Heriot's Choice Part 58

Mildred sat with her elbow on her knee, looking dreamily at the gray scarped rock and overhanging vegetation; while Olive and Chriss scrambled over the slippery boulders in search of ferns. Behind the dark woods the sunset clouds were flaming with breadths of crimson and yellow glory. Over the barren rocks a tiny crescent moon was rising; Mildred's eyes were riveted on it.

'We have found some b.u.t.terwort and kingcups; Dr. Heriot declares it is the same that Shakespeare calls "Winking Mary-buds." You must add it to your wild-flower collection, Aunt Milly.'

'Are you tired of waiting for us, Miss Lambert? Polly has been giving me some trouble, and I have had to lecture her.'

'Not very severely, I expect,' returned Mildred. She looked anxiously from one to another, but Polly's gaiety rea.s.sured her as she flung a handful of flowers into her lap, and then proceeded to sort and arrange them.

'You might give us Perdita's pretty speech, Polly,' said Dr. Heriot, who leant against a young thorn watching her.

Polly gave a mischievous little laugh. She remembered the quotation; Roy had so often repeated it. He would spout pages of Shakespeare as they walked through the wintry woods. 'You have brought it upon yourself,'

she cried, holding up to him a long festoon of gaudy weeds, and repeating the lines in her fresh young voice.

'Here's flowers for you!

Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age. You are very welcome.'

'Oh, Polly--Polly--fie!'

'Little Heartsease, do you know what you deserve?' but Dr. Heriot evidently enjoyed the mischief. 'After all, I brought it on myself. I believe I was thinking of the crazy Danish maid, Ophelia, all the time.'

'You have had your turn,' answered Polly, with her prettiest pout; 'my next shall be for Aunt Milly. I am afraid I don't look much like Ophelia, though. There, Aunt Milly--there's rosemary, that's for remembrance--pray you, love, remember; and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.'

'Make them as gay as your own, Heartsease;' then--

'Hush, don't interrupt me; I am making Aunt Milly s.h.i.+ver. "There's fennel for you and columbines; there's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference."'

'You are offering me a sorry garland;' and Mildred forced a smile over the girl's quaint conceit. 'Mints, savory, marjoram, all the homeliest herbs you could find in your garden. I shall not forget the compliment to my middle age,' grumbled Dr. Heriot, who was unusually tickled at the goodness of the _repartee_ Polly was never so thoroughly at her ease as when she was under Aunt Milly's wing. Just then Mildred rose to recall Olive and Chriss; as she went down the woody hillock a quick contraction of pain furrowed her brow.

'There's rue for you,' she said to herself; 'ah, and rosemary, that's for remembrance. Oh, Polly, I felt tempted to use old Polonius's words, and say, "there's a method in madness"; how little you know the true word spoken in jest; never mind, if I can only take it as "my herb of grace o' Sundays," it will be well yet.'

Mildred found herself monopolised by Chriss during their homeward walk.

Polly and Dr. Heriot were in front, and Olive, as was often her custom, lingering far behind.

'Let them go on, Aunt Milly,' whispered Chriss; 'lovers are dreadfully poor company to every one but themselves. Polly will be no good at all now she is engaged.'

'What do you know about lovers, a little girl like you?' returned Mildred, amused in spite of herself.

'I am not a little girl, I am nearly sixteen,' replied Chriss, indignantly. 'Romeo and Juliet were all very well, and so were Ferdinand and Miranda, but in real life it is so stupid. I have made up my mind that I shall never marry.'

'Wait until you are asked, puss.'

'Ah, as to that,' returned the young philosopher, calmly, 'as Dr. John says, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and I daresay some one will be found who does not object to eye-gla.s.ses.'

'Or to blue stockings,' observed Mildred, rather slyly.

'You forget we live in enlightened days,' remarked Chriss, sententiously; 'this sort of ideas belonged to the Dark Ages. Minds are not buried alive now because they happen to be born in the feminine gender,' continued Chriss, with a slight confusion of metaphor.

Mildred smiled. Chriss's odd talk distracted her from sad thoughts. The winding path had already hidden the lovers from her; unconsciously she slackened her pace.

'I should not mind a nice gray professor, perhaps, if he knew lots of languages, and didn't take snuff. But they all do; it clears the brain, and is a salutary irritant,' went on Chriss, who had only seen one professor in her life, and that one a very dingy specimen. 'I should like my professor to be old and sensible, and not young and silly, and he must not care about eating and drinking, or expect me to sew on his b.u.t.tons, or mend his gloves. Some one ought to invent a mending-machine.

I am sure these things take away half the pleasure of living.'

'My little Chriss, do you mean to be head without hands? You will be a very imperfect woman, I am afraid, and I hope in that case you will not find your professor.'

'I would rather be without him, after all,' replied Chriss, discontentedly. 'Men are so stupid; they want their own way, and every one has to give in to them. I would rather live in lodgings like Roy, somewhere near the British Museum, where I could go and read every day, and in the evening I would go to lectures and concerts, or stop at home and play with Fritter-my-wig: that is just the sort of life I should like, Aunt Milly.'

'What is to become of your father and me? Perhaps Olive may marry.'

'Olive? not a bit of it. She always says nothing would induce her to leave papa. You don't want me to stop all my life in this little corner of the world, where everything is behind the times, and there is not a creature to whom one cares to speak?'

'Chriss, Chriss, what a Radical you are,' returned Mildred. She was a little weary of Chriss's childish chatter. They were in the deep lane skirting Podgill now; just beyond the footbridge Polly and Dr. Heriot were standing waiting for them.

'Is the tangle all gone?' he asked presently. 'Are you quite happy again, Heartsease?'

'Yes, very happy,' she a.s.sured him, with a bright smile, and he felt a pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.

'What a darling she is,' he thought to himself somewhat later that night, as he walked across the market-place, now s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight 'Little witch, how prettily she acted that speech of Perdita, her eyes imploring forgiveness all the time for her mischief. The child has deep feelings too. Once or twice she made me feel oddly. But I need not fear; she will make a sweet wife, I know, my innocent Polly.'

But the little scene haunted his fancy, and he had an odd dream about it that night. He thought that they were in the gra.s.sy knoll again looking over the Scar, and that some one pushed some withered herbs into his hands. 'Here's rue for you, and there's some for me; you may wear your rue with a difference,' said a voice.

'Unkind Polly!' he returned, dropping them, and stretched out his arms to imprison the culprit; but Polly was not there, only Mildred Lambert was there, with her elbow on her knee, looking sadly over the Scar.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE DESERTED COTTON-MILL IN HILBECK GLEN

Hey the green ribbon! we kneeled beside it, We parted the gra.s.ses dewy and sheen; Drop over drop, there filtered and slided A tiny bright beck that trickled between.

Tinkle, tinkle, sweetly it sung to us, Light was our talk as of faery bells-- Faery wedding-bells faintly rung to us Down in their fortunate parallels.--Jean Ingelow.

Richard came home for a few days towards the end of the long vacation.

He was looking pale and thin in spite of his enforced cheerfulness, and it was easy to see that the inaction of the last few weeks had only induced restlessness, and a strong desire for hard, grinding work, as a sedative for mental unrest. His brotherly congratulations to Polly were mixed with secret amus.e.m.e.nt.

'So you are "Heriot's choice," are you, Polly?' he said, taking her hand kindly, and looking at the happy, blus.h.i.+ng face.

'Are you glad, Richard?' she whispered, shyly.

'I can hardly tell,' he returned, with a curiously perplexed expression.

'I believe overwhelming surprise was my first sensation on hearing the wonderful intelligence. I gave such an exclamation that Roy turned quite pale, and thought something had happened at home, and then he got in a temper, and carried off the letter to read by himself; he would have it I was chaffing him.'

Polly pouted half-seriously. 'You are not a bit nice to me, Richard, or Roy either. Why has he never written to me himself? He must have got my two letters.'

'You forget; I have never seen anything of him for the last six weeks.

Fancy my finding him off on the tramp when I returned that night, prosecuting one of his art pilgrimages, as he calls them, to some shrine of beauty or other. He had not even the grace to apologise for his base desertion till a week afterwards. However, Frognal without Rex was not to be borne; so I started off to Cornwall in search of our reading party, and then got inveigled by Oxenham, who carried me off to Ilfracombe.'

'It was very wrong of Rex to leave you; he is not generally so thoughtless,' returned Polly, who had been secretly chagrined by this neglect on the part of her old favourite. 'Is there no letter from Rex?'

had been a daily question for weeks.