Her Shining Splendor, page 23
She loved him, she loved him! It sang like a refrain in her secret, dancing heart.
Lorena did not see Tabby for some time after that. She learned that he had gone to a nearby town for a fortnight to visit an ailing aunt.
But her heart skipped a beat when Flora told her to take a message to Aylesbury’s Mill on the outskirts of Twainmere. She was to tell Lyle Aylesbury, the miller, that the vicarage needed another barrel of wheaten flour.
That would mean she would see Tabby! She knew he was back, for she’d seen him ride by the vicarage on his light sleigh only this morning!
Lorena dressed very carefully in her best gray dress and pulled up over her slim ankles the stockings Aunt Flora had given her for Christmas. She studied her plain square-toed shoes and wished desperately she had a pair with red or yellow heels, but these would have to do. She took especial care with her shining fair hair, peered anxiously into the piece of polished metal which served her as a mirror, and hurried away to the mill.
Her heart was beating like a drum as she crossed the footbridge above the frozen millrace and studied the big stone mill that rose up like a giant in the snow.
But Tabby was not there.
Cloaking her disappointment, Lorena smiled up at the miller and delivered Flora’s message.
“Aye,” said Lyle Aylesbury, looking down from his great height at sparkling-eyed Lorena and thinking her the prettiest little girl he had ever seen. “I’ll send the flour by Tabby. ’Twill be there today for certain, Mistress Lorena.”
Lorena sighed and used a ruse. “Will Tabby be back soon?” she asked plaintively. “For I turned my ankle on the way here, and I’d like to ride back with him in the sleigh if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“No trouble at all.” The tall miller dusted off his arms, for he’d been weighing grain and some of the wheat and chaff had stuck to them. “Have ye ever seen the inside of a mill, Mistress Lorena?”
Lorena admitted she had not.
“Just rest your hand upon my arm to take the weight off your ankle and I’ll show ye round.” Gallantly, he proffered a muscular arm, and Lorena’s small white hand rested on it as lightly, he thought, as the wings of the swallows that nested up under the eaves. He found her charming company as he showed her through the great dusty mill, exhibited the heavy weights that were used in weighing out the flour and grain, and explained the workings of the big mill wheel, now frozen solid in the icy millstream.
Lorena chattered gaily. She liked Tabby’s father— but it was Tabby she’d come to see.
At last Tabby returned, and his gray eyes lost their sleepy look and widened at the sight of Lorena, there in the mill on easy terms with his father. His father and Lorena kept up a running conversation while he loaded the barrel of flour onto the sleigh, and Tabby watched while his father gallantly lifted Lorena up into it, for her ankle, he insisted, would scarce bear her weight.
“See she gets there safe,” the miller admonished his son sternly. Tabby, who had a knowing hand with horses and had never in his life overturned the sleigh, gave him back a look of astonishment.
Lorena turned proudly to Tabby. See, she thought silently, your father likes me!
But Tabby, who had never seen his rather silent father talk so much to any girl—or woman either for that matter, since Tabby’s mother died—frowned as he drove the sleigh down toward the old stone bridge that crossed the millstream some distance below the race and the footbridge. He knew his father for a determined man. Only yesterday Lyle had commented on his son’s wild ways and said sternly it was time that Tabby settled down and took a wife. Tabby had shrugged it off. But now he wondered. Could it be, he asked himself uneasily, that his father had decided to take matters into his own hands and choose a wife for Tabby? Had the vicar sent Lorena over that Lyle Aylesbury might talk to her and judge her qualifications as a future daughter-in-law?
For it was a day when “arranged” marriages were the usual thing for sons of men of property. Tabby’s father, the miller, considered himself a man of property.
The thought galled Tabby. Lorena was growing up to be a beauty, and indeed he might ask her to marry him one day, but he wanted to decide on his own bride, without interference and in his own good time.
He frowned at Lorena. “When did ye hurt your ankle?”
Lorena jumped guiltily. “Oh, it isn’t bad—I turned it a little. I tripped over a root under that big beech tree just before I got to the footbridge.”
“Ye should not have attempted the footbridge with a hurt ankle,” Tabby told her severely. “’Tis not a proper footbridge, but only planks stretched across with no railing. The millrace lies below it. Suppose your ankle had given way and ye had plunged to the ice and broken through it? Ye’d have been swept away downstream under the ice!”
Lorena gave him an unhappy look. She could hardly say she had lied to his father to have an excuse to stay and wait for him. “I didn’t think of that, Tabby,” she sighed.
“Well, ye should have,” Tabby growled, turning the light sleigh up onto the bridge.
Lorena sat back, crushed. Here she was, riding through Twainmere in Tabby’s sleigh through a white world of big old rough-barked trees, their heavy branches weighted down with snow, passing snow forts built by children—deserted now for the children were at supper. Candles glimmered through frosted panes in the snowy dusk, making the cottage windows rectangles of soft, golden light. In this romantic setting she was alone with the lover she had chosen—and she could find nothing to say to him. Shyness had trapped her tongue and she, who had found it so easy to talk to his father, now that she was alone with Tabby, found herself tongue-tied.
For Lorena it was a new experience.
Tabby, hard pressed with his own thoughts, also had the barrel of flour to think about. It rode precariously on the back of the light sleigh and he must needs pay attention to the icy ruts to keep it from turning over. So he did not notice this unwonted silence on Lorena’s part as he might have on some other occasion.
To Lorena’s chagrin, he pulled up before the vicarage, helped her down—for she had to keep up the fiction of an injured ankle—and hoisted down the barrel of flour, without their having exchanged more than a few words the whole way.
“D’ye want it in the kitchen? I could take it around back.”
“No, use the front door,” insisted Lorena, limping ahead to swing it open for him. “It’s closer and besides you might slip on the ice if you go around back, and drop it.”
Flora, working at the kitchen table in an apron, looked up in surprise at the sight of Tabby lugging a barrel of flour from the front hall into her kitchen.
“Ye’re late, Lorena,” she said as Tabby carefully lowered the heavy barrel to the clean stone floor. “Robbie’s been asking where ye were.”
Robbie’s been asking. . . Then the vicar hadn’t sent Lorena to the mill to be “considered” for a wife! Only flour she’d wanted!
Tabby straightened up, his face clearing. “Lorena hurt her ankle on the way to the mill,” he explained with a smile at Lorena that struck fire to her young heart. “And my father made her wait until I came home and could take her back in the sleigh along with the flour.”
“Well, sit down and rest your ankle, Lorena.” Flora couldn’t help noting how easily Lorena had stepped out of the way of the flour barrel as Tabby set it down. “Won’t ye stay to supper, Tabby?”
Tabby hesitated. He’d promised to have supper over at the Meadows’. Harve Meadows had promised to teach him to play chess. At the moment he wished he hadn’t promised Harve, for Lorena looked very enticing. It was strange how much more beautiful she’d grown, now that he realized she wasn’t being forced on him!
“I’d like to stay,” he told Flora. “And ’tis kind of ye to ask me, but I’m expected elsewhere for supper and I’m already late.”
“Another time then,” Flora said kindly.
Lorena, remembering to limp, accompanied Tabby to the door and watched him go regretfully. It was strange he hadn’t mentioned being late for supper somewhere on the way over. A sudden suspicion flared in her mind. He was off to meet Tess, no doubt, and eager to get away!
She closed the front door harder than was necessary and stomped back to the kitchen. Oh, she hoped Tess’s Pomeranian bit him!
“I see your ankle’s improved of a sudden,” observed Flora, handing her a crock. “Here, stir this batter for me. That Tabby is a nice lad.”
Lorena took the crock and gave Flora a stormy look. “I think Lyle Aylesbury is far nicer than his son!” she cried in such a ringing tone that even the vicar heard it in his study. She began beating the batter with such energy that some of it spilled from the crock.
Flora watched her. “I think ye’ve beaten it enough,” she said at last. “Ye can go in and set the table now, Lorena.”
She watched the child’s straight-backed exit—for “child” Flora still thought her. She had not yet realized that Lorena, for better or worse, was becoming a woman—and dreaming a woman’s dreams.
It was the wedding of pert little Lillie Austin in late February that brought Flora squarely to a consideration of Lorena’s future. For chestnut-haired Lillie was barely two years older than Lorena, and now she’d jumped over the stile with old Sam Brown and gone off to live in a shepherd’s hut.
A shepherd’s hut wasn’t what Flora wanted for beautiful Lorena. She had watched Lorena, the prettiest bridesmaid of them all, walking proudly in the wedding procession, and thought about that. And when two weeks later Lorena came home bursting with excitement and told her the miller, widower Lyle Aylesbury, had stopped his cart in the street and asked her if she could do some work about the house in the afternoons, Flora gave her a thoughtful look. She knew how Lorena felt about Tabby.
And she’d noted that twice Lyle Aylesbury had found occasion to call at the vicarage lately—something he’d certainly never done before. Tabby, she thought. Lyle wants to throw Tabby and Lorena together—and make a match of it, so Tabby will stay home and mind the mill and not go running off to sea—for it was no secret in Twainmere that Tabby Aylesbury was always asking what the American Colonies were like and sometimes talked of going to sea.
Well, Flora wasn’t averse to a match between Tabby and Lorena. Tabby, with his sleepy gray eyes and flashing smile, was a favorite of Flora’s. One day he’d inherit the mill. It would be a good match for a young girl with no prospects.
“Since Mr. Aylesbury’s wife died last year, he and Tabby haven’t had anybody helping out,” Lorena was explaining earnestly. “They’ve just been ‘batching.’ I told him”—she reached up to push back a lock of fair hair that kept falling down into her eyes—“that I wasn’t a very good cook, but he said he and Tabby weren’t critical, they’d eat all my mistakes and never know the difference.”
“He should have spoken to Robbie first.”
“He’s going to this afternoon. But first he wanted to be sure I would want to do it, before he asked Uncle Robbie. He said he didn’t want any ‘unwilling workers’ straightening up or getting supper for him and Tabby.”
“He’s a kind man,” murmured Flora. “And ’twould give you incentive to learn to be a good housewife, for being on your own would put you on your mettle. Still—I know not what Robbie will say.”
“Aunt Flora.” Lorena’s voice was wistful. “It would give me money of my own to buy gifts for you at Christmas and—and you know I’ve always wanted a pair of yellow shoes with red heels and a yellow dress.”
“Red heels? Robbie would never stand for that.”
“Yellow heels then. Oh, you will talk to Uncle Robbie about it, won’t you. Aunt Flora? So he won’t say no when Mr. Aylesbury asks him?”
“Of course, child,” said Flora gruffly.
But the hours passed and still Lyle Aylesbury did not come. In her impatience, Flora sent Lorena out on an errand and knocked on the study door. She was carrying the straw broom she used to sweep the house, and her jaw was set.
“Robbie,” she began, “I know ye’re busy writing your Sunday sermon, but there’s a matter about which we must speak.”
The vicar knew that tone. He put down his quill pen, got up from his slanted writing desk and went to stand at the window with his back to her. “Go on,” he said in the controlled tone of a man who has much to bear.
Flora looked at his straight back impatiently. “Robbie, I’ve spoke to ye before about this, but now we must come to grips with it. We must think of Lorena’s future. The child’s changes have come upon her so early that already she’s filling out and becoming a woman! ’Twas Lillie Austin’s wedding brought it home to me, for all the young lads’ eyes were upon Lorena and not the bride!”
The slight jerk of the vicar’s shoulders was not lost upon Flora, but she was at a loss to account for it. Why was it that any mention of Lorena these days set off such reactions, as if Robbie were a wound-up top and the very mention of the child’s name sent him whirling!
Flora waited and when he said nothing, she began again. “Lyle Aylesbury is coming over to see you*”
Still he did not turn. “What about?”
“He wants Lorena to help out in the house afternoons.’Twould be good experience for her, Robbie, for one day she’ll have a house of her own to manage— perhaps that very house, for young Tabb Aylesbury is a likely lad with good expectations, and I doubt not Lyle thought of his son when he asked Lorena to help out.”
The narrow shoulders seemed to be widening, but having begun. Flora now plunged on. “In any case, Lorena is eager to make some money of her own to buy us gifts for next Christmas and perchance some yellow dress material and a pair of yellow shoes—”
"Yellow shoes!” The vicar spun around. “I’ll not have Lorena parading through the streets in brazen yellow shoes. No, nor in a yellow dress either!”
Flora sighed, recalling the red-heeled shoes with which Lenore had paraded through the village. Aye, and she had notched those heels, ’twas said, for every conquest she made! She remembered the apple green dress in which Lenore had riden away to snatch Jamie from the Battle of Worcester.
“Very well, a gray dress. But the child would still like to earn some money, and I think ’twould be a good thing for her to be out on her own a bit.” Away from the vicarage with its stern rules which were going to cause Lorena to rebel, she thought.
Jerkily, as if his muscles would not obey him, Robbie drummed his fingers on his thigh. Each tap hit his ragged nerve ends like a blow. “Young Aylesbury?” he burst out. “How could you suggest him. Flora? The lad has eyes for every wench.”
“Aye,” agreed Flora dryly. “And they’ve all got eyes for him as well. But she’d come to no mischief in the house, for Lyle Aylesbury’s an upright man—”
“Aye, but young Tabb isn’t!”
“You don’t know that!” Flora challenged. She was growing angry. “Tabby Aylesbury spent two hours fixing the wheel on Mistress Fowler’s carriage when it broke down in the street—and charged her nothing for his trouble.”
“No, but he pinched Mistress Fowler’s daughter on the bottom! I saw him do it.”
Flora sniffed. “Jennie Fowler’s the kind who would egg on anything in breeches, we all know that.”
“I do not know it!” The vicar’s voice was growing shrill. “Ye’ve only to look into that hot young face of his to know him for what he is. Exactly like—” He stopped at Flora’s wooden expression.
“Exactly like my brother Jamie. Why don’t you say it?”
“I do not wish to provoke a quarrel with ye, Flora. But all know Jamie’s and Lenore’s was not a proper marriage. They were—”
“Living in sin, I grant ye that. I’ve never held with handfasting.”
"And she’d have been off to another man before the year was out!”
“How can ye say that, Robbie?” Flora looked at his flushed face in amazement. “How do you know what she’d have done or not done? You liked Lenore when she came back to us with the baby, and you were good to her and kept down the gossip while she stayed with us. What’s come over you, Robbie?”
The vicar passed a hand over his brow. The hand shook slightly and came away damp, for he was perspiring even though it was cold in the study. “Naught has come over me,” he said hoarsely, “save that the girl is like her mother.”
“Then best she be thinking of marriage soon,” cried Flora. “And lucky we are that Lyle Aylesbury wants her to work there. Ye’ll be well advised to allow it!”
“Unchaperoned? Alone in a house with two men? Never!”
They glared at each other and then Flora banged down her broom and went out, slamming the door.
The vicar stared unseeingly at the solid oak panels of that door. He was seeing instead a head of long thick shining hair, white as hemp, that shook out like silk around a lovely appealing young face, and a child’s body that was rapidly becoming a woman’s. Those clear blue eyes challenged him as a man, but he would not admit that even to himself. The devil had constructed a temptress in Lorena—just as the devil had constructed a temptress in Lenore. Lenore had driven men to distraction and so would Lorena.
He sat down heavily and mopped his brow with a clean white kerchief and told himself angrily that he would not be sending the child into the miller’s house to consort with a young rake such as Tabb Aylesbury. The lad was as bad as Jamie had been, lusting after every skirt! Why could Flora not see it? In every other way, she was a saint!
Too saintly for a licentious man such as himself to touch.
For Robbie had always judged himself harshly. He had pored over every impulse of his, assessed them. Did he see a woman walking to market and notice her fine figure and swaying walk? That was evil—see, it was the devil at work in him! Did he note the carefree laughter of a young girl, her childish gaiety? Ah, that was frivolous of him and not to be borne.
In his heart of hearts Robbie considered that he was the vilest of human beings and fast being overtaken by the devil.
