if thorns are to beset his path on every side, and if persistent malice blocks his way to the feet of her whom he adores?

He reaches home in an unenviable frame of mind, and is thoroughly unsociable to Owen Kelly and the old squire all the evening.

Next morning sees him in the same mood; and, indeed, it is about this time he takes to imagining his little love as being a hapless prisoner in the hands of two cruel ogres (I am afraid he really does apply the term "ogres" to the two old ladies of Moyne), and finds a special melancholy pleasure in depicting her as a lonely captive condemned to solitary confinement and dieted upon bread and water.

To regard the Misses Blake in the light either of ogres or witches required some talent; but Mr. Desmond, at this period of his love-affair, managed it.

He would go about, too, singing,--

"Oh, who will o'er the downs so free,"

taking immense comfort out of, and repeating over and over again, such lines as--

"I sought her bower at break of day, 'Twas guarded safe and sure;"

"Her father he has locked the door, Her mother keeps the key; But neither bolt nor bar shall keep My own true love from me,"--

until bars, and bolts, and locks, and keys seemed all real.

CHAPTER XVIII.

How, after much discussion, the devoted, if mistaken, adherents of Thalia gain the day--and how, for once in his life, Owen Kelly feels melancholy that is not a.s.sumed.

"I wish you would all attend," says Olga Bohun, just a little impatiently, looking round upon the a.s.sembled group, with brows uplifted and the point of a pencil thrust between her rose-red lips.

"Thrice-blessed pencil!" murmurs Mr. Kelly, in a _very_ stage whisper.

"Man is the superior being, yet he would not be permitted to occupy so exalted a position. Are you a stone, Ronayne, that you can regard the situation with such an insensate face?" Mr. Ronayne is at this moment gazing at Mrs. Bohun with all his heart in his eyes. He starts and colors. "I cannot help thinking of that dear little song about the innocent daisy," goes on Mr. Kelly, with a rapt expression. "But I'd 'choose to be a _pencil_, if I might be a flower.'"

"Now _do_ let us decide upon something," says Olga, taking no heed of this sally, and frowning down the smile that is fighting for mastery.

"Yes; now you are all to decide upon something at once," says Mr. Kelly, gloomily. "There is a difficulty about the right way to begin it, but it must be done; Mrs. Bohun says so. There is to be no deception. I shall say one, two, three, and away, and then every one must have decided: the defaulter will be spurned from the gates. Now, one, two----Desmond,"

sternly "you are not deciding!"

"I am, indeed," says Desmond, most untruthfully. He is lying on the gra.s.s at Monica's feet, and is playing idly with her huge white fan.