Delia Blanchflower | Page 6

their fathers and brothers; playing
lawn-tennis like young men, and shewing their shapely forms
sometimes, when it was a question of attacking the heights, in
knicker-bocker costume, and at other times in fresh white dresses and
bright-coloured jerseys, without a hint of waist; these young Atalantas,
budding and bloomed, made the strongest impression upon him, as of a
new race. Where had he been all these years? He felt himself a kind of
Rip van Winkle--face to face at forty-one with a generation unknown to
him. No one of course could live in England, and not be aware of the
change which has passed over English girls in the same direction. But
the Englishman always tacitly assumes that the foreigner is far behind
him in all matters of open-air sport and physical development.
Winnington had soon confessed the touch of national arrogance in his
own surprise; and was now the keen and much attracted spectator.
On one of the grounds he saw the little German girl--Euphrosyne, as he
had already dubbed her--having a lesson from a bullying elder brother.
The youth, amazed at his own condescension, scolded his sister
perpetually, and at last gave her up in despair, vowing that she would
never be any good, and he was not going to waste his time in teaching
such a ninny. Euphrosyne sat down beside the court, with tears in her
pretty eyes, her white feet crossed, her dark head drooping; and two girl
companions, aged about sixteen or seventeen, like herself, came up to

comfort her.
"I could soon shew you how to improve your service, Mademoiselle,"
said Winnington, smiling, as he passed her. Euphrosyne looked up
startled, but at sight of the handsome middle-aged Englishman, whom
she unkindly judged to be not much younger than her father, she
timidly replied:--
"It is hateful, Monsieur, to be so stupid as I am!"
"Let me shew you," repeated Winnington, kindly. At this moment, a
vigilant English governess--speaking with a strong Irish-American
accent--came up, and after a glance at the Englishman, smilingly
acquiesced. The two comforters of Euphrosyne, graceful little maids,
with cherry-coloured jerseys over their white frocks, and golden brown
hair tied with the large black bows of the _Backfisch_, were eager to
share the lesson, and soon Winnington found himself the centre of a
whole bevy of boys and girls who had run up to watch Euphrosyne's
performance.
The English governess, a good girl, in spite of her accent, and the
unconscious fraud she was thereby perpetrating on her employers,
thought she had seldom witnessed a more agreeable scene.
"He treats them like princesses, and yet he makes them learn," she
thought, a comment which very fairly expressed the mixture of
something courtly with something masterful in the Englishman's
manner. He was patience itself; but he was also frankness itself,
whether for praise or blame; and the eagerness to please him grew fast
and visibly in all these young creatures.
But as soon as he had brought back Euphrosyne's smiles, and roused a
new and fierce ambition to excel in all their young breasts, he dropped
the lesson, with a few gay slangy words, and went his way, leaving a
stir behind him of which he was quite unconscious. And there was no
Englishman looking on who might have told the charmed and
conquered maidens that they had just been coached by one of the most
famous of English athletes, born with a natural genius for every kind of

game, from cricket downwards.
* * * * *
On his way to the eastern side of the pass on which stood the group of
hotels, Winnington got his post from the _concierge_, including his
nightly _Times_, and carried it with him to a seat with which he was
already familiar.
But he left the Times unopened, for the spectacle before him was one to
ravish the senses from everything but itself. He looked across the deep
valley of the Adige, nearly four thousand feet below him, to the giant
range of the Dolomite Alps on the eastern side. The shadow of the
forest-clad mountain on which he stood spread downwards over the
plain, and crept up the mountains on the farther edge. Above a gulf of
deepest blue, inlaid with the green of vineyards and forest lakes, he
beheld an aerial world of rose-colour--the giant Dolomites, Latemar,
Rosengarten, Schlern--majestic rulers of an upper air, so pure and
luminous, that every tiny shadow cast by every wisp of wandering
cloud on the bare red peaks, was plainly visible across the thirty miles
of space. Rosengarten, with its snowless, tempest-beaten crags, held the
centre, flushing to its name; and to the right and left, peak ranged
beyond peak, like courtiers crowding to their king; chief among them a
vast pyramid, blood-red in the sunset,