The Quest of the Golden Girl | Page 9

for me.
I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As old Campion sings,--
"I care not for those ladies Who must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country-maid."
Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give me the girls that work. The Girls That Work! But evidently it is high time woe began a new chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID
Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of my imagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were any ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying to flirt with her without a touch of reverence.
Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through the noon, are for a short magical hour their own celestial selves, their unearthly glory as yet unhidden by any earthly disguise.
Neither fairies nor fauns, dryads nor nymphs of the forest pools, have really passed away from the world. You have only to get up early enough to meet them in the meadows. They rarely venture abroad after six. All day long they hide in uncouth enchanted forms. They change maybe to a field of turnips, and I have seen a farmer priding himself on a flock of sheep that I knew were really a most merry company of dryads and fauns in disguise. I had but to make the sign of the cross, sprinkle some holy water upon them, and call them by their sweet secret names, and the whole rout had been off to the woods, with mad gambol and song, before the eyes of the astonished farmer.
It was so with Hebe. She was really a little gold-haired blue-eyed dryad, whose true home was a wild white cherry-tree that grew in some scattered woodland behind the old country-house of my boyhood. In spring- time how that naughty tree used to flash its silver nakedness of blossom for miles across the furze and scattered birches!
I might have known it was Hebe.
Alas! it no longer bares its bosom with so dazzling a prodigality, for it is many a day since it was uprooted. The little dryad long since fled away weeping,--fled away, said evil tongues, fled away to the town.
Well do I remember our last meeting. Returning home one evening, I met her at the lodge-gate hurrying away. Our loves had been discovered, and my mother had shuddered to think that so pagan a thing had lived so long in a Christian house. I vowed--ah! what did I not vow?--and then we stole sadly together to comfort our aching hearts under cover of the woodland. For the last time the wild cherry-tree bloomed,--wonderful blossom, glittering with tears, and gloriously radiant with stormy lights of wild passion and wilder hopes.
My faith lived valiantly till the next spring. It was Hebe who was faithless. The cherry-tree was dead, for its dryad had gone,--fled, said evil tongues, fled away to the town!
But as yet, in the time to which my thoughts return, our sweet secret mornings were known only to ourselves. It was my custom then to rise early, to read Latin authors,--thanks to Hebe, still unread. I used to light my fire and make tea for myself, till one rapturous morning I discovered that Hebe was fond of rising early too, and that she would like to light my fire and make my tea. After a time she began to sweeten it for me. And then she would sit on my knee, and we would translate Catullus together,--into English kisses; for she was curiously interested in the learned tongue.
How lovely she used to look with the morning sun turning her hair to golden mist, and dancing in the blue deeps of her eyes; and once when by chance she had forgotten to fasten her gown, I caught glimpses of a bosom that was like two happy handfuls of wonderful white cherries . . .
She wore a marvellous little printed gown. And here I may say that I have never to this day understood objections which were afterwards raised against my early attachment to print. The only legitimate attachment to print stuff, I was told, was to print stuff in the form of blouse, tennis, or boating costume. Yet, thought I, I