A Sovereign Remedy. Flora Annie Webster Steel
Aura! Aura!"
Up in the corries, setting the tall brackens a-quiver, high on the birch woods hidden in their silver, higher still among the tumbled rocks of the "Eye of the World," what was that passing?
Was it, white and dim, a wandering sheep looming large upon the moonlit mountainside as it sought to answer the cry, or, this midsummer night when the spirits wander, was it a restless wraith seeking it knew not what?
Or was it Aura herself, free and fearless among the hills?
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
The faint, far--distant call sounded from the valley, from the corries, from the birch woods, from the rocks.
The shadows lay so still, so soft, yet that one surely moved--moved upwards.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!" Was it Aura, or only the echoing sound of the calling lambs?
Still, soft, equable, serene, oh, misty mountain moonlight what didst thou hold?
And in the garden across the lawn, where the girl's feet had lain, was that curved shadow, a snake making its way to the black and white shadow of the Druid's yew tree?
Oh, misty moonlight of the valley what didst thou hold, as the faint, far--away cry echoed between the hills, and up into high heaven?
Did they meet and hold converse face to face upon the mountain-top, those wandering lights and shadows on the mountainsides? or did they wander, searching for something, until dawn, and find nothing?
* * * * *
Dawn at any rate came soon, as Ned had said it would.
The moonlight changed swiftly to sunlight, the heifer lowed for her bull-calf, a sleepy chaffinch chirruped his challenge to the coming day, and Ted Cruttenden coming into the verandah from the library saw Ned entering it from the music room, while at the hall door between them stood Aurelia, blushing at being caught so early.
She was in a loose, white overall, girded in at the waist with a leathern girdle, and her bare feet were shod in sandals.
"Good-morning," she said, without any trace of the blush in her voice. "See what I have found under the old yew tree. Grandfather's chair had torn the turf, and there it was. Do you think it can be the snake-ring grandfather told us about?"
The flat, bead-like stone she held out was no larger than a sixpence, but it had a hole through its greenish, semi-opaque lustre.
"I think it must be," said Ted, passing it on to Ned. "You will have 'all the wealth of the world.' Wasn't that what it is supposed to bring?"
"But I don't want money," she said.
"The wealth of the world is not all money," smiled Ned, handing the stone back to her. "There is love."
She laughed merrily. "I don't want that either. No! not if 'is 'air be 'ung round with gold."
They waved a good-bye to her from the turn of the draw-bridge.
"Till Christmas," said Ned cheerfully.
"Till Christmas," replied Ted cheerfully.
They found the village early astir. Miss Myfanwy Jones's holiday having come to an end, she was starting for Williams and Edwards with a pile of empty dress and bonnet boxes, which Alicia Edwards, the Reverend Morris Pugh, and the Adonis Mervyn were packing into the village shandrydan.
"It is most kind of you gentlemen to be up so early," said Myfanwy, dispensing her smiles impartially. "It is no use asking you, Mr. Morris," she said, throwing a little flavouring of regret into her voice, "you are too busy and too good; but if Mr. Mervyn comes up to town I trust he will call on me."
Mervyn, whose front lock looked exactly as if it had just left a curling-pin's care, nodded at her approvingly.
"That would be jolly fun," he said. "I have to go up for an examination in September."
"Good-bye, then, till September. Good-bye, Alicia." As she kissed the latter she whispered, "That will be a guinea to your account for the hat."
"You said a pound," protested Alicia.
"That was for cash, child. And what is a shilling? But two sixpences; and you shall pay when you are married, see you."
CHAPTER V
Would anything stop those waves except a Cornish coast? thought Helen Tressilian, as she watched the green-blue, solid water slip over a half-sunk rock, and with unabated strength, send up against a higher shelving mass a forty-foot column of reckless spray.
And the sky was so blue, the sun so hot, bringing out all the aromatic odours of the cliff herbs. How sweet they were! It would almost be worth while to be a humble bee to work so busily among the purple thyme. She let some heads of it she had picked fall on her lap with a little listless gesture. Yes! to work instead of droning out the days. To work as Herbert, the dead young husband of her dreams, had meant to work. It was seven years since she had lost him in Italy, whither they had gone on their honeymoon for his health. So he lay there dead through the breaking of a blood vessel; dead without a good-bye; dead under the blue sky amid the orange blossoms, while she, after her mother's death, kept house for her father, Sir Geoffrey Pentreath. And still on her roughest serge suits she wore the conventional muslin of widowhood round her throat and wrists.
And in her heart? In her heart she had set up such a fetich of bereavement that the idea of a second marriage was unthinkable. Yet it would have been advisable. The death of her only brother in South Africa sent the few farms, which was all that remained of the great Pentreath estates, to a distant cousin, and for long years past Sir Geoffrey had had no ready money. Poor father! It was the thought of her which made him----
She glanced to the left, over a great scaur of tumbled rocks like some giant's house in ruins, gave a little shiver and buried her face in her hands.
Poor father! Yet how could he? And how could he be mixed up with all those fateful, hateful people with money, who brought their chauffeurs to the old serving-hall at the Keep? Those chauffeurs were the bane of her life; for what should she give them to eat!
Some one from behind clasped her wrists close, and held her hands still on her eyes.
"Guess!" said a sepulchrally gruff voice.
"My dear Ned! Where have you come from?" she answered gaily.
"How did you find out?" asked Ned Blackborough, seating himself on the thyme beside her.
"As if any one but Ned Cruttenden--I can't help the name, my dear--was ever quite so hoarse!"
"By George, Nell," he said, looking seawards, "it is good to be here. That's what one always says, isn't it, when the visible Body of the Lord is transfigured before one's eyes as it is now."
"You know, Ned, I do not agree with your Buddhistic notions," she said, a trifle severely.
"Beg pardon! They're not Buddhistic; but I'm always forgetting you don't like--though you will some day! Meanwhile I want to ask you a question: and as the butler told me you would be on the coast somewhere ... you've a most superior set of London servants just now, Nell----"
"To keep the chauffeurs company," she interrupted, shrugging her shoulders. "One must--but don't let's talk of it--it's sickening---- And so you came to the old place?"
"To the old place, Nell," he repeated, looking at her with criticising eyes of kind affection, and thinking she looked as though she stood in need of physical and moral backing; "I always think of you here, looking out to sea, just under Betty Cam's chair----" he nodded his head backwards to the scaur of tumbled rocks. "If you get looking so long, Nell, you will be seeing ghostly things--like