URSULA

It was a white-hot July morning. Long ago the impatient earth had cast aside her thin veil of summer twilight; already she lay, a Danae, in exultant swoon beneath the golden sun. Yet the bridegroom had barely leaped forth to the conquest; his rath kisses were still drinking the pearly freshness from the dawn, while the loud birds filled the resonant heavens with the tumult of their bridal song.

It was still so early, and already so immovably warm; all wide earth and deep sky agasp in the naked blaze. Ursula drew forward her broad-brimmed straw hat, where she stood picking pease among the tall lines of pale-green, blossom-speckled tangle.

“Oof!” she said. Not as your burly farmer says it, but with the prettiest little high-pitched echo of the louder note. And she buried her soft brown cheeks in the cool moisture of her half-filled basket. Then she gravely resumed her work, and a great, big, booming bumblebee, which had thought to play hide and seek with Ursula’s nose, sailed away in disgust that on such a sun-soaked morning any of God’s creatures should bend to toil in his sight.

Ursula Rovers was not one of those who serve their Maker with dancing and a shout. Yet she sang to herself, very sedately, as she broke off each bursting pod, amid the fiercer jubilation of the passion-drunk blackbirds and finches,

The prim vegetable garden, with its ranks of gay salads and pompous cabbages, lay serenely roasting, as vegetable gardens delight to do, in unabated verdure. About Ursula’s corner the lattice-work of creepers put forth some faint attempt at a stunted shadow. DominÉ Rovers came down the walk, his coat-flaps brushing the currant-bushes.

“Ursula!”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Come in and shell your pease, while I recite you my sermon.”

“But I must pick them first, father!”

“True. What I love best in you, Ursula, is that you are as logical as if you were not a woman.”

The pastor drew nearer to the scaffolding of greenery, and strove vainly to shelter his tall figure in its shade. He was a spare, soldierly-looking man, with an honest complexion and silvery hair. You knew he had a very gentle countenance until you gave him cause to turn a wrathful look upon you.

“I might as well begin at once,” he said, and, proud though she was of her father’s preaching, the girl’s soul rose in momentary protest on behalf of the birds and flowers. “I have chosen a text for to-morrow, Ursula, which has troubled my thoughts all through the week. All through the week, I couldn’t understand it. And when I came to look it out, it wasn’t there at all.”

Ursula’s dutiful lips said, “I see.”

“I imagined the verse to be as follows: ‘Flee from youthful lusts that war against the soul.’ But I see the word used is ‘Abstain.’ I could not believe it of St. Peter that he would have instructed any man to run away in battle. You will find the ‘flee’ in Timothy, my dear, but the connection is not the same.”

DominÉ Rovers paused and stood tenderly watching his natty daughter in her cool print dress. Suddenly he burst out quite impetuously, “Resist! Resist! That is the true Bible language. Resist the devil. Resist temptation. And so I shall tell them to-morrow morning. ‘Dearly beloved,’ I shall say, ‘life is a—’”

“War,” cried Ursula, facing round. A bold blackbird had alighted on one of the stakes, and sang loudly of peace and good-will.

“Don’t interrupt me, child”—the DominÉ’s eyes grew vexed—“I know I have said it before; they cannot hear the truth too often. Life is a battle, dearly beloved. Against the city of Mansoul all the powers of evil band themselves together. But in the vanguard march ever the lusts of the flesh. You cannot escape the conflict. And therefore”—the speaker lifted an energetic arm—“remember what said the Corinthians—the grandsires of St. Paul’s Corinthians—to the Spartans, their allies, ‘He that, for love of pleasure, shrinks from battle, will most swiftly be deprived of those very delights which caused him to abstain.’ My subject divides itself—Ursula, you are not attending—into seven natural parts: the enemy, the weapons, the—”

Nobody listened. All God’s creation, busy with its individual loves and pleasures, luxuriously lapped in the sensuous sunlight and rejoicing in universal allurement, was twittering and fluttering and blushing and blooming in clouds of perfume and pollen. The great All-father smiled down upon his manifold children—and shrivelled them up.

Ursula was not listening. Her father was a dear, dear man, but she had heard it all so often before! And fortune had pity upon her and upon the sleepily staring marigolds, and created a diversion ere the sermon was ten sentences old.

Shrill shrieks of childish protest under punishment arose from beyond the garden-wall. The pastor of an unruly flock immediately ran to peer over the bushes. And Ursula followed more slowly, flitting into the full morning glow.

Out on the gleaming high-road a peasant-woman was belaboring an eight-year-old urchin in a whirlwind of dust. “I’ll teach you to use bad words,” she was screaming. “Damn me, I can’t make out, for the life o’ me, what taught the child to swear!”

Ursula, leaning one round arm on the top of the garden-wall, turned spontaneously to her father, all her serious young face a swift ripple of fun; but the DominÉ counted not a pennyworth of humor among his many militant virtues. He pressed his thin lips tight, under his Wellington nose. He was not going to reprove a mother in the presence of her son.

“Discipline first,” said the DominÉ. “One thing I note gratefully, Ursula, that the wretched habit of swearing is now confined to the lower classes in this country. In my time even gentlemen would swear—”

A dog-cart had turned the sharp angle at the back, where the road breaks off to the Manor-house. In the dust and the skirmish it pulled up with a jerk, and a clear voice was heard crying,

“Confound you! Get out of the way, can’t you? Scuffling in the middle of the road!”

The dog-cart was a very smart dog-cart, and the mare was a high-stepping mare. She fretted under the sudden restraint, amid an appetizing jingle and smell and glitter of harness. There was not so much promiscuous dust but that the speaker could instantaneously perceive the two heads over the low brown wall.

He lifted his cap. “Good-morning, DominÉ! Good-morning, Ursula!” he said, with nonchalance. “Awfully hot already, isn’t it?”

The DominÉ raised a flashing eye. The woman and boy had slipped away. “Gerard,” said the DominÉ, “why do you swear at our people? How often must I remind you of our joint responsibility? We must lead them to what is right; I by my precept, you by your example.”

“Oh, DominÉ, I’ll exchange, if you’re agreeable,” retorted the young man, with a quick smile. The DominÉ looked away.

“You are going to the station to fetch your brother, Gerard?” interposed Ursula, carelessly cracking the pods in her basket.

“Yes, at your service,” replied the young man, as he loosened the reins.

“How strange it will be for you to meet Mynheer Otto again after all these years!”

Gerard turned quickly from his prancing steed. “Are you going to call Otto ‘Mynheer’?” he asked.

She blushed with annoyance, in an overflow of innocent confusion.

“Oh, very well,” he went on. “Only, of course, you will have to call me Mynheer Gerard.”

He raced off, laughing. “I know you,” she stammered; but the words were lost in the dog-cart’s departing rattle. She appealed to her father in dismay. “Why, father,” she cried, “I have known Gerard all my life!”

Together they stood watching the dust-enfolded vehicle disappear into the far blue sunshine. Its occupant was young, light-hearted, and handsome. Evidently a cavalry officer: you could see that by the way in which his tweeds and he conjoined without combining.