The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [160]
“Hang this path! it has as many turns as a corkscrew,” remarked Mr. Lambert, bending his head to avoid a downstretched branch of hawthorn, covered with baby leaves and giant thorns. “I thought we’d have come to a seat long before this; if it was Stephen’s Green there’d have been twenty by this time.”
“There would, and twenty old men sitting on each of them!” retorted Francie. “Mercy! who’s that hiding behind the tree? Oh, I declare, it’s only one of those everlasting old statues, and look at a lot more of them! I wonder if it was that they hadn’t room enough for them up in the house that they put them out here in the woods?”
They had come to an enclosed green space in the wood, a daisy-starred oval of grass, holding the spring sunshine in serene remoteness from all the outer world of terraces and gardens, and made mysterious and poetical as a vale in Ida by the strange pale presences that peopled every nook of an ivy-grown crag at its further side. A clear pool reflected them, but waveringly, because of the ripples caused by a light drip from the overhanging rock; the trees towered on the encircling high ground and made a wall of silence round the intenser silences of the statues as they leaned and postured in a trance of suspended activity; the only sound was the monotone of the falling water, dropping with a cloistered gravity in the melodious hollow of the cave.
“I’m not going to walk another foot,” said Francie, sitting down on the grass by the water’s edge; “here, give me the oranges, Roddy, no one’ll catch us eating them here, and we can peg the skins at that old thing with its clothes dropping off and the harp in its hand.”
It was thus that Mrs. Lambert described an Apollo with a lyre who was regarding them from the opposite rock with classic preoccupation. Lambert lighted a cigar, and leaning back on his elbow in the grass, watched Francie’s progress through her inelegant meal with the pride of the provider. He looked at her half wonderingly, she was so lovely in his eyes, and she was so incredibly his own; he felt a sudden insanity of tenderness for her that made his heart throb and his cheek redden and would have ennobled him to the pitch of dying for her on the spot, had such an extravagance been demanded of him. He longed to put his arms round her, and tell her how dear, how adorable, how entirely delightful she was, but he knew that she would probably only laugh at him in that maddening way of hers, or at all events, make him feel that she was far less interested in the declaration than he was. He gave a quick sigh, and stretching out his hand laid it on her shoulder as if to assure himself of his ownership of her.
“That dress fits you awfully well. I like you better in that than in anything.”
“Then I’d better take care and not get the juice on it,” Francie replied, with her mouth full of orange; “lend me a loan of your handkerchief.”
Lambert removed a bundle of letters and a guide-book from his pocket, and finally produced the handkerchief.
“Why, you’ve a letter there from Charlotte, haven’t you?” said Francie, with more interest than she had yet shown, “I didn’t know you had heard again from her.”
“Yes, I did,” said Lambert, putting the letters back in his pocket, “I wish to goodness we hadn’t left our address at the Charing Cross Hotel. People might let a man alone when he’s on his honeymoon.”
“What did she say?” inquired Francie lightly. “Is she cross? The other one she wrote was as sweet