Athalie
Page 200Athalie was having a wonderful summer. House and garden continued to
enchant her. She brought down Hafiz, who, being a city cat, instantly
fled indoors with every symptom of astonishment and terror the first
time Athalie placed him on the lawn.
But within a week the dainty Angora had undergone a change of heart.
Boldly, now he marched into the garden all by himself; fearlessly he
pounced upon such dangerous game as crickets and grasshoppers and the
little night moths which drifted among the flowers at twilight,--the
favourite prowling hour of Hafiz, the Beautiful.
Also, early in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double
buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the
familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden
gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes
with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More
often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and
some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar woodland,
haunted by childish memories, and lie there listening to the bees and
to the midsummer wind in softly modulated conversation with the little
tree-top leaves.
She had brought her maid from the city; Mrs. Connor continued to rule
laundry and kitchen. Connor himself decorated the landscape with his
lawn-mower, raking bed and path, cutting and training vines, clipping
hedges,--a sober, bucolic, agreeable figure to the youthful chatelaine
of the house of Greensleeve.
Clive had come once more from town to say that he was sailing for
England the following day; that he would be away a month all told, and
that he would return by the middle of August.
They had spent the morning driving together in her buckboard--the
happiest morning perhaps in their lives.
It promised to be a perfect day; and she was so carefree, so
contented, so certain of the world's kindness, so shyly tender with
month's separation ceased for the time to appal him.
Concerning his interview with his wife she had asked him nothing; nor
even why he was going abroad. Whether she guessed the truth; whether
she had come to understand the situation through other and occult
agencies, he could not surmise. But one thing was plain enough;
nothing that had happened or that threatened to happen was now
disturbing her. And her gaiety and high spirits were reassuring him
and tranquillising his mind to a degree for which, on reflection, he
could scarcely account, knowing the ultimate hopelessness of their
situation.