THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE

Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed to sit aside it awhile:  and Aminta’s feverishness was cooled by now and then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a school-master.  Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody thought him a stunted growth.

In Aminta’s realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her, though he had done it—­much as if she had assisted at the planting and watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an interval of years, pollarded—­a short trunk shooting out a shock of small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps; not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard.  And he was a cool well-spring to talk with.  He, supposed once to be a passionate nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful executioner’s way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters.  But that was quite incidental in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it lasted.  He had, of course, a right to his ideas.

No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it was flattish, or, say, flavourless.  In the other there was excess of flavour—­or, no, spice it had to be called.  The young schoolmaster’s world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain, without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare all for native land—­or for the one beloved.  Love pressed its claim on heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under flush of sky.  The one beloved!  She had not known love; she was in her five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round, such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy circus-horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step.  She was admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the glorious fling afield, her nature’s food.  Hitherto she would have been shamefaced as a boy in forming the word ‘love’:  now, believing it denied to her for good and all—­for ever and ever—­her bosom held and uttered the word.  She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and she envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it—­good-bye even to the poor empty word.