Naturally Daisy and I were not reared as theologians. We nominally belonged to the Calvinistic church, but not being obliged to attend its services, rarely did so. This tended to further separate us from our neighbors, who were mainly prodigious church-goers.
But, more than all else, we lived by ourselves because, by constant contact with refined associations, we had grown to shrink from the coarseness which ruled outside. All about us marriages were made between mere children, each boy setting up for himself and taking a wife as soon as he had made a voyage to the Lakes and obtained a start in fur-trading. There was precious little sentiment or delicacy in these early courtships and matches, or in the state of society which they reflected—uncultured, sordid, rough, unsympathetic, with all its elementary instincts bluntly exposed and expressed. This was of course a subject not to be discussed by us. Up to the spring of 1772, when I was twenty-three years of age and Daisy was eighteen, no word of all the countless words which young men and women have from the dawn of language spoken on this great engrossing topic had ever been exchanged between us. In earlier years, when we were on the threshold of our teens, Mr. Stewart had more than once thought aloud in our hearing upon the time when we should inherit his home and fortune as a married couple. Nothing of that talk, though, had been heard for a long while.
I had not entirely forgotten it; but I carried the idea along in the attic of my mind, as a thing not to be thrown away, yet of no present use or value or interest.
Occasionally, indeed, I did recall it for the moment, and cast a diffident conjecture as to whether Daisy also remembered. Who shall say? I have been young and now am old, yet have I not learned the trick of reading a woman's mind. Very far indeed was I from it in those callow days.
And now, after what I fear has been a tiresome enough prologue, my story awaits.
Chapter VIII
Enter My Lady Berenicia Cross.
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It is averred that all the evils and miseries of our existence were entailed upon us by the meddlesome and altogether gratuitous perverseness of one weak-headed woman. Although faith in the personal influence of Eve upon the ages is visibly waning in these incredulous, iconoclastic times, there still remains enough respect for the possibilities for mischief inherent within a single silly woman to render Lady Berenicia Cross and her works intelligible, even to the fifth and sixth generations.
I knew that she was a fool the moment I first laid eyes on her—as she stood courtesying and simpering to us on the lawn in front of Johnson Hall, her patched and raddled cheeks mocking the honest morning sunlight. I take no credit that my eyes had a clearer vision than those of my companions, but grieve instead that it was not ordered otherwise.
We had ridden up to the hall, this bright, warm May forenoon, on our first visit of the spring to the Johnsons. There is a radiant picture of this morning ride still fresh in my memory. Daisy, I remember, sat on a pillion behind Mr. Stewart, holding him by the shoulder, and jogging pleasantly along with the motion of the old horse. Our patron looked old in this full, broad light; the winter had obviously aged him. His white, queued hair no longer needed powder; his light blue eyes seemed larger than ever under the bristling brows, still dark in color; the profile of his lean face, which had always been so nobly commanding in outline, had grown sharper of late, and bended nose and pointed chin were closer together, from the shrinking of the lips. But he sat erect as of old, proud of himself and of the beautiful girl behind him.
And she was beautiful, was our Daisy! Her rounded, innocent face beamed with pleasure from its camlet hood, as sweet and suggestive of fragrance as a damask rose against the blue sky. It was almost a childish face in its simplicity and frankness, yet already beginning to take on a woman's thoughtfulness and a woman's charm of tint and texture. We often thought that her parents must have had other than Palatine peasant blood, so delicate and refined were her features, not realizing that books and thoughts help far more toward making faces than does ancestry. Just the edge of her wavy light-brown hair could be seen under the frill of the hood, with lines of gold upon it painted by the sun.
She laughed and talked gayly as our horses climbed the hills. I thought, as I rode by their side, how happy we all were, and how beautiful was she—this flower plucked from the rapine and massacre of the Old War! And I fancy the notion that we were no longer children began dancing in my head a little, too.
It would have been strange otherwise, for the day and the scene must have stirred the coldest pulse. We moved through a pale velvety panorama of green—woodland and roadside and river reflections and shadows, all of living yet young and softening green; the birds all about us filled the warm air with song; the tapping of the woodpeckers and the shrill chatter of squirrels came from every thicket; there was nothing which did not reflect our joyous, buoyant delight that spring had come again. And I rode by Daisy's side, and thought more of her, I'm bound, than I did of the flood-dismantled dike on the river-bend at home which I had left unrestored for the day.
Over the heads of the negroes, who, spying us, came headlong to take our horses, we saw Sir William standing in the garden with an unknown lady. The baronet himself, walking a little heavily with his cane, approached us with hearty salutations, helped Daisy to unmount, and presented us to this stranger—Lady Berenicia Cross.
I am not so sure that people can fall in love at first sight. But never doubt their ability to dislike from the beginning! I know that I felt indignantly intolerant of this woman even before, hat in hand, I had finished my bow to her.
Yet it might well have been that I was over-harsh in my judgment. She had been a pretty woman in her time, and still might be thought well-favored. At least she must have thought so, for she wore more paint and ribbons, and fal-lals generally, than ever I saw on another woman, before or since. Her face was high, narrow, and very regular; oddly enough, it was in outline, with its thin, pursed-up mouth, straight nose, and full eyelids and brows, very like a face one would expect to see in a nun's hood. Yet so little in the character of the cloister did this countenance keep, that it was plastered thick with chalk and rouge, and sprinkled with ridiculous black patches, and bore, as it rose from the low courtesy before me, an unnatural smile half-way between a leer and a grin.
I may say that I was a wholesome-enough looking young fellow, very tall and broad-shouldered, with a long, dark face, which was ugly in childhood, but had grown now into something like comeliness. I am not parading special innocence either, but no woman had ever looked into my eyes with so bold, I might say impudent, an expression as this fine lady put on to greet me. And she was old enough to be my mother, almost, into the bargain.
But even more than her free glances, which, after all, meant no harm, but only reflected London manners, her dress grated upon me. We were not unaccustomed to good raiment in the Valley. Johnson Hall, which reared its broad bulk through the trees on the knoll above us, had many a time sported richer and costlier toilets in its chambers than this before us. But on my lady the gay stuffs seemed painfully out of place—like her feather fan, and smelling-salts, and dainty netted purse. The mountains and girdling forests were real; the strong-faced, burly, handsome baronet, whose words spoken here in the back-woods were law to British king and Parliament, was real; we ourselves, suitably and decently clad, and knowing our position, were also genuine parts of the scene. The English lady was pinchbeck by contrast with all about her.
"Will you give the ladies an arm, Douw?" said Sir William. "We were walking to see the lilacs I planted a year ago. We old fellows, with so much to say to each other, will lead the way."
Nothing occurred to me to say to the new acquaintance, who further annoyed me by clinging to my arm with a zeal unpleasantly different from Daisy's soft touch on the other side. I walked silent, and more or less sulky, between them down the gravelled path. Lady Berenicia chattered steadily.
"And so this is the