Molly Bawn Part 9

--Tennyson.

They are now drawing toward the close of July. To Luttrell it appears as though the moments are taking to themselves wings to fly away; to more prosaic mortals they drag. Ever since that first day in the garden when he betrayed his love to Molly, he had been silent on the subject, fearful lest he gain a more decided repulse.

Yet this enforced silence is to him a lingering torture; and as a school-boy with money in his pocket burns till he spend it, so he, with his heart brimful of love, is in torment until he can fling its rich treasures at his mistress's feet. Only a very agony of doubt restrains him.

Not that this doubt contains all pain; there is blended with it a deep ecstasy of joy, made to be felt, not spoken; and all the grace and poetry and sweetness of a first great pa.s.sion,--that thing that in all the chilling after-years never wholly dies,--that earliest, purest dew that falls from the awakening heart.

"O love! young love!

Let saints and cynics cavil as they will, One throb of yours is worth whole years of ill."

So thinks Luttrell; so think I.

To-day Molly has deserted him, and left him to follow his own devices.

John has gone into the next town on some important errand connected with the farm: so perforce our warrior shoulders his gun and sallies forth savagely, bent on slaying aught that comes in his way. As two crows, a dejected rabbit, and an intelligent squirrel are all that present themselves to his notice, he wearies toward three o'clock, and thinks with affection of home. For so far has his air-castle mounted that, were Molly to inhabit a hovel, that hovel to him would be home.

Crossing a stile and a high wall, he finds himself in the middle of the grounds that adjoin the more modest Brooklyn. The s.h.i.+mmer of a small lake makes itself seen through the branches to his right, and as he gains its bank a boat shoots forth from behind the willows, and a gay voice sings:

"There was a little man, And he had a little gun, And his bullets they were made of lead, lead, lead; He went to a brook, And he saw a little----"

"Oh, Mr. Luttrell, please, please don't shoot _me_," cries Molly, breaking down in the song with an exaggerated show of feigned terror.

"Do _you_ call yourself a 'duck'?" demands Luttrell, with much scorn. "Is there any limit to a woman's conceit? Duck, indeed! say rather----"

"Swan? Well, yes, I will, if you wish it: I don't mind," says Molly, amiably. "And now tell me, are you not surprised to see me here?"

"I am, indeed. Are you ubiquitous? I thought I left you safe at home."

"So you did. But I never counted on your staying so long away. I was tired of waiting for you. I thought you would _never_ come. So in despair I came out here by myself."

"So you absolutely missed me?" says Luttrell, quietly, although his heart is beating rapidly. Too well he knows her words are from the lips alone.

"Oh, didn't I!" exclaims she, heartily. "You should have seen me standing at the gate peering up and down for you and bemoaning my fate, like that silly Mariana in the moated grange. Indeed, if I had been photographed then and there and named 'Forsaken,' I'm positive I would have sold well."

"I don't doubt it."

"Then I grew enraged, and determined to trouble my head no more about you; and then---- It was lucky I came here, wasn't it?"

"Very lucky,--for me. But you never told me you had a boat on the lake."

"Because I hadn't,--at least not for the last two months,--until yesterday. It got broken in the spring, and they have been ever since mending it. They are so slow down here. I kept the news of its return from you a secret all yesterday, meaning to bring you here and show it you as a surprise; and this is how my plan has ended."

"But are you allowed? I thought you did not know the owners of this place."

"Neither do we. He is a retired butcher, I fancy (he doesn't look anything like as respectable as a grocer), with a fine disregard for the Queen's English. We called there one day, Let.i.tia and I (nothing would induce John to accompany us), but Mrs. Butcher was too much for Let.i.tia,--too much for even me," cries Molly, with a laugh, "and I'm not particular: so we never called again. They don't bear malice, however, and rather affect our having our boat here than otherwise.

Jump in and row me for a little while."

Over the water, under the hanging branches they glide to the sweet music of the wooing wind, and scarcely care to speak, so perfect is the motion and the stillness.

Luttrell, with his hat off and a cigar between his lips, is far happier than he himself is at all aware. Being of necessity opposite her, he is calmly feasting himself upon the sweet scenery of Molly's face, or else letting his eyes wander to where her slender fingers drag their way through the cool water, leaving small bubbles in their track.

"It is a pity the country is so stupid, is it not?" says Molly, breaking the silence at length, and speaking in a regretful tone.

"Because otherwise there is no place like it."

"Some country places are not at all stupid. There are generally too many people about. I think Brooklyn's princ.i.p.al charm is its repose, its complete separation from the world."

"Well, for my own part," seriously, "I think I would excuse the repose and the separation from the world, by which, I suppose, you mean society. I have no admiration for cloisters and convents myself; I like amus.e.m.e.nt, excitement. If I could, I would live in London all the year round," concludes Molly, with growing animation.

"Oh, horror!" exclaims Luttrell, who, seven years before, thought exactly as she does now, and who occasionally thinks so still. "Who that ever lived for six months among all its grime and smoke and turmoil but would pine for this calmer life?"

"I lived there for more than six months," says Molly, "and I didn't pine for anything. I thought it charming. It is all very well for you"--dejectedly--"who are tired of gayety, to go into raptures over calmness and tranquillity, and that; but if you lived in Brooklyn from summer until winter and from winter back again to summer, and if you could count your b.a.l.l.s on one hand,"--holding up five wet open fingers,--"you would think just as I do, and long for change."

"I never knew you had been to London."

"Yes: when I was sixteen I spent a whole year there, with a cousin of my father's, who went to Canada with her husband's regiment afterward.

But I didn't go out much, she thought me too young, though I was quite as tall as I am now. She heard me sing once, and insisted on carrying me up with her to get me lessons from Marigny. He took great pains with me: that is why I sing so well," says Molly, modestly.

"I confess I often wondered where your exquisite voice received its cultivation, its finish. Now I know. You were fortunate in securing Marigny. I have known him refuse dozens through want of time; or so he said. More probably he would not trouble himself to teach where there was no certainty of success. Well, and so you dislike the country?"

"No, no. Not so much that. What I dislike is having no one to speak to.

When John is away and Letty on the tread-mill--that is, in the nursery--I am rather thrown on my own resources; and they are not much.

Your coming was the greatest blessing that ever befell me. When I actually beheld you in your own proper person on the garden path that night, I could have hugged you in the exuberance of my joy."

"Then why on earth didn't you?" says Luttrell, reproachfully, as though he had been done out of something.

"A lingering sense of maiden modesty and a faint idea that perhaps you might not like it alone restrained me. But for that I must have given way to my feelings. Just think, if I had," says Molly, breaking into a merry laugh, "what a horrible fright I would have given you!"

"Not a horrible one, at all events. Molly," bending to examine some imaginary thing in the side of the boat, "have you never--had a--lover?"

"A lover? Oh, yes, I have had any amount of them," says Molly, with an alacrity that makes his heart sink. "I don't believe I could count my adorers: it quite puzzles me to know where to begin. There were the curates,--our rector is not sweet-tempered, so we have a fresh one every year,--and they never fail me. Three months after they come, as regular as clock-work, they ask me to be their wife. Now, I appeal to you,"--clasping her hands and wrinkling up all her pretty forehead,--"_do_ I look like a curate's wife?"

"You do not," replies Luttrell, emphatically, regarding with interest the _debonnaire, spirituelle_ face before him: "no, you most certainly do not."

"Well, I thought not myself; yet each of those deluded young men saw something angelic about me, and would insist on asking me to share his lot. They kept themselves sternly blind to the fact that I detest with equal vigor broth and old women."

"Intolerable presumption!" says Luttrell, parenthetically.

"Was it? I don't think I looked at it in that light. They were all very estimable men, and Mr. Rochfort was positively handsome. You, you may well stare, but some curates, you know, are good-looking, and he was decidedly High Church. In fact, he wasn't half so bad as the generality of them," says Molly, relentingly. "Only--it may be wrong, but the truth is I hate curates. I think nothing of them. They are a mixture of tea and small jokes, and are ever at a stand-still. They are always in the act of budding,--they never bloom; and then they are so afraid of the bishop."

"I thank my stars I'm not a curate," says Luttrell, devoutly.

"However,"--regretfully,--"they were _something_: a proposal is always an excitement. But the present man is married; so that makes it impossible for this present year. There was positively nothing to which to look forward. So you may fancy with what rapture I hailed your coming."

"You are very good," says Luttrell, in an uncertain tone, not being quite sure whether he is intensely amused or outrageously angry, or both. "Had you--any other lovers?"

"Yes. There was the last doctor. He poisoned a poor man afterward by mistake, and had to go away."

"After what?"