“What!
With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped fields and golden haystacks, and—and—”
She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of contradiction.
“I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!”
“Misplaced?”
“July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly couple who feel too late the supreme passion.”
Lucy’s eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine, revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted her comprehension.
“I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom.”
“And old age its experience.
The law of compensation, my dearest.
But I don’t see,” he added reflectively, “what your remark and my answer have to do with the view,” whereat Lucy declared that his wits wandered.
Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast open space, apparently at the World’s-End.
Here the saltings spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames, intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following the water-courses.
The marshes were shaggy with reeds and rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for fairy-rings.
Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and timber, the lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward to the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat on its golden tide.
Across the gleaming waters, from where they lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills, stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines could be discerned.
The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of the sun’s profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a Paradise.
Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the usual rose-colored spectacles which form an important part of his stock-in-trade, and they looked abroad on a fairy world.
Was not SHE there: was not HE there: could Romeo or Juliet desire more?
From their feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the King’s highway of the district—a trim, prim line of white above the picturesque disorder of the marshes.
It skirted the low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible.
It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard.
It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard.
What with the frowning battlements, the very few windows diminutive and closely barred, the sullen entrance and the absence of any gracious greenery, Gartley Fort resembled the Castle of Giant Despair.
On the hither side, but invisible to the lovers, great cannons scowled on the river they protected, and, when they spoke, received answer from smaller guns across the stream.
There less extensive forts were concealed amidst trees and masked by turf embankments, to watch and guard the golden argosies of London commerce.
Lucy, always impressionable, shivered with her hand in that of Archie’s, as she stared at the landscape, melancholy even in the brilliant sunshine.
“I should hate to live in Gartley Fort,” said she abruptly. “One might as well be in jail.”
“If you marry Random you will have to live there, or on a baggage wagon.
He is R.G.A. captain, remember, and has to go where glory calls him, like a good soldier.”
“Glory can call until glory is hoarse for me,” retorted the girl candidly. “I prefer an artist’s studio to a camp.”
“Why?” asked Hope, laughing at her vehemence.
“The reason is obvious.
I love the artist.”
“And if you loved the soldier?”
“I should mount the baggage wagon and make him Bovril when he was wounded.
But for you, dear, I shall cook and sew and bake and—”
“Stop! stop!
I want a wife, not a housekeeper.”
“Every sensible man wants the two in one.”
“But you should be a queen, darling.”
“Not with my own consent, Archie: the work is much too hard.
Existence on six pounds a week with you will be more amusing.
We can take a cottage, you know, and live, the simple life in Gartley village, until you become the P.R.A., and I can be Lady Hope, to walk in silk attire.”
“You shall be Queen of the Earth, darling, and walk alone.”
“How dull!
I would much rather walk with you.
And that reminds me that dinner is waiting. Let us take the short cut home through the village.
On the way you can tell me exactly how you bought me from my step-father for one thousand pounds.”
Archie Hope frowned at the incurable obstinacy of the sex.