A Sovereign Remedy. Flora Annie Webster Steel
into their heads with the Wine of Life, as they sat and talked and watched Aurelia against the background of flower and fruit.
"Oh! cupbearer! save the Wine of Life, what gifts canst thou bring?" quoted Ned suddenly under his breath.
"A fine poet Hâfiz--a very fine poet," remarked Sylvanus Smith, who appeared to have read and remembered most things, "but he lacks the true human spirit. He fuddles himself into content with mystic unrealities, and misses the great individual claim of each soul to freedom and equality. So unlike Byron."
"Very," assented Ned dryly.
Still the conversation did not languish, and when dinner was over they adjourned to another large room opposite the library, which was also empty of all things save a grand piano, an arm-chair, and a music rest. Here Ned settled himself down to accompany Ted and Aura as they sang, and finally, with apologies, for not being so much at home on the piano as on the organ, persuaded Mr. Sylvanus Smith, who turned out to be a passed musician, into trying a Brahms sonata for piano and violin. And here Martha coming to announce tea found them still happily busy over the great piles of music that were ranged along the wall.
It was when Ned lingered to close the piano that Aura lingered also watching him quietly; but she made him start and blush violently by saying with a smile, "You were the Archangel Gabriel, weren't you?"
Taken aback as he was, his eyes met hers with a reflection of their confidence. "I was. But how did you find out?"
"I don't know," she said, a faint trouble coming into her face, "that is the worst of it. It was when we were running through the Messiah, something in your mind touched mine, I think. It happens sometimes, doesn't it?--and--and it isn't altogether pleasant."
She drew herself away from him instinctively, but he followed her.
"Why?" he asked.
She flashed round on him. "Because I dislike being touched."
There was a silence; finally he asked curiously, "Ought I to tell Adam?"
"Why should you? He loves miracles, and it will give him something to talk about, besides"--here she laughed--"it was a miracle, you know, to make the old organ sound at all."
"Perhaps," replied Ned, relieved of the necessity for confessing one of the many sudden impulses which were always getting him into trouble.
They found Martha by the tea-table looking very rakish and young in a coat and skirt and a sailor hat, which, however, did not prevent her from, as usual, masking her supremacy by subserviency. The gentlemen's rooms were quite ready for them, and as she was going through the village could she leave any message with the smith?
"Thanks, no!" replied Ted curtly, for he had noticed Aura's confidence with Ned, and had--he scarcely had time to think why--resented it; "but, I think, Cruttenden, that if we do avail ourselves of Mr. Smith's kindly offered hospitality, we must start at dawn, picking up our bicycles by the way."
"As you please, Ted," replied Ned carelessly. "But thanks all the same, Martha. I hope there will be no more miracles in church."
"Thank you, sir," retorted Martha cheerfully, "but I don't 'old with church nor yet with chapel neither. As I keep tellin' of Adam, they makes people think too much of their sins. An' 'is is but what we cooks call second stock at that, sir; for takin' 'im, fine an' wet, Adam do 'is work like a real Briton--yes! he really do----"
With which testimonial to Adam's worth she bobbed another curtsey, and was off for her panacea for all ills, a "spin on her bike."
"I suppose," said Ted after a pause, in a somewhat awed voice, "that Adam is Martha's husband."
Aura bubbled over with quick mirth. "Martha's husband! Oh dear, no! Why, she is always at me 'not to incline to no man, no; not if his 'air be 'ung round with gold'; and just think of Adam's little cropped head!"
Her laugh was infectious.
"And so Martha shares the--the family dislike to gold," suggested Ned slyly.
Mr. Sylvanus Smith rose to the fly at once. "We do not dislike it, sir; gold has undoubtedly its appointed place in the world, but it happens to be in its wrong place. So I disregard it, and pay all my bills by cheque."
"Martha makes out the lists for the Army and Navy, you know," explained Aura quickly. "It's rather fun unpacking the boxes when they come."
"There is no doubt," continued Mr. Smith, in a tone of voice which suggested an effort to be strictly original, "that as now administered, money is the root of all evil. Our hoarded millions instead of, as they should, bringing equality--comfortable, contented equality--to the world, separate man from his fellow man by a purely artificial distinction; they bring about class antagonism, and are a premium on inept idleness."
"Hear, hear!" said Ted. "I quite agree with you, sir. If these millions were equitably divided----"
"They would be a premium on idle ineptitude instead," laughed Ned lightly. "If you gave a loafer the same wage as a working man, I for one would loaf. It is the better part. If any one were to offer me a golden sovereign at the present moment, Miss Aura----"
She arrested the teapot in the middle of pouring out his second cup, and glanced up at him in smiling horror.
"And I never gave back the one in Cockatua's bread and milk tin! Dear me, what should I have done if you had gone away and left it? I'll remember it after tea."
But after tea found them still laughing, still talking, still sitting silent awhile listening to the song of a thrush which, as the day drew down to dusk, sat on the bent branch of the old yew to sing as surely never thrush sang before.
So the moon climbed into the sky and the flowers faded into the ghosts of flowers, each holding just a hint of the hues it had worn by day.
"What a pity it is to go to bed at all," said Aura suddenly, leaning over her grandfather's chair and laying her cheek on his thick, white hair; "for we seem to have so much to say to each other, don't we?"
He winced slightly; since for once he had forgotten the absorption of his later years, and had let himself be as he would have been but for the tragedy which he had fled into the wilderness to hide. For he had seen his wife starve to death, and his daughter sell herself for bread, while he, struck down by rheumatic fever, had waited for the tardy decision of a Law Court. The verdict had come too late for either; too late for anything but decent burial for a poor, young mother, and flight, if possible, from himself. But, though he forgot sometimes, the tragedy of seeing his wife die before his helplessness, it remained always to blur his outlook, to make him what he was, a half-crazy visionary.
And to-night he had forgotten. He had laughed at trivialities, and told trivial stories of the thousand-year-old yew tree, and the Druidical legends connected with the summer solstice--the real midsummer night, though St. John's Day came later.
But now remembrance came back, and he rose. "We have talked too much," he said almost captiously, "and these gentlemen have to leave at dawn. We wish them good luck, don't we? Come, Aurelia, my child."
So they had said good-bye; but five minutes afterwards, as the two young men sat silently finishing their pipes, they saw her returning over the lawn, holding the sovereign in her raised right hand.
It seemed to them as if the whole world came with her as, rising to their feet instinctively, they waited beside the cool, dark pool, full of the black shadows of the yew tree, full also of marvellous moonlit depths going down and down into more and more light.
The air was heavy with the flower fragrance of the garden, the round moon, large, soft, mild, hung in the velvety sky, not a breath stirred in earth or heaven, her very footstep on the turf was silent.
"Which of you gave it me?" she asked. "You are so much alike, at first, that I forget."
They were silent, uncertain what to claim, what not to claim.
She smiled. "Is it a puzzle? You want me to find out; but really, I expect