FURIOSO.
EUPHAN CURRAPLE kept her word. She was soon by old Martha’s side again! She was very merry. Never had the old kitchen rung to pleasanter peals of laughter.
William heard these sounds, as he paced his study, in a tumult of fancies and feelings. He opened the door, and leaned smiling at its side, with his arms folded. He hardly breathed, for the voice that was more silvery than choirs of angels in his ear was dimly audible in the merriment: and oh! how clear, and though the faintest, the only one he heard. He sighed, in his lonely rapture.
A world as new as the world of spirits was opening to him. These sounds of merriment were of good augury to him, he hoped. Had she thought over all he had said, and was she happy? Oh! if that friendless being could only love him as he loved her — hand-in-hand, through enchanted ground, they would walk henceforward together!
His darling was there — his idol, his muse, his beautiful spirit — and everything was interesting; the tick of his old Dutch clock was musical; the light of fairy land was on the panels of his homely house. The look down the dim passage was a gaze into beautiful futurity. O Time! wing on, and bear him swiftly to the gate of his paradise!
Next morning, just as usual, Euphan was there, very merry, at breakfast with old Martha.
You are not to suppose that she was a useless visitor. Ready to lend a hand whenever it was needed — very quick, very neat was she, and could use her needle for half an hour as well as any. She was a wise adviser, too, in all household matters; and old Martha had come, by this time, habitually to consult her — obliquely and accidentally, as it were; for the old housekeeper had her pride of rule and care, but made no secret of her opinion that the lass had a good notion of housekeeping, and would make a very pretty housewife in time. And anything she did was pleasantly done, with a song or a story.
Now it was the last loitering five or ten minutes after their last cup of tea, when Mall had gone to her work in the scullery, or among the poultry, and she and Mrs. Gillyflower were alone, each on her clumsy kitchen-chair, at the opposite side of the little deal table on which their cloth was spread — clumsy, but also beautifully white.
“There’s a song I used to laugh at,” said the handsome stranger, smiling down upon her hands that lay on the table— “about a poor girl that loved a prince, and the prince loved her, ever so much, and he would have married her; but she bethought her how his father the king, and his mother the queen, would rate him, and his lords and great folk despise him, and how he would be made little of, and sorry — and all for her sake. And just because she loved him too well, she would not marry him — and wasn’t she a big fool?”
“Never a bigger,” acquiesced Martha. “She was called Dun Alice, and he was the Lord of Linton, and a king’s son. And will ye miss the song and the dances, and all the nonsense — and think of me when I’m gone away?”
And suddenly, leaning across the table, she kissed old Martha on the cheek; and Martha caught her close to her heart, and said: —
“Gone, lass! Ye shan’t think o’ that for mony a day. I would not know my old self, or the old house, or the fields without ye, my bonny rogue!” s And thus saying, old Martha rose abruptly, with a little laugh, and trotted away to the dresser, and then to the cupboard — or (as in that northern region they term it) the “catmallison” — and was busy over cups and flagons in an instant; for she did not choose people to see her eyes wet, and dried them hastily, with her back turned, and speaking hilariously all the time.
William was not likely to make a secret of his love anywhere. But he could not tell how Euphan might resent his letting Martha guess it, and therefore he had to act with circumspection. Sorely it tried him, as you may fancy, to know that she was so near, and yet so effectually hidden from him. As to reading, that was quite out of the question; equally so was his remaining in his study. He was in a state of sublimest restlessness.
Quietly, with an unavowed fear of old Martha Gillyflower, he let himself out, gently, by the hall-door, and stood leaning on the outer edge of the porch, vainly looking for Euphan, listening for her voice.
Then the young Squire walked away through the trees to the right, and, making a detour, reached the wood of thorn and birch, oak and hazel, that skirts the moss, and so up again, by the Druid ring of tall stones — always, henceforward, an enchanted region for him.
“Quite lonely it now was, and beyond it, through rugged glades of scattered dwarf oak and birch, he still looked in vain.
He was in the acme of his fever — he could not rest. Those who measure all things by mundane prudences and proprieties will regard his infatuation with proper astonishment and disgust. There are others to whom it will appear essential true love, and in so far heavenly as it was uncontaminated by the sordid. The inner man, the ‘xardia’, the spiritual man who is to live forever, is the shrine of every celestial affection. There reside the true and the loving in all human nature. If not there, both are extinct, and what is then that inner man? An immortal principle of evil, the Satanic lord of the tabernacle of the flesh, which is not, as in the happier man, a veil through which, as in the countenance, the glory of the inner love and truth shines forth; but a fixed and a goodly mask, within which lurks and rules a satanic stranger. When, from the celestial tenant in the other, shines forth a sudden truth or affection — how the heavenly spirits thrill with a strange delight! In this law is the life of what we call romance — that noble folly, which to some seems so ridiculous, and to others so beautifully wise.
William is now walking in his dream — in his delirium. The intoxication’ is not, as in some, selfish. Generous madness! — who can charm it into sanity, or impose on it the laws of plodding quietude? Will it listen to reason, or be strapped down on its bed? Alas! no; it will talk from its frenzy, and enjoy its suicidal liberty — and gather supernatural strength from its very mania.
Euphan liked, when the sun shone out, to sit on a stile, or under an old tree, or to wander up and down the hedgerows — with the dog by her side, or the bird’s cage in her fingers — singing sometimes, sometimes silent, and sometimes talking to her mute companions.