Henrietta Temple: A Love Story
‘Miss Temple is quite right,’ pronounced Ferdinand. ‘It is impossible to
live without a conservatory.’
At this moment the heroine of their conversation entered the room, and
Ferdinand turned pale. She extended to him her hand with a graceful
smile; as he touched it, he trembled from head to foot.
‘You were not fatigued, I hope, by your ride, Miss Temple?’ at length he
contrived to say.
‘Not in the least! I am an experienced horsewoman. Papa and I take very
long rides together.’
As for eating, with Henrietta Temple in the room, Ferdinand found
that quite impossible. The moment she appeared, his appetite vanished.
Anxious to speak, yet deprived of his accustomed fluency, he began to
praise Ducie.
‘You must see it,’ said Miss Temple: ‘shall we walk round the grounds?’
‘My dear Henrietta,’ said her father, ‘I dare say Captain Armine is at
this moment sufficiently tired; besides, when he moves, he will like
perhaps to take his gun; you forget he is a sportsman, and that he
cannot waste his morning in talking to ladies and picking flowers.’
‘Indeed, sir, I assure you,’ said Ferdinand, ‘there is nothing I like so
much as talking to ladies and picking flowers; that is to say, when
the ladies have as fine taste as Miss Temple, and the flowers are as
beautiful as those at Ducie.’
‘Well, you shall see my conservatory, Captain Armine,’ said Miss Temple,
‘and you shall go and kill partridges afterwards.’ So saying, she
entered the conservatory, and Ferdinand followed her, leaving Mr. Temple
to his pasty.
‘These orange groves remind me of Palmero,’ said Ferdinand.
‘Ah!’ said Miss Temple, ‘I have never been in the sweet south.’
‘You seem to me a person born to live in a Sicilian palace,’ said
Ferdinand, ‘to wander in perfumed groves, and to glance in a moonlight
warmer than this sun.’
‘I see you pay compliments,’ said Miss Temple, looking at him archly,
and meeting a glance serious and soft.
‘Believe me, not to you.’
‘What do you think of this flower?’ said Miss Temple, turning away
rather quickly and pointing to a strange plant. ‘It is the most singular
thing in the world: but if it be tended by any other person than myself
it withers. Is it not droll?’
‘I think not,’ said Ferdinand.
‘I excuse you for your incredulity; no one does believe it; no one can;
and yet it is quite true. Our gardener gave it up in despair. I wonder
what it can be.’
‘I think it must be some enchanted prince,’ said Ferdinand.
‘If I thought so, how I should long for a wand to emancipate him!’ said
Miss Temple.
‘I would break your wand, if you had one,’ said Ferdinand.
‘Why?’ said Miss Temple.
‘Oh! I don’t know,’ said Ferdinand; ‘I suppose because I believe you are
sufficiently enchanting without one.’
‘I am bound to consider that most excellent logic,’ said Miss Temple.
‘Do you admire my fountain and my birds?’ she continued, after a short
pause. ‘After Armine, Ducie appears a little tawdry toy.’
‘Ducie is Paradise,’ said Ferdinand. ‘I should like to pass my life in
this conservatory.’
‘As an enchanted prince, I suppose?’ said Miss Temple.
‘Exactly,’ said Captain Armine; ‘I would willingly this instant become a
flower, if I were sure that Miss Temple would cherish my existence.’
‘Cut off your tendrils and drown you with a watering-pot,’ said Miss
Temple; ‘you really are very Sicilian in your conversation, Captain
Armine.’
‘Come,’ said Mr. Temple, who now joined them, ‘if you really should like
to take a stroll round the grounds, I will order the keeper to meet us
at the cottage.’
‘A very good proposition,’ said Miss Temple.
‘But you must get a bonnet, Henrietta; I must forbid your going out
uncovered.’
‘No, papa, this will do,’ said Miss Temple, taking a handkerchief,
twisting it round her head, and tying it under her chin.
‘You look like an old woman, Henrietta,’ said her father, smiling.
‘I shall not say what you look like, Miss Temple,’ said Captain Armine,
with a glance of admiration, ‘lest you should think that I was this time
even talking Sicilian.’
‘I reward you for your forbearance with a rose,’ said Miss Temple,
plucking a flower. ‘It is a return for your beautiful present of
yesterday.’
Ferdinand pressed the gift to his lips.
They went forth; they stepped into a Paradise, where the sweetest
flowers seemed grouped in every combination of the choicest forms;
baskets, and vases, and beds of infinite fancy. A thousand bees and
butterflies filled the air with their glancing shapes and cheerful
music, and the birds from the neighbouring groves joined in the chorus
of melody. The wood walks through which they now rambled admitted at
intervals glimpses of the ornate landscape, and occasionally the view
extended beyond the enclosed limits, and exhibited the clustering and
embowered roofs of the neighbouring village, or some woody hill studded
with a farmhouse, or a distant spire. As for Ferdinand, he strolled
along, full of beautiful thoughts and thrilling fancies, in a dreamy
state which had banished all recollection or consciousness but of the
present. He was happy; positively, perfectly, supremely happy. He was
happy for the first time in his life, He had no conception that life
could afford such bliss as now filled his being. What a chain of
miserable, tame, factitious sensations seemed the whole course of his
past existence. Even the joys of yesterday were nothing to these;
Armine was associated with too much of the commonplace and the gloomy
to realise the ideal in which he now revelled. But now all circumstances
contributed to enchant him. The novelty, the beauty of the scene,
harmoniously blended with his passion. The sun seemed to him a more
brilliant sun than the orb that illumined Armine; the sky more clear,
more pure, more odorous. There seemed a magic sympathy in the trees, and
every flower reminded him of his mistress. And then he looked around and
beheld her. Was he positively awake? Was he in England? Was he in the
same globe in which he had hitherto moved and acted? What was this
entrancing form that moved before him? Was it indeed a woman?
_O dea certè!_
That voice, too, now wilder than the wildest bird, now low and hushed,
yet always sweet; where was he, what did he listen to, what did he
behold, what did he feel? The presence of her father alone restrained
him from falling on his knees and expressing to her his adoration.
At length our friends arrived at a picturesque and ivy-grown cottage,
where the keeper, with their guns and dogs, awaited Mr. Temple and his
guest. Ferdinand, although a keen sportsman, beheld the spectacle with
dismay. He execrated, at the same time, the existence of partridges and
the invention of gunpowder. To resist his fate, however, was impossible;
he took his gun and turned to bid his hostess adieu.
‘I do not like to quit Paradise at all,’ he said in a low voice: ‘must I
go?’
‘Oh! certainly,’ said Miss Temple. ‘It will do you a great deal of
good.’
Never did anyone at first shoot more wildly. In time, however, Ferdinand
sufficiently rallied to recover his reputation with the keeper, who,
from his first observation, began to wink his eye to his son, an
attendant bush-beater, and occasionally even thrust his tongue inside
his cheek, a significant gesture perfectly understood by the imp. ‘For
the life of me, Sam,’ he afterwards profoundly observed, ‘I couldn’t
make out this here Captain by no manner of means whatsomever. At first
I thought as how he was going to put the muzzle to his shoulder. Hang me
if ever I see sich a gentleman. He missed everything; and at last if he
didn’t hit the longest flying shots without taking aim. Hang me if ever
I see sich a gentleman. He hit everything. That ere Captain puzzled me,
surely.’
The party at dinner was increased by a neighbouring squire and his wife,
and the rector of the parish. Ferdinand was placed at the right hand of
Miss Temple. The more he beheld her the more beautiful she seemed. He
detected every moment some charm before unobserved. It seemed to him
that he never was in such agreeable society, though, sooth to say, the
conversation was not of a very brilliant character. Mr. Temple recounted
the sport of the morning to the squire, whose ears kindled at a
congenial subject, and every preserve in the county was then discussed,
with some episodes on poaching. The rector, an old gentleman, who had
dined in old days at Armine Place, reminded Ferdinand of the agreeable
circumstance, sanguine perhaps that the invitation might lead to a
renewal of his acquaintance with that hospitable board. He was painfully
profuse in his description of the public days of the famous Sir
Ferdinand. From the service of plate to the thirty servants in livery,
nothing was omitted.
‘Our friend deals in Arabian tales,’ whispered Ferdinand to Miss Temple;
‘you can be a witness that we live quietly enough now.’
‘I shall certainly never forget my visit to Armine,’ replied Miss
Temple; ‘it was one of the agreeable days of life.’
‘And that is saying a great deal, for I think your life must have
abounded in agreeable days.’
‘I cannot indeed lay any claim to that misery which makes many people
interesting,’ said Miss Temple; ‘I am a very commonplace person, for I
have been always happy.’
When the ladies withdrew there appeared but little inclination on the
part of the squire and the rector to follow their example; and Captain
Armine, therefore, soon left Mr. Temple to his fate, and escaped to
the drawing-room. He glided to a seat on an ottoman, by the side of
his hostess, and listened in silence to the conversation. What a
conversation! At any other time, under any other circumstances,
Ferdinand would have been teased and wearied with its commonplace
current: all the dull detail of county tattle, in which the squire’s
lady was a proficient, and with which Miss Temple was too highly bred
not to appear to sympathise; and yet the conversation, to Ferdinand,
appeared quite charming. Every accent of Henrietta’s sounded like
wit; and when she bent her head in assent to her companion’s obvious
deductions, there was about each movement a grace so ineffable, that
Ferdinand could have sat in silence and listened, entranced, for ever:
and occasionally, too, she turned to Captain Armine, and appealed on
some point to his knowledge or his taste. It seemed to him that he had
never listened to sounds so sweetly thrilling as her voice. It was a
birdlike burst of music, that well became the sparkling sunshine of her
violet eyes.
His late companions entered. Ferdinand rose from his seat; the windows
of the salon were open; he stepped forth into the garden. He felt the
necessity of being a moment alone. He proceeded a few paces beyond the
ken of man, and then leaning on a statue, and burying his face in his
arm, he gave way to irresistible emotion. What wild thoughts dashed
through his impetuous soul at that instant, it is difficult to
conjecture. Perhaps it was passion that inspired that convulsive
reverie; perchance it might have been remorse. Did he abandon himself
to those novel sentiments which in a few brief hours had changed all his
aspirations and coloured his whole existence; or was he tortured by that
dark and perplexing future, from which his imagination in vain struggled
to extricate him?
He was roused from his reverie, brief but tumultuous, by the note of
music, and then by the sound of a human voice. The stag detecting the
huntsman’s horn could not have started with more wild emotion. But one
fair organ could send forth that voice. He approached, he listened; the
voice of Henrietta Temple floated to him on the air, breathing with a
thousand odours. In a moment he was at her side, the squire’s lady was