“That’s what I love about you, Priscilla. You are so rebellious! You are not one of the tame ones who submit to what they call the will of Providence.”
“I think too highly of Providence to believe that its will is that my life should be wrecked by no fault of my own—no fault except obedience. It was my obedience that made me what I am to-day, and upon my word I don’t believe that my punishment is out of proportion to my offence.”
“Your offence? But you never——”
“I did. I ceased to be myself. I put myself behind myself and allowed myself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter—the slaughter of that womanhood which I should have upheld—my womanhood, which meant the right to think for myself—the right to be a woman to love a man, and help him in his life and be loved by him and to give him children. That is how love is immortal—our children live after us, and our children’s children! … No more obedience for me, thanks; I mean to live my life. That’s all!”
“I’ll tell you what I think, Priscilla——” Rosa allowed a considerable interval to elapse before she spoke. “I’ll tell you what I think, and that is, that the awfulness of the past year has made a woman of you in this way.”
Priscilla seemed a little startled by the enunciation of this theory. She looked quickly at her companion, and then laughed queerly.
“God is too busy making worlds, universes and that, to have a moment to spare to a woman,” said she. “No, it is the man who makes the woman; and be sure that if the woman is made by the man, the man is made by the woman—by the woman and by the children that she gives him. And yet—here we are.”
“Yes,” said Rosa, “here we are. Oh, there is one thing certain: God made primroses.”
CHAPTER IV
They had been walking along the narrow hilly road that branched off from the broad highway between the little town of Framsby and the villages of Dean Grange, Beastlington, and Elfrisleigh, and now they were standing on the ridge of the Down that overlooked the lovely valley of the Wadron. The day was one toward the end of April, when everything in nature, including men and women and healthy girls, feels stirred with the impulses of the Spring, and while all fancy they are living only in the joy of the present, they are yet giving their thoughts to the future. Everything in nature was showing signs of thinking of the future. The early flowers were looking after themselves, doing their best to offer allurements to the insects which they trusted to carry their love tokens for them from stamen to pistil; and the pale butterflies became messenger Cupids all unconsciously. But the birds were doing their own love-making. Every bough was vocal, every brake quivered in harmony. In that green lane there was the furtive flutter of wings. Some nests had been built and padded for the eggs, and here and there a stranger looking carefully through the interspaces among the glossy leaves could see the glitter of the beady eye of a hiding blackbird, and, with greater pains, the mottling of a thrush’s throat. Love-making and home-making on all sides—this is what the Spring meant, and it was probably because she was so closely in touch with the season and its instincts that one of the girls had spoken out some of the thoughts that made her warm as though her thoughts were infants of the Spring, to be cherished very close to her body.
They stood at that part of the road which bridged one of the tributary streams that went down to the Wadron, losing itself for many yards where it crept among the bosky slopes nearest to the road, but making its course apparent by many a twinkle of quick water, and now and again by a crystal pool, overflowing among mossy stones and cascading where there was a broad steep rock. Again it disappeared among the wilderness of bramble, but when one looked for its continuation, its glistening, not directly downward, but many yards to one side, gave one a glad surprise.
And all its course was marked by primroses. The park through which it flowed was carpeted with primroses, and all the distance of the valley was tinted with ten thousand tufts. Only on one of the high banks of the parkland, where the pines stood in groups, was the brown earth covered with a haze of bluebells. Close though this bank was to the road, it was picked over with rabbit burrows, and when the girls came near there was a scurrying of brown and a flicker of white among the bluebells and the ferns.
“It is getting wilder and wilder,” said Rosa.
“Thank goodness!” added Priscilla. “It was the wisest thing that ever the owner did, to die and keep every one out of it for all these years.”
“Yes, so far as we are concerned,” said Rosa. “We have got more out of the place than any one else.”
“You would have been a visitor to the Manor in any case,” said Priscilla; “but what chance would I have had? Well, I might have come in under the shelter of your wing, not otherwise.”
“Perhaps the son’s wife might not have been so stuck up as the rest of the people in our neighbourhood,” remarked Rosa, consolingly.
Priscilla laughed.
“I think I should take their—their—standoffishness more to heart if you were not here, Rosa,” said Priscilla, thoughtfully “What shall I do when you go away?”
“Go away? I heard nothing about my going away.”
“I hear a good deal about it to-day from the birds, and the sheep, and all the other voices of the Spring. They have talked about nothing else all the morning.”
Rosa looked at her anxiously for some moments. Then she gave a sound that had something of contempt in it, crying, “What rot! My dear girl, you know as well as I do that I have no intention of going away—that I do not bother my head with any notion of—of that sort of thing. I am quite content to remain here. It would take a lot of coaxing to carry me away. Come along now, I don’t trust strangers, and I certainly don’t trust April weather, and I certainly don’t trust that cloud that puts a black cap on Beacon Hill. If we are to get our baskets full in time we would do well not to wait here sentimentalizing.”
She led the way on the road by the park fence, and Priscilla was still behind her when they went round the curve, where the road had been widened in front of the pillars that supported a pair of well-worn entrance gates. Lodges were on each side, picturesque sexagonal cottages, their shape almost undiscernible through the straggling mass of the creepers that covered them.
“Do you remember the pheasants’ eggs?” whispered Rosa, when they had gone through the gates and had just passed the lodges.
“I am trying my best to forget them,” replied Priscilla. “How awful it would be if I accidentally spoke of that omelette in the hearing of some one who would mention it to Mr. Dunning!”
“It would be awful!” acquiesced Rosa.
Their exchange of confidences related to the hospitality of the wife of one of the keepers, who occupied the lodge on the right. One day during the previous year the girls had been drenched in the park, and while they were drying their clothes the good woman, who had been a cook at the Manor, made them an omelette, using pheasants’ eggs, of which quite a number were in her larder awaiting consumption.
“It was a nice omelette,” said Priscilla, “but it made me feel that old Mr. Wingfield mightn’t have been so wise after all in allowing the place to remain unoccupied for so long.”
Signs of neglect were to be observed on all sides—not by any means the neglect that suggests the Court of Chancery or an impoverished owner; merely the neglect that is the result of the absence of any one interested in the maintenance of tidiness. The broad carriage drive was a trifle green, where fresh gravel was needed, and the grass borders had become irregular. The enormous bough that had broken