“A cabbage leaf! Now you are too bad. I won’t taste so much as the tip of a strawberry out of anything but one. How did you eat your strawberries, pray?”
“With my mouth, of course. But explain your meaning. You won’t eat what I pick for you out of what?”
“Out of anything else in the world except your own little beautiful palm.”
“Now, how very absurd you are! Why, my hands are quite hot.”
“Let me feel them and judge for myself. Now the other, if you please. Oh, how lovely and cool they are! How could you tell me such a story, Mabel, beautiful Mabel?”
“I am not at all beautiful, and I won’t be called so. And I know not what they may do in London. But I really think, considering—at least when one comes to consider that——”
“To consider what? You make me tremble, you do look so ferocious. Ah, I thought you couldn’t do it long. Inconsiderate creature, what is it I am to consider?”
“You cannot consider! Well, then, remember. Remember, it is not twenty-four hours since you saw me for the very first time; and surely it is not right and proper that you should begin to call me ‘Mabel,’ as if you had known me all your life!”
“I must have known you all my life. And I mean to know you all the rest of my life, and a great deal more than that——”
“It may be because you are Gregory’s friend you are allowed to do things. But what would you think of me, Mr. Lorraine, if I were to call you ‘Hilary’—a thing I should never even dream of?”
“I should think that you were the very kindest darling, and I should ask you to breathe it quite into my ear—‘Hilary, Hilary!’—just like that; and then I should answer just like this, ‘Mabel, Mabel, sweetest Mabel, how I love you, Mabel!’ and then what would you say, if you please?”
“I should have to ask my mother,” said the maiden, “what I ought to say. But luckily the whole of this is in your imagination. Mr. Lorraine, you have lost your strawberries by your imagination.”
“What do I care for strawberries?” Hilary cried, as the quick girl wisely beat a swift retreat from him. “You never can enter into my feelings, or you never would run away like that. And I can’t run after you, you know, because of Phyllis and Gregory. There she goes, and she won’t come back. What a fool I was to be in such a hurry! But what could I do to help it? I never know where I am when she turns those deep rich eyes upon me. She never will show them again, I suppose, but keep the black lashes over them. And I was getting on so well—and here are the stalks of the strawberries!”
Of every strawberry she had eaten from his daring fingers he had kept the stalk and calyx, breathed on by her freshly fragrant breath, and slyly laid them in his pocket; and now he fell to at kissing them. Then he lay down in the Carolinas, where her skirt had moved the leaves; and to him, weary with strong heat, and a rush of new emotions, comfort came in the form of sleep. And when he awoke, in his open palm most delicately laid he found a little shell-shaped cabbage-leaf piled with the fruit of the glossy neck.
[1] That admirable writer, Dr. Hogg.
CHAPTER XVI.
OH, SWEETER THAN THE BERRY!
These doings of Hilary and his love—for his love he declared her to be for ever, whether she would have him for hers or not—seem to have taken more time almost in telling than in befalling. Although it had been a long summer’s day, to them it had passed as a rapid dream. So at least they fancied, when they began to look quietly back at it, forgetting the tale of the golden steps so lightly flitted over by the winged feet of love.
Martin Lovejoy watched his daughter at supper-time that Sunday; and he felt quite sure that his wife was wrong. Why, the girl scarcely spoke to Lorraine at all, and even neglected his plate so sadly, that her mother was compelled to remind her sharply of her duties. Upon which the Grower despatched to his wife a smile of extreme sagacity, which (being fetched out of cipher and shorthand, by the matrimonial key) contained all this—“Well you are a silly, as you always are, when you want to advise me. The girl is cold-shouldering that young fellow, the same as she does all the young hop-growers. And well she knows how to do it too. She gets her intellect from her father. Now please not to put in your oar, Mrs. Lovejoy, another time, till it is asked for.”
Moreover, he thought that if Mabel took the smallest delight in Hilary, she could not have answered as she had done, when that pious youth, in the early evening, expressed his sincere desire to attend another performance of Divine service.
“I had no idea,” said the simple Gregory, “that you made a point of going to church at least twice every Sunday. I seldom see you of a Sunday in London. But the very last place I should go to, to find you, would probably be the Temple church.”
“That is quite a different thing, don’t you see? A country church, and a church in London, are as different as a meadow and a market-place.”
“But surely, Mr. Lorraine, you would find the duty of attending just the same.” Thus spoke Mrs. Lovejoy, who seldom missed a chance of discharging her duty towards young people.
“Quite so, of course I do, Mrs. Lovejoy. But then we always perform our duties best, when they are pleasures. And besides that, I have a special reason for feeling bound, as one might say, to go to church well in the country.”
“I suppose one must not venture to ask you what that reason is, sir.”
“Oh, yes, to be sure. It is just this. I have an uncle, my mother’s brother, who is a country clergyman.”
“Well done, Master Lorraine!” said the Grower, while the rest were laughing. “You take a very sensible view, sir, of things. It is too much the fashion nowadays to neglect our trade-connections. But Gregory will go with you, and Phyllis, and Mabel. The old people stay at home to mind the house. For we always let the maid-servants go.”
“Oh father,” cried Mabel; “poor Phyllis is so overcome by the heat, that she must not go. And I must stop at home to read to her.”
So that the good Lorraine took nothing by his sudden religious fervour, except a hot walk with Gregory, and a wearisome doze in a musty pew with nobody to look at.
With fruit-growers, Monday is generally the busiest day of the week, except Friday. After paying all hands on the Saturday night, and stowing away all implements, they rest them well till the Sunday is over, having in the summer-time earned their rest by night-work as well as day-work, through the weary hours of the week. This is not the case with all, of course. Many of them, especially down in Kent, grow their fruit, or let it grow itself, and then sell it by the acre, or the hundred acres, to dealers, who take all the gathering and marketing off their hands altogether. But for those who work off their own crops, the toil of the week begins before the daystar of the Monday. At least for about six weeks it is so, according to the weather and the length of the “busy season.” Before the stars fade out of the sky, the pickers advance through the strawberry quarters, carrying two punnets each, yawning more than chattering even, whisking the grey dew away with their feet, startling the lark from his nest in the row, groping among the crisp leaves for the fruit, and often laying hold of a slug instead.
That is the time for the true fruit-lover to try the taste of a strawberry. It should be one that refused to ripen in the gross heat of yesterday, but has been slowly fostering goodness, with the attestation of the stars. And now (if it has been properly managed, properly picked without touch of hand, and not laid down profanely), when the sun comes over