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.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account