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Innocent : her fancy and his fact By: Marie Corelli (1855-1924) |
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Her Fancy and His Fact
By MARIE CORELLI
Author of "God's Good Man," "The Treasure of Heaven," Etc.
BOOK ONE: HER FANCY
INNOCENT
BOOK ONE CHAPTER I The old by road went rambling down into a dell of deep green
shadow. It was a reprobate of a road, a vagrant of the land,
having long ago wandered out of straight and even courses and
taken to meandering aimlessly into many ruts and furrows under
arching trees, which in wet weather poured their weight of
dripping rain upon it and made it little more than a mud pool.
Between straggling bushes of elder and hazel, blackberry and
thorn, it made its solitary shambling way, so sunken into itself
with long disuse that neither to the right nor to the left of it
could anything be seen of the surrounding country. Hidden behind
the intervening foliage on either hand were rich pastures and
ploughed fields, but with these the old road had nothing in
common. There were many things better suited to its nature, such
as the melodious notes of the birds which made their homes year
after year amid its bordering thickets, or the gathering together
in springtime of thousands of primroses, whose pale, small, elfin
faces peeped out from every mossy corner, or the scent of secret
violets in the grass, filling the air with the delicate sweetness
of a breathing made warm by the April sun. Or when the thrill of
summer drew the wild roses running quickly from the earth skyward,
twining their stems together in fantastic arches and tufts of deep
pink and flush white blossom, and the briony wreaths with their
small bright green stars swung pendent from over shadowing boughs
like garlands for a sylvan festival. Or the thousands of tiny
unassuming herbs which grew up with the growing speargrass,
bringing with them pungent odours from the soil as from some deep
laid storehouse of precious spices. These choice delights were the
old by road's peculiar possession, and through a wild maze of
beauty and fragrance it strayed on with a careless awkwardness,
getting more and more involved in tangles of green, till at last,
recoiling abruptly as it were upon its own steps, it stopped short
at the entrance to a cleared space in front of a farmyard. With
this the old by road had evidently no sort of business whatever,
and ended altogether, as it were, with a rough shock of surprise
at finding itself in such open quarters. No arching trees or
twining brambles were here, it was a wide, clean brick paved
place chiefly possessed by a goodly company of promising fowls,
and a huge cart horse. The horse was tied to his manger in an open
shed, and munched and munched with all the steadiness and goodwill
of the sailor's wife who offended Macbeth's first witch. Beyond
the farmyard was the farmhouse itself, a long, low, timbered
building with a broad tiled roof supported by huge oaken rafters
and crowned with many gables, a building proudly declaring itself
as of the days of Elizabeth's yeomen, and bearing about it the
honourable marks of age and long stress of weather. No such
farmhouses are built nowadays, for life has become with us less
than a temporary thing, a coin to be spent rapidly as soon as
gained, too valueless for any interest upon it to be sought or
desired. In olden times it was apparently not considered such
cheap currency. Men built their homes to last not only for their
own lifetime, but for the lifetime of their children and their
children's children; and the idea that their children's children
might possibly fail to appreciate the strenuousness and worth of
their labours never entered their simple brains. The farmyard was terminated at its other end by a broad stone
archway, which showed as in a semi circular frame the glint of
scarlet geraniums in the distance, and in the shadow cast by this
embrasure was the small unobtrusive figure of a girl. She stood
idly watching the hens pecking at their food and driving away
their offspring from every chance of sharing bit or sup with
them, and as she noted the greedy triumph of the strong over the
weak, the great over the small, her brows drew together in a
slight frown of something like scorn... Continue reading book >>
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