CHAPTER V

AN IDYLL OF ALICE SUNSHINE, WHICH REALLY BELONGS TO THE LAST CHAPTER

If the Reader has heard enough of the amourettes of the young gentleman upon whose memoirs I am engaged, let him skip this chapter and pass to the graver chapters beyond.  My one aim is the Reader’s pleasure, and I carry my solicitude so far that if he finds his happiness to lie outside these pages altogether, has no choice among these various chapters, but prefers none to any, I am quite content.  Such a spirit of self-abnegation, the Reader must admit, is true love.

Perhaps it was an early unconscious birth-impulse of the true love some day to be born in his heart, that caused Narcissus to make a confession to his Miller’s Daughter, on one of their pretty decorative evenings, when they sat together at the fireside, while the scent of the climbing roses, and the light of the climbing moon, came in at the window.

The immediate effect of the confession was—­no wonder—­to draw tears.  And how beautiful she looked in tears!  Who would dive for pearls when the pearl-fisheries of a woman’s eyes are his to rifle?

Beautiful, beautiful tears, flow on—­no dull, leaden rain, no mere monotonous deluge, but a living, singing fountain, crowned with such rainbows as hang roses and stars in the fine mist of samite waterfalls, irradiated by gleaming shafts of lovely anger and scorn.

Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden’s eyes pierced Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears.  There was thunder, too; the earth shook—­just a little:  but soon Narcissus saw the white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers.  For all her sorrow, his was the peace of confession.  His little lie had been acknowledged, his treason self-betrayed.

And it was this.

I have hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, worshipped many saints.  At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller’s Daughter had drawn into her lovely face so much of the beauty of the world.  Alice Sunshine, shall we call her, was perhaps more of a cherub than a saint; a rosy, laughing, plump little arrangement of sunshiny pink and white flesh, with blue eyes and golden hair.  Alice was not overburdened with intellectuality, and, like others of her sex, her heart was nothing like so soft as her bosom.  Narcissus had first been in love with her sister; but he and the sister—­a budding woman of the world—­had soon agreed that they were not born for each other, and Narcissus had made the transfer of his tragic passion with inexpensive informality.  As the late Anthony Trollope would finish one novel to-night, and begin another to-morrow morning, so would Narcissus be off with the old love this Sunday, and visibly on with the new the next.