English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
Baden was her first peep at the edges of the world since she had grown
to be a young woman. She had but a faint idea of the significance of
gambling. The brilliant lights, the band music, the sitting groups and
company of promenaders were novelties; the Ball of the ensuing night
at the Schloss would be a wonder, she acknowledged in response to
Henrietta, who was trying to understand her; and she admired her
ball-dress, she said, looking unintelligently when she heard that she
would be guilty of slaying numbers of gentlemen before the night was
over. Madame Clemence thought her chances in that respect as good as any
other young lady’s, if only she could be got to feel interested. But at
a word of the pine forest, and saying she intended to climb the hills
early with the light in the morning, a pointed eagerness flushed
Carinthia, the cold engraving became a picture of colour.
She was out with the earliest light. Yesterday’s parting between Chillon
and Henrietta had taught her to know some little about love; and if her
voice had been heeded by Chillon’s beloved, it would not have been a
parting. Her only success was to bring a flood of tears from Henrietta.
The tears at least assured her that her brother’s beautiful girl had no
love for the other one,--the young nobleman of the great wealth, who was
to be at the Ball, and had ‘gone flying,’ Admiral Fakenham shrugged to
say; for Lord Fleetwood was nowhere seen.
The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to her
thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she
was once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing
pines, broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare
straight shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward. Her old
father was arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her
there. The suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and
her old father and she were aware of one another without conversing in
speech. He pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger
for the solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling.
He would not let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea
forward disturb the scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped
mid-fall by standing comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted
scurry up the bark of long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch,
were noticed by him as well as by her; even the rotting timber drift,
bark and cones on the yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf
chestnut pushing level out, with a strain of the head up, from a crevice
of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns; he saw what his girl saw. Power of
heart was her conjuring magician.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account