IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER’S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A GODDESS

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 coarse-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 clustering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its grassy 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 Pettit; 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 transmuting 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 godlike.

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 goddess 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 goddess as ever graced a Versailles Fete Champêtre. 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 Pettit?