Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/229

 flatter their tears away in a trice, and sent them forward in a race to the turnstile.

Waife and Sophy were alone in the cottage parlour, Mrs. Gooch, the bailiff's wife, walking part of the way back with the good couple, in order to show the Mayor a heifer who had lost appetite and taken to moping. "Let us steal out into the back garden, my darling," said Waife. "I see an arbour there, where I will compose myself with a pipe,—a liberty I should not like to take indoors." They stepped across the threshold, and gained the arbour, which stood at the extreme end of the small kitchen-garden, and commanded a pleasant view of pastures and cornfields, backed by the blue outline of distant hills. Afar were faintly heard the laugh of the Mayor's happy children, now and then a tinkling sheep-bell, or the tap of the woodpecker, unrepressed by the hush of the. Midmost summer, which stills the more tuneful choristers amidst their coverts. Waife lighted his pipe, and smoked silently; Sophy, resting her head on his bosom, silent also. She was exquisitely sensitive to nature: the quiet beauty of all round her was soothing a spirit lately troubled, and health came stealing gently back through frame and through heart. At length she said softly, "We could be so happy here, Grandfather! It cannot last, can it?"

"It is no use in this life, my dear," returned Waife, philosophizing, "no use at all disturbing present happiness by asking, 'Can it last?' To-day is man's, to-morrow his Maker's. But tell me frankly, do you really dislike so much the idea of exhibiting? I don't mean as we did in Mr. Rugge's show. I know you hate that; but in a genteel private way, as the other night. You sigh! Out with it."

"I like what you like, Grandy."

"That's not true. I like to smoke; you don't. Come, you do dislike acting? Why? you do it so well,—wonderfully. Generally speaking, people like what they do well."

"It is not the acting itself, Grandy dear, that I don't like. When I am in some part, I am carried away; I am not myself. I am some one else!"

"And the applause?"

"I don't feel it. I dare say I should miss it if it did not come; but it does not seem to me as if I were applauded. If I felt that, I should stop short, and get frightened. It is as if that somebody else into whom I was changed was making friends with the audience; and all my feeling is for that somebody,—just as, Grandy dear, when it is over, and we two