Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Her Fancy and His Fact
By MARIE CORELLI
Author of "God's Good Man," "The Treasure of Heaven," Etc.
The old by-road went rambling down into a dell of deep green shadow. Itwas a reprobate of a road,—a vagrant of the land,—having long agowandered out of straight and even courses and taken to meanderingaimlessly into many ruts and furrows under arching trees, which in wetweather poured their weight of dripping rain upon it and made it littlemore than a mud pool. Between straggling bushes of elder and hazel,blackberry and thorn, it made its solitary shambling way, so sunkeninto itself with long disuse that neither to the right nor to the leftof it could anything be seen of the surrounding country. Hidden behindthe intervening foliage on either hand were rich pastures and ploughedfields, but with these the old road had nothing in common. There weremany things better suited to its nature, such as the melodious notes ofthe birds which made their homes year after year amid its borderingthickets, or the gathering together in springtime of thousands ofprimroses, whose pale, small, elfin faces peeped out from every mossycorner,—or the scent of secret violets in the grass, filling the airwith the delicate sweetness of a breathing made warm by the April sun.Or when the thrill of summer drew the wild roses running quickly fromthe earth skyward, twining their stems together in fantastic arches andtufts of deep pink and flush-white blossom, and the briony wreaths withtheir small bright green stars swung pendent from over-shadowing boughslike garlands for a sylvan festival. Or the thousands of tinyunassuming herbs which grew up with the growing speargrass, bringingwith them pungent odours from the soil as from some deep-laidstorehouse of precious spices. These choice delights were the oldby-road's peculiar possession, and through a wild maze of beauty andfragrance it strayed on with a careless awkwardness, getting more andmore involved in tangles of green,—till at last, recoiling abruptly asit were upon its own steps, it stopped short at the entrance to acleared space in front of a farmyard. With this the old by-road hadevidently no sort of business whatever, and ended altogether, as itwere, with a rough shock of surprise at finding itself in such openquarters. No arching trees or twining brambles were here,—it was awide, clean brick-paved place chiefly possessed by a goodly company ofpromising fowls, and a huge cart-horse. The horse was tied to hismanger in an open shed, and munched and munched with all the steadinessand goodwill of the sailor's wife who offended Macbeth's first witch.Beyond the farmyard was the farmhouse itself,—a long, low, timberedbuilding with a broad tiled roof supported by huge oaken rafters andcrowned with many gables,—a building proudly declaring itself as ofthe days of Elizabeth's yeomen, and bearing about it the honourablemarks of age and long stress of weather. No such farmhouses are builtnowadays, for life has become with us less than a temporary thing,—acoin to be spent rapidly as soon as gained, too valueless for anyinterest upon it to be sought or desired. In olden times it wasapparently not considered such cheap currency. Men built their homes tolast not only for their own lifetime, but for the lifetime of theirchildren and their children's children; and the idea that theirchildren's children might possibly fail to appr