Oke called to me to accompany her. She sent away the groom,
and in a minute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along the
yellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on either
side.
I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little coat
and hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, and
chattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate,
morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, who
spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolent
with strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. The
movement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of the
wheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine.
"It is so long since I have done this sort of thing," she kept repeating;
"so long, so long. Oh, don't you think it delightful, going at this pace,
with the idea that any moment the horse may come down and we two be
killed?" and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no longer
pale, but flushed with the movement and the excitement, towards me.
The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging to
behind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasture
lands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people came
out to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and the
dark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of the
horizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze the
ground.
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