Rupert Godwin

LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM.

Slowly, very slowly, did Mrs. Westford recover from that attack of brain-fever which had been brought on by the grief and excitement of her parting with her husband. It was no ordinary grief which had reduced her to this alarming condition—she had succumbed beneath the influence of a strange and unconquerable presentiment which had oppressed her during the long night of watching that preceded Captain Westford’s departure.

Long and patiently through those bright midsummer days did Violet watch in the sick-chamber, while Lionel, scarcely less devoted, was faithful to his post in the pretty boudoir adjoining his mother’s room. Never had a mother been blessed by more affectionate children; never had more loving eyes kept watch by a sick-bed.

But sometimes in the pleasantest hour of the June evening, when the western sky was rosy with the last glory of the setting sun, Lionel Westford would insist upon Violet going out for a constitutional walk, while he took her place beside his mother’s bed.

“It is no use talking, Violet,” he said; “if you don’t get a little fresh air after a long day’s watching and fatigue, you will make yourself as ill as poor mamma, and it will be small comfort for her to find you an invalid when she recovers. Go, dear, and take a nice long ramble in the forest, and come back fresh and blooming to get a good night’s rest. Remember, Miss Vio, in the absence of papa I am your responsible guardian. So no disobedience, miss. Put on your hat and depart.”

If the light-hearted young man had been a close observer, he would have wondered, perhaps, at the blushes which dyed Violet’s cheeks whenever these evening rambles were discussed.

Hesitating and confused in her manner, she would seem one minute as if she most earnestly wished to go, and in the next would plead almost piteously to be allowed to stay in the peaceful sanctuary of her mother’s room.

But Lionel was obstinate where he thought Violet’s welfare was concerned, and insisted on these evening rambles.

“I should go with you and see that you took a regular constitutional, miss,” he would say; “but I am determined that our mother shall never be left entirely to hired service, however faithful and devoted that service might be. If you don’t like going alone, you can take one of the servants with you; but you need scarcely go out of earshot of the house.”

All this time Clara Westford lay feeble and helpless, her mind disordered by feverish visions, in which she always saw her husband surrounded by peril and tempest.

The doctor reported favourably, but he owned that her recovery might be slow and tedious.

The mind had been very much shaken, he said, by the shock of that parting with Harley Westford.

So when the sun was low in the west, Violet was wont to leave her mother’s room and to go out alone into the forest glades that stretched beyond the gardens of the Grange.

No English scenery could be more lovely than that Hampshire woodland, with its rich undergrowth of fern and hazel, its glimpses of sunshine and depth of shadow.

And surely no lovelier nymph ever adorned a classic forest than she who now wandered forth in the quiet evening, with wildflowers twisted in the ribbon of her broad straw hat.

So she went forth one evening about a week after that interview between the banker and his victim at Wilmingdon Hall.

She crossed the broad lawn, went along the narrow path that led through the shrubbery, and left the Grange gardens by a little wooden gate that opened at once into the forest. Her face was pale now, though it had been rosy with bright blushes when she left her brother. She did not keep within earshot of the house, as Lionel had supposed she would do, but struck at once into a narrow footpath that wound in and out amongst the grand old trees, and wandered on, sometimes slowly, sometimes at an almost rapid pace, till she came to a grassy patch of land shut in by a tall screen of elm and beech, with here and there the spreading branches of an oak. It was a most lovely spot, an enchanted circle wherein Vivien might have hushed the magician to his charmed sleep. The fern grew tall amongst the broad brown trunks of the old trees, and in the distance a glassy sheet of water reflected the evening sky.

It was a lovely spot; and it was not untenanted. A young man sat on a low camp-seat, with an artist’s portable easel before him.

He was not working at the water-colour sketch on the easel. He was sitting in rather a melancholy attitude, and his eyes were fixed upon that opening in the forest in which Violet appeared.

He was very handsome; dark, with deep grey eyes fringed by long black lashes—eyes which more often looked black than grey. He was very handsome, and his appearance was that of a man upon whom the stamp of gentle blood had been indelibly fixed. The air of high breeding was a part of himself, and not borrowed from the clothes he wore; for no costume could be more indefinite in its character than his velveteen shooting-jacket and grey waistcoat and trousers, which might have been alike suitable to a gamekeeper, a pedlar, or a gentleman on a pedestrian tour.

No sooner had the first glimpse of Violet Westford’s white dress appeared in the forest pathway than the young artist sprang from his seat and ran to meet her.

“My own darling!” he exclaimed; “how late you are, and how long the time has seemed—how cruelly long!”

Now, when a gentleman addresses a lady as “his own darling,” it must be presumed that the lady and gentleman have met very often, and are on very good terms with each other.

“I could not come earlier, George,” the girl said gently; “and even now I feel as if I were very wicked to come at all. O, if mamma were well, and I could tell her of our engagement! If I could take you to her! O, George, you do not know her, if you think that your poverty would stand in your way. She would never ask me to marry a man I did not sincerely love. And if she liked you, I’m sure she’d be the last person to consider whether you were rich or poor.”

The young man sighed heavily, and did not immediately answer this maidenly speech.

But after a pause he said:

“Your mother may be a very generous woman, Violet, but there are others who are not so generous. There are some who worship only one god, the Golden Calf; some there are who bow themselves down before that modern Moloch, and would offer up the hearts’ blood of their own children as mercilessly as the Carthaginians cast their offspring into the furnaces that burned beneath the feet of Belsamen. You do not know the world, my Violet, as I know it, or you would never talk of poverty being no barrier between us.”

“But neither my father nor my mother are money-worshippers,” pleaded the loving girl. “Papa is the most simple-hearted of men, and I have only to confess to him that I have been foolish enough to fall in love with a poor unknown artist, whose sole fortune consists of a sheaf of brushes, a palette, a portable easel, and a camp-stool, and he will give his consent immediately—that is to say, as soon as he knows you, George; for, at the risk of making you very conceited, I must confess that he can’t know you without liking you.”

“My dear foolish girl!”

“Wasn’t mamma charmed with you last Christmas, when we met you at the ball at Winchester? only she mistook you for a man of fortune, and little knew that you were a poor wandering artist, lodging at a cottage in the forest. You have really such an aristocratic air, that one would imagine you had twenty thousand a year.”

A dark shade passed over the young man’s face.

“If I had five hundred a year, my darling, I should have contrived to get an introduction to your father before he left England, and should have boldly asked for this dear little hand. But I am a pauper, Violet. I am a dependant, and the lowest of dependants, for I am a dependant on a man I cannot esteem.”

Violet Westford looked at her lover’s gloomy face with an air of mingled distress and bewilderment.

“But it will not be always so, George,” she said. “You will be a great painter some day, and then all the world will be at your feet.”

The young man’s moody expression vanished as he looked down at the bright face lifted to his.

“My beautiful young dreamer!” he exclaimed. “No; I have no such ambitious visions of triumph and greatness; but I hope some day to win a name that will at least give me independence. To that end I work; and you know that I work hard, my darling.”

“Yes, indeed, I am sometimes afraid your health will suffer.”

“There is no fear of that, Violet. See here. You must see the result of my day’s labour, and approve, or I shall not rest happily to-night. You are all the world to me now, Violet.”

The young painter led the girl to the easel, and she stood by his side for some minutes gazing in silent rapture upon the water-colour drawing before her.

She had no artistic knowledge—no experience; and yet she felt somehow that the work before her bore upon it the divine impress of genius.

It was only the picture of that forest glade, with the deep fern, the broad sheet of unrippled water, the rosy glow of the sunset, and the figure of a deer drinking.

But the soul of a poet had inspired the hand of the painter, and there was a quiet beauty about the picture that went home to the heart.

“O, you will be great, George!” exclaimed the girl, after that long silent gaze upon the picture. “I feel that you will be great.”

She looked up at him with her earnest eyes of darkest deepest blue, and clasped two little loving hands about his arm.

He needed no higher praise than this. Glory might come to him by-and-by, and gold with it; but this one passionate thrill of delight was the thing neither glory nor gold could buy for him.

For some little time the lovers wandered together in the forest glade, supremely happy, forgetful for a while of all the earth, except that one verdant spot hidden in the heart of the woodland.

Then, as long streaks of crimson dyed the grass, Violet hurried homewards, with her lover still by her side. It was only when they were near the gate opening into the gardens of the Grange that the young painter reluctantly withdrew.

Heaven knows, their meetings were pure and innocent as if they had been denizens of the fairy realms of Oberon and Titania; but Violet felt a pang of something like guilt as she returned to the sick-room, and seated herself once more by her mother’s bed.

“How hard to keep a secret from such a darling mother!” thought the girl, with a sigh. “I will tell her all directly she recovers. George cannot refuse me that privilege. I will tell her all, and she will smile at our folly and sympathize with our hopes, and believe, as I do, in that bright future when George Stanmore will be the name of a great painter.”

Comforted by such thoughts as these, a sweet smile crept over Violet Westford’s face as she watched her mother’s slumbers, which to-night were more peaceful than they had been since the Captain’s departure.

The story of Violet’s acquaintance with the wandering artist is a very simple one.

The lovers first met at a ball at Winchester—a grand county ball, where only people of unblemished respectability were admitted. Here Mrs. Westford and Violet met Mr. Stanmore, who came with one of the officers stationed there, an old school-fellow, as he said. The young stranger made a very favourable impression upon both ladies, and danced several times with the younger.

After this, Lionel and his sister frequently encountered the stranger in their winter walks and drives in the forest. He made no secret of his profession, but told them at once that he was a landscape-painter, and that he was living in very humble lodgings in the forest, in order that he might study nature face to face.

Sometimes they found him seated in a little canvas tent, buttoned to the chin in a thick greatcoat, and working hard at a study of some grand old oak, gaunt and brown, against the wintry sky.

Little by little, therefore, the young people grew very intimate with Mr. George Stanmore, the artist. Lionel was much pleased with his new acquaintance. But during the warm spring months Lionel Westford had been away at the University, and Violet had been obliged to walk alone in the forest, for Mrs. Westford’s active charities engaged the greater part of her time, as she devoted herself much to visiting the poor in the villages within a few miles of the Grange.

Sometimes Violet accompanied her upon these missions of charity; but there were many days upon which the young girl went alone into the forest, sometimes on foot, sometimes riding a pet pony, that had been honoured with the name of Oberon.

But, whether she rode Oberon or went on foot, and whichever pathway she took, Violet Westford was sure to meet George Stanmore.

The rest is easily told. They had seen and loved each other. From the very first, unknown to either, that Divine lamp of love had shone in the breast of each—innocent unselfish love, which the trials of life, the cruel tempests of the world, might distress and torture, but could never wholly quench. It was true love, which knows no base alloy of selfish fear or mercenary caution. Violet Westford would have united her fortunes to George Stanmore though he had been a beggar and would have blindly trusted Providence with her future; and the only prudential motive that withheld the young man from pressing his suit was the fear that she whom he so tenderly loved might suffer by his impetuosity.

“Not till I have won independence will I ask her to be my wife,” he thought. “No, not till I can look the world in the face, reliant upon my own right hand for support.”