The White Riband Part 2

"She would certainly look outlandish, ma'am," was all Mrs. Lear could manage.

Loveday's thoughts flew of a sudden to the ribands she had disturbed in Cherry's lap, and for the first time in her life, till now so proudly above such matters in its aloofness, she yearned over fineries. If such as those could admit her into the company of such as this! She thought enviously of that pale pink, even of the yellows and reds she had seen in Bugletown, since such deep tones seemed to the taste of this wonderful creature.

But Miss Le Pett.i.t, still staring at her, changed her note.

"I was wrong," she exclaimed, "that face needs no gaudy hues, those white cheeks need nothing but that red mouth to set them off, and that black hair. She should be white, all white, should she not, Mrs. Lear?

A tragic bride from the south, languishing in our cold land. 'Twould make a fine subject for a painting, though I fear beyond my brush.

I never can get my faces to look as sad as I could wish them to."

There was something engaging and almost childlike about the heiress as she spoke those words, but recollecting herself she resumed:

"Never mind the portrait, but I vow I will have you for my attendant at the Flora, that I will. Now, Mrs. Lear, you shall not protest, I always have my way when I set my heart on a thing, you know. I am going to dance in the Flora this year, 'tis a charming rural custom, and the gentry should help to preserve it. Besides, my name is Flora, so I am doubly bound. And this child shall be my maid; she will be a rare contrast to me, I being chestnut and she so foreign looking. It would be indiscreet if I were to dance with a gentleman--you know what the gossips are--but if I am partnered by an attendant maid 'twill be very different."

"Ma'am ..." from the scandalised Mrs. Lear, "if you are set on having a village girl ... there are many from good homes, respectable girls.

Not that I've anything to say against this poor child, G.o.d knows, but her mother, ma'am.... I a.s.sure you 'tis impossible."

Miss Le Pett.i.t, who guessed very well the sort of tale Mrs. Lear's delicacy spared her, laughed the matter off.

"It shall be as I say, Mrs. Lear, I can afford to be above these things.

You shall dance with me, Loveday. You must have a white frock, of course, but I suppose you have a Sunday frock? Quite a simple thing, the simpler the better, and a white sash of satin riband. Don't forget.

I shall expect to see you waiting for me at the Flora."

And Miss Le Pett.i.t rose, having carried her freak of sensibility on long enough, and sweeping past Loveday with a dazzling smile, was accompanied to the front door by Mrs. Lear, and after standing poised for a moment against the sunny verdure beyond, took wing with a flutter of white taffetas and was gone.

Loveday was left with that most dangerous of all pa.s.sions--the pa.s.sion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pett.i.t she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover--she imagined she was in love with another human being, while in reality she was in love with those feelings in herself which that other had evoked.

Never did aspiring saint of old, impelled by ecstasy, cling closer to a crucifix as the symbol of the loved one than did Loveday to that notion of the white garb which must be hers. It was, indeed, a symbol to her, the symbol of everything she had unwittingly craved and starved for, of everything she had, could not but feel she had, in herself which was lacked by those who jeered at her. And, though she knew it not, nor would have understood it, she was a symbol-lover, than which there is no form of lover more dangerous in life--or more endangered by the chances of it. For he who loves another human being gives his heart in fee, but he who loves an idea gives his soul.

CHAPTER IV: IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A G.o.dDESS

Chapter IV

IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A G.o.dDESS

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 coa.r.s.e-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 cl.u.s.tering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its gra.s.sy 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 Pett.i.t; 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 trans.m.u.ting 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 G.o.dlike.

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 G.o.ddess 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 G.o.ddess as ever graced a Versailles Fete Champetre. 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 Pett.i.t?

CHAPTER V: IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN

Chapter V

IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN

With morning came thoughts of the practical side of the business and, the worst of her daily duties performed, Loveday ascended to her chamber to examine the scanty contents of her small oaken chest. It was a sea-chest, legacy from her roving father, who had given it to her mother, and often enough had Aunt Senath expressed scruples about allowing her to keep a gift obtained so G.o.dlessly. Perhaps the fact that it was a good chest and better than anything she could have bought had something to do with Aunt Senath's complaisance in permitting it to remain. Perhaps Loveday's fierce look in defence of it was not without influence also. The chest stayed in the little attic room, and made of it, to Loveday's eyes, a place peculiarly her own, and rich because of its a.s.sociations. There was something about the chest, its dark polish and coa.r.s.e carving, that even led her to think hopefully of its poor contents.

She crouched beside it now, upon her heels, and lifting the lid, gazed expectantly at what was revealed.

After all, it did not look so bad, just a level surface of white linen...

But, when she lifted it out, and all the yellow of age was revealed in the full gathers of the skirt, a shade pa.s.sed over Loveday's spirit.

How small and tight the bodice looked, how skimpy even the plaits of the skirt for the present modes ... yet it had been a good linen in its day, there was no doubt of that, this frock that had been st.i.tched for her mother's wedding gown.

For perhaps he had always been coming back to marry her, perhaps only their young blood and eager hearts beating so strongly within them had made the beat of wedding bells seem at first too slight a sound to catch their absorbed attention.... So Loveday the elder had always known, in spite of the sneers of the neighbours. So Loveday the younger had maintained to carping girl-critics, though in her inmost heart she had never been able to feel it mattered so vastly, for half the girls she knew would have been in her predicament had their fathers been cut off untimely. She knew it was not that she was born out of wedlock, a misfortune that might happen to anyone, which oppressed her youth, but the fact of her father having been a foreigner, and of that she was fiercely resolved to be proud. Neither mother nor father had she ever known, but the instinct of generous youth is ever to defend the oppressed, and with her defence had love sprung in Loveday's heart.

Therefore, even with her sensation of disappointment at the sight of the yellowed linen, there was reverence and tenderness in her touch as she laid the gown across her narrow bed.

She ripped off the coa.r.s.e blue wrapper that enfolded her, and stood revealed in her little flannel under-bodice and linsey-woolsey petticoat of striped red and black, her thin girlish arms and young bosom making her look more childish than she did when fully clothed. She held the gown above her head and struggled into it. Her pale little face was red when she poked it triumphantly through the narrow opening and finally settled the neck, with its ruffled cambric frilling, round her throat, and pulled the puff sleeves as far as they would go down her arms in a vain attempt to make them conceal her red young girl's elbows. She could only see a small portion of herself at a time in the little mirror, yet that small portion, in spite of the skimpiness and yellowness of the gown, pleased her eye.

For her dark tints were set off by the creamy folds, her slight shape revealed by the tight bodice, even her bare feet, which some fine prompting had made her wash carefully lest they should shame this essay, looked small and graceful beneath the full folds.

But she could not dance in the Flora unshod, and so once again she bent to the sea-chest, and withdrew her only pair of shoes, bought for her in a generous moment last Michaelmas by Aunt Senath. She pulled on her Sunday pair of white cotton stockings, and then the stout shoes. They still fitted, and to her country eye looked well enough. She examined herself bit by bit in the mirror, from her smooth black head to her smooth black feet, and all the faintly yellowed linen that curved in and swelled out between.