The Green Mummy | Page 4

afterthought," grumbled the
bachelor; then, when she merely laughed teasingly after the manner of
women, he added moodily:
"No, by Jove, Random isn't me, by any manner of means. I am but a
poor artist without fame or position, struggling on three hundred a year
for a grudging recognition."
"Quite enough for one, you greedy creature."
"And for two?" he inquired softly.
"More than enough."
"Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!"
"What! when I am engaged to you? Actions speak much louder than
remarks, Mr. Archibald Hope. I love you more than I do money."
"Angel! angel!"
"You said that I was a woman just now. What do, you mean?"
"This," and he kissed her willing lips in the lane, which was empty save
for blackbirds and beetles. "Is any explanation a clear one?"
"Not to an angel, who requires adoration, but to a woman who - Let us
walk on, Archie, or we shall be late for dinner."
The young man smiled and frowned and sighed and laughed in the
space of thirty seconds - something of a feat in the way of emotional
gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him as it had
perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid change from
poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he was but
five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time? Threescore years and
ten is all too short a time to learn what woman really is, and every
student leaves this world with the conviction that of the thousand sides

which the female of man presents to the male of woman, not one
reveals the being he desires to know. There is always a deep below a
deep; a veil behind a veil, a sphere within a sphere.
"It's most remarkable," said the puzzled man in this instance.
"What is?" asked the enigma promptly.
To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched his
on to the weather.
"This day in September; one could well believe that it is still the month
of roses."
"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