The Devils Garden | Page 9

across his raised toes was sufficient to make him feel again the pressure
of thick boots that he had worn years ago when he tramped as new
postman on the Manninglea Road.
And each thing that he thought of he saw--hawthorn blossom like snow
on the hedgerows, red rhododendrons as vivid as Chinese lanterns in
the gloom of the dark copse, the green moss of the rides, the white
paint of the gates. The farthest point of his round was Mr. Barradine's
mansion, and he used to arrive there just before eight o'clock. With the
thought came the luminous pictures, and he saw again, as clearly as
fifteen years ago, the splendor of the Abbey House--that is, all one can
see of it as one approaches its vast servants' offices. Here, solidly real,
were the archway, the first and the second courtyard, grouped gables
and irregular roof ridges, the belfry tower and its gilded vane; men
washing a carriage, a horse drinking at the fountain trough, a dog lying
on a sunlit patch of cobble-stones and lazily snapping at flies; a glimpse,
through iron scroll work, of terrace balustrades, yellow gravel, and
lemon-trees in tubs; the oak doors of laundries, drying-rooms, and so
forth.
It was here, outside the laundry, that he saw Mavis for the first time;
and although the sleeves of her print dress were rolled up and she was
carrying a metal skimming dish, something ineffably refined and
superior in her deportment led him to believe that she was some lesser
member of the august Barradine family, and not one of its hired
dependents. He touched his peaked cap, and did not even venture to say
"Good morning, miss."
Then he found out about her. She was not quite so grand as all that.
You might say she was a young lady right enough, if you merely
counted manners and education; but she had been born far below the
level of gentility. She belonged to the Petherick lot; and, living with her
aunt at North Ride Cottage, she came every day to the Abbey to do
some light and delicate work in Mr. Barradine's model dairy. The fact
that she had lost both her parents interested and pleased Dale:
orphanhood seemed to contain the embryonic germs of a mutual
sympathy.

He used to speak to her now whenever he saw her. One day they stood
talking in the copse, and he showed her their distorted reflections on
the curves of her shining cream-dish. She laughed; and that day he was
late on his round.
Then somehow he got to a heavy sort of chaff about the letters. She
said she liked receiving letters, and she never received enough of them.
He used to say, "Good morning, miss. My mate started off with a
tremendous heavy bag to-day. I expect the most of it was for you.
You'll find 'em when you get home this evening--shoals of 'em."
Walking fast on his round he rehearsed such little speeches, and if she
made an unanticipated answer he was baffled and confused. He
suffered from an extreme shyness when face to face with her.
Then all at once his overwhelming admiration gave him a hot flow of
language. Beginning the old cumbrous facetiousness about her
correspondence, he blurted out the true thoughts that he had begun to
entertain.
"You didn't ought to want for letters, miss, and you wouldn't--not if I
was your letter-writer. I'd send you a valentine every day of the year."
As he spoke, he looked at her with burning eyes. He was astonished,
almost terrified by his hardiness; and what he detected of its effect on
her threw him into an indescribable state of emotion.
Rough and coarse he might be, and yet not truly disagreeable to her
fine senses; his freckled face and massive shoulders did not repel her;
no instinct of the lovely princess turned sick at these advances of the
wild man of the woods. Under his scrutiny she showed a sort of
fluttered helplessness, a mingling of beauty and weakness that sent
fiery messages thrilling through and through him, a pale tremor, a soft
glow, a troubled but not offended frown; and from beneath all these
surface manifestations the undeveloped woman in her seemed to speak
to the matured manhood in him--seemed to say without words, "Oh,
dear me, what is this? I hope you haven't taken a real fancy to my
whiteness and slenderness and tremulousness; because if you _have_,
you are so big and so strong that I know you'll get me in the end."
That was the crucial moment of his marvelous life. After that all his
dreams fused and became one. He felt as if from soft metal he had
changed into hard metal. And, moreover, the stimulus of