Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/117

. 17, 1863.]  had come over it. I put my hand over my eyes for a moment, feeling that the table with its glasses and decanters reeled before them.

As I sat down your cousin cried out with a great outburst.

“What on earth is amiss with Ellen? She looks like the ghost of herself.”

I battled with a quick pain at my heart and made some trivial answer. I hated the sight of his handsome face at my table.

“Ellen used to bear a great deal of persecution from me,” he went on, holding up his glass to the light. “You know I was going to be married before that last trip, and when the affair was put off, I made a sort of scape goat of Nelly, and bored her unmercifully. One woman doesn’t often hear another praised as patiently as she did. The only time we ever quarrelled was about you, old fellow.”

I carried my glass to my lips steadily and put it down untasted, but I could not trust my voice to speak.

“I dare say she has told you all about it. You know you were inclined to be ferocious at times, and I got a bad habit of calling you Ursa Major, &c. You needn’t frown about it. The fact was I saw which way the wind blew, and couldn’t resist the fun of having something to tease Nelly about in her turn. I had to be very humble before I got forgiven, and I knew then that Ellen was done for.”

“Will you help yourself?” I said, breaking my silence suddenly, I should have liked to get up and shake hands with him, but for the thought that it might be dangerous.

“No more wine,” said Ernest. “But if you have any place big enough to swing a cat in, where one might make a brute of oneself with a mild cigar—”

know how to paint it. You were sitting by the fire in the twilight, and your head was bent, with one hand shading your face and the other holding a book which you were not reading. Were you thinking then of the days gone by, and wondering at the dark spirit which had taken possession of your husband? Lights and shadows fell over your face from the fire, but its expression of sadness never changed. And I, knowing what I had been all this time; thinking of my blundering and folly; seeing it in its true light: how could I speak to you?

I don’t know what I said, but I know that the first words of remorse and self-accusation brought your hand to cover my lips gently; and I know that I was happy then as I had never deserved to be: happy afterwards, even in confessing my madness, and hearing your tales of Ernest’s infatuation about some one else; in watching the sorrowful look pass from your face, and its old brightness come back.

“But if it was about Ernest that I had been so—foolish, why did I always stop you when you spoke of him, instead of letting you tell me all?”

That was one of the questions I could not answer. But I should think that your cousin, when he came in from his mild cigar, must have imagined that dinner was a wonderful improver of Ursa Major’s temper.

Are you there again, behind my chair? Well, I have finished the picture and you may look at it. I have had it in my mind’s eye this many a day, and now it is done. There is one comforting reflection about it, viz., if it is true that all men are mad once in their lives, surely my time is over. You were too gentle with me; you should have called me to account instead of bearing all things so patiently. Never mind! we have learnt each other by heart now. One’s first untried affection may be faulty and vacillating, but in spite of Sir Cresswell Cresswell, the holy love of married years does but grow firmer and deeper, and more indispensable as it loses its novelty. What do you say? .

Neustadt to Dürkheim the hills are somewhat quieter than those by Trifels, and their formation appears due rather to watery agencies than to subterranean volcanic upheavals. It is not advisable to walk the whole distance between the vineyards and the woods, though the view is finer, as the distance is doubled by the ups and downs and ins and outs. The long slope below our feet is one vast vineyard. If Neptune had ever acted on the suggestion of a well-known old song, that he would have done better to have filled the ocean with wine than with brine, he might well have sought his supply in the interminable acres of vines which lie about the feet of the Palatinate hills. There is no doubt that samples of all the different kinds of Rhine wine are grown on this one slope, and the tickets of other places are put on them according to their qualities. It is laughable to compare the acreage of Schloss-Johannisburg with its supposed produce, or that of the little wine-garden at Worms which produces the delicate Liebfrauenmilch. The deficiencies of these renowned places would be easily made up from the abundance of Deidesheim, Wachenheim, and Forst, whose avowed wines are excellent of their kind. Dürkheim produces a capital second-rate wine, and this year (1862) its grapes are mostly healthy, while those of Forst and Deidesheim have been somewhat touched by oidium, and south of Neustadt the plague is still worse. When Lycurgus, king of Thrace, endeavoured to put down Bacchus by violence, that classical teetotaller little thought how much more effectually his views would be promoted by this mysterious microscopic fungus. In the places most affected the vine-disease seems to spare every other tree; in those least so it withers a cluster here and there. But the vintage is a good average one in consequence of the magnificence of the autumn. The immorality of the long mountain-slope of the Palatinate in supplying the market with its wine under feigned names is countenanced by that of the plain below, which produces real Havanna cigars in any desired quantity.