Home > Authors Index > Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch > Lady Good-for-Nothing > This page
Lady Good-for-Nothing, a novel by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
||
Book 3. The Bridals - Chapter 7. Housekeeping |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ BOOK III. THE BRIDALS CHAPTER VII. HOUSEKEEPING She awoke at daybreak to the twittering of birds. Raising herself little by little, she bent over him, studying the face of her beloved. He slept on; and after a while she slipped from the couch, collected her garments in a bundle, tiptoed to the door, and lifting its curtain, stole out to the dawn. Mist filled the valley below the fall. A purple bank of vapour blocked the end of it. But the rolling outline was edged already with gold, and already ray upon ray of gold shivered across the upper sky and touched the pinewoods at the head of the pass. Clad in cloak and night-rail, shod in loose slippers of Indian leather-work, she moved across to the fire she had banked overnight. Beside it a bold robin had perched on the rim of the cooking-pot. He fluttered up to a bough, and thence watched her warily. She remade the fire, building a cone of twigs; fetched water, scoured the cauldron, and hung it again on its bar. As she lifted it the sunlight glinted on the ring her lover had brought for the wedding and had slipped on her finger in the cabin, binding her by this only rite. The fire revived and crackled cheerfully. She caught up the bundle again and climbed beside the stream, following its right bank until she came to the pool of her choice. There, casting all garments aside, she went down to it, and the alders hid her. Half an hour later she returned and paused on the threshold of the hut, the sunlight behind her. In her arms she carried a cluster--a bundle almost--of ferns and autumnal branches--cedar and black-alder, the one berried with blue the other with coral, maple and aromatic spruce, with trails of the grape vine. He was awake and lay facing the door, half-raised on his left elbow. "This for good-morning!" She held out the armful to show him, but so that it hid her blushes. Then, dropping the cluster on the floor, she ran and knelt, bowing her face upon the couch beside him. But laying a palm against either temple he forced her to lift it and gaze at him, mastering the lovely shame. He looked long into her eyes. "You are very beautiful," he said slowly. She sprang to her feet. "See the dew on my shoes! I have bathed, and--" with a gesture of the hand towards the scattered boughs-- "afterwards I pulled these for you. But I was in haste and late because--because--" She explained that while bathing she had let the ring, which was loose and heavy, slip from her finger into the pool. It had lodged endwise between two pebbles, and she had taken some minutes to find it. "As for these," she said, "the flowers are all done, but I like the leaves better. In summer our housekeeping might have been make-believe; now, with the frosts upon us, we shall have hard work, and a fire to give thanks for." He slid from the couch and, standing erect, threw a bath-gown over his shoulders. "I must build a chimney," he said, looking around; "a chimney and a stone hearth." "Then our house will be perfect." "I will start this very day. . . . Show me the way to your pool."
He must take the mare, too, she said; and promised to start him on the bridle-path, so that he could not miss it. "What! Must I ride on a side-saddle?" "It should be easy for you," she laughed. "You pretended to know all about it when you taught me." In the end it was settled that she should ride and he walk beside till Bayard was found. "Then you can lead her back and leave her with Mr. Strongtharm." "But I shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar. And you are over thoughtful for Madcap. I walked up to inspect the pasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week. It is odds, too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, with patches of good grass. Let us keep the horses up here, at any rate until the nights turn colder. A taste of hard faring will be good for their pampered flesh, as for mine. Besides--though you may not know it--I am a first-class groom." "As well as a mason? You will have to turn hunter, too, before long, else your cook will be out of work. Dear, dear, how we begin to crowd the days!"
When the chimney was finished they were in great anxiety lest, being built close under the cliff, it should catch a down-draught of the wind and fill the dwelling with smoke. But the wind came, and, as it turned out, made a leap from the cliff to the valley, singing high overhead and missing the chimney clear. When they lit their first fire indoors and ran forth to see the smoke rising in a thin blue pillar against the pines, they laughed elated, and at supper drank to their handiwork. Ruth's first sacrifice on the new hearth was the solemn heating of a flat iron, to crimp and pleat her lover's body-linen. Next day he shot a deer and flayed it; and, the next, set to work to build a bed. Their couch had been of white linen laid upon skins, the skins resting on a thick mat of leaves. Now he raised it from the ground on four posts, joining the posts with a stout framework and lacing the framework with cords criss-crossed like the netting of a hammock. Also he replaced the curtain at the entrance with a door of split pinewood, and fashioned a wooden bolt. The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian summer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to her bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it with taps of her naked foot while she braced her body for the cold shock. The flat rock over the fall was still their supper-table. After supping they would wrap themselves closer in their cloaks of bearskin, and sit for long, his arm about her body. The stars wheeled overhead. At a little distance shone the open window inviting them. From their ledge they overlooked the world.
She had, in fact, being fearful of her experiment; had planned it, in some sort, as a test for him. She was no sentimentalist. She had believed that he loved her--well she knew it now. But for him this could not be first love. Many times she had bethought her of the dead Margaret Dance, and as a sensible girl without resentment. But, herself in the ecstasy of first love, she marvelled how it could die and anything comparable spring up in its room; and she had only her own heart to interrogate. Her own heart told her that it was impossible. "Fool!" said her own heart. "Is it not enough that he condescends--that you have found favour in his sight--you, that asked but to be his slave?" "Fool!" said her heart again. "Would you be jealous of this dead woman? Then jealousy is not cruel as the grave, but crueller." And she retorted, "The woman is dead and cannot grudge it. Ah, conscience! are you the only part of me that has not slept in his arms. I want him all--all!" "How can that be--since you are not his first love?" objected conscience, falling back upon its old position. "Be still," she whispered back. "See how love is recreating him!" Indeed, the secret may have lain in her passing loveliness--by night, beside their fire on the rock, he would sit motionless watching her face for minutes together, or the poise of her head, or the curve of her chin as she tilted it to ponder the stars; and, in part, the woodland life, chosen by her so cunningly, may have bewitched him for a space. Certain it is that during their sojourn here he became a youth again, eager and glad as a youth, passionate as a youth, laughing, throwing his heart into simple things and not shrinking from coarser trials--as when he plunged his hands into the blood of the deer. This story is of Ruth, not of Oliver Vyell; or of him only in so far as his star ruled hers. For the moment their stars danced together and the common cares of this world stood back for a space and left a floor for them. Their bliss was absolute. But the seed of its corruption lay in him. Her spirit was chaste, as her life had been. For him, before ever Margaret Dance met and crossed his path, he had lived loosely, squandering his manhood; and of this squandering let one who later underwent it record the inevitable sentence.
She left him and turned back, under boughs too bare to hide the lowering sky. She had gained the hut and he the village before the storm broke. Indeed it gave him time to make his purchases and reach the Inn, where a heavy mail-bag awaited him. He was served with bread, cheese, and beer in the Inn parlour, and dealt with the letters then and there; answering some, tearing up others, albeit still with a sense of bringing back his habits of business to a world with which he had no concern. While he wrote, always in haste, on the cheap paper the Inn supplied, the storm broke and with such darkness that he pulled out his watch. It was yet early afternoon. He called for candles and wrote on. The last letter, addressed to Batty Langton, Esquire, he superscribed "_Most urgent_," and having sealed it, arose and shouldered his sack for the homeward tramp. By this time the wind howled through the village street, blowing squall upon squall of rain before it. It blew, too, dead in his path; but he faced it cheerfully. Before he gained what should have been the shelter of the woods, the gale had increased so that they gave less than the road had given. The trees rocked above him; leaves and dead twigs beat on his face, and at length the blast forced him almost to creep on all fours. It was dark, too, beneath the swaying boughs. But uppermost in his mind was fear for his love, lest the hut should have given way before the tempest, and she be lying crushed beneath it. Still he fought his way. Darkness--the real darkness--was falling, and he was yet a mile from the hut when in his path a figure arose from the undergrowth where it had been crouching. "Ruth!" "Ah, you are safe! . . . I could not rest at home--" They took hands and forced their way against the wind. "The cabin?" "It stands, please God!" After much battling they spied the light shining through the louvers of its closed shutter. The gale streamed down the valley as through a funnel, but once past the angle of the cliff they found themselves almost in a calm. He pushed the door open. On the hearth--the hearth of his building--a pile of logs burned cheerfully. Over these the kettle hissed; and the firelight fell on their bed, with its linen oversheet turned back and neatly folded. She entered and he closed the door behind her. She laughed as he pushed its bolt. They were drenched to the skin, the pair. "This is best," said she with another soft and happy laugh. "This is best," he repeated after her. "Better even than in fair weather." _ |
||