Simon Dale | Page 8

but she looked up now,
smiling again, and said to me:
"You'll soon have a friend in London."
Thinking of Barbara, I answered gloomily, "She's no friend of mine."
"I did not mean whom you mean," said Cydaria, with twinkling eyes

and not a whit put out. "But I also am going to London."
I smiled, for it did not seem as though she would be a powerful friend,
or able to open any way for me. But she met my smile with another so
full of confidence and challenge that my attention was wholly caught,
and I did not heed the Vicar's farewell as he rose and left us.
"And would you serve me," I asked, "if you had the power?"
"Nay, put the question as you think it," said she. "Would you have the
power to serve me if you had the will? Is not that the doubt in your
mind?"
"And if it were?"
"Then, indeed, I do not know how to answer; but strange things happen
there in London, and it may be that some day even I should have some
power."
"And you would use it for me?"
"Could I do less on behalf of a gentleman who has risked his mistress's
favour for my poor cheek's sake?" And she fell to laughing again, her
mirth growing greater as I turned red in the face. "You mustn't blush
when you come to town," she cried, "or they'll make a ballad on you,
and cry you in the streets for a monster."
"The oftener comes the cause, the rarer shall the effect be," said I.
"The excuse is well put," she conceded. "We should make a wit of you
in town."
"What do you in town?" I asked squarely, looking her full in the eyes.
"Perhaps, sometimes," she laughed, "what I have done once--and to
your good knowledge--since I came to the country."
Thus she would baffle me with jesting answers as often as I sought to
find out who and what she was. Nor had I better fortune with her

mother, for whom I had small liking, and who had, as it seemed, no
more for me. For she was short in her talk, and frowned to see me with
her daughter. Yet she saw me, I must confess, often with Cydaria in the
next days, and I was often with Cydaria when she did not see me. For
Barbara was gone, leaving me both sore and lonely, all in the mood to
find comfort where I could, and to see manliness in desertion; and there
was a charm about the girl that grew on me insensibly and without my
will until I came to love, not her (as I believed, forgetting that Love
loves not to mark his boundaries too strictly) but her merry temper, her
wit and cheerfulness. Moreover, these things were mingled and spiced
with others, more attractive than all to unfledged youth, an air of the
world and a knowledge of life which piqued my curiosity and sat (it
seems so even to my later mind as I look back) with bewitching
incongruity on the laughing child's face and the unripe grace of
girlhood. Her moods were endless, vying with one another in an ever
undetermined struggle for the prize of greatest charm. For the most part
she was merry, frank mirth passing into sly raillery; now and then she
would turn sad, sighing, "Heigho, that I could stay in the sweet
innocent country!" Or again she would show or ape an uneasy
conscience, whispering, "Ah, that I were like your Mistress Barbara!"
The next moment she would be laughing and jesting and mocking, as
though life were nought but a great many-coloured bubble, and she the
brightest-tinted gleam on it.
Are women so constant and men so forgetful, that all sympathy must
go from me and all esteem be forfeited because, being of the age of
eighteen years, I vowed to live for one lady only on a Monday and was
ready to die for another on the Saturday? Look back; bow your heads,
and give me your hands, to kiss or to clasp!
Let not you and I inquire What has been our past desire, On what
shepherds you have smiled, Or what nymphs I have beguiled; Leave it
to the planets too What we shall hereafter do; For the joys we now may
prove, Take advice of present love.
Nay, I will not set my name to that in its fulness; Mr Waller is a little
too free for one who has been nicknamed a Puritan to follow him to the

end. Yet there is a truth in it. Deny it, if you will. You are smiling,
madame, while you deny.
It was a golden summer's evening when I, to whom