Villa Eden Part 155

"Ah, good evening, Brindy! Do you feel proud because you've taken the prize? Shall you tell your neighbors of it? Will you enjoy yourself now at home, or don't you know anything about your honors?"

The heifer was led to the barn, and the child, turning to Roland, cried,--

"Wouldn't you like to know whether the heifer has any notion of what has happened to her?"

As Roland was still silent, the child continued, very seriously,--

"Don't you want to be a husbandman, and have my uncle teach you? Then you can have my room. It's beautiful there!"

The maiden found words sooner than Roland, who still did not open his lips.

She continued,--

"Why haven't you been to see us before?"

"I did not know where you lived, nor who you were."

"Ah! That was why!"

And now they talked of their first meeting, how Lilian was carried away by her uncle, and how Roland wandered on to find Eric. Then it was spring, and now it is autumn.

"Just think! In your lilies there were some pretty little flies, which went along with us in the carriage, and didn't stir."

"Have you kept the flowers?"

"No. I don't like withered flowers, Give me something--give me something, that doesn't wither."

"I have nothing," replied Roland. "But I will send you my photograph, taken as a page--no. That's not fit for you. Oh, if I only had my rings now! I should like to give a ring, but Herr Eric has taken them all off my fingers."

"I don't want any ring. Well, give me that--give me the pebble that's now under your foot."

Roland stooped down, and giving her the pebble, begged she would also give him one.

She did so, saying,--

"Yes, this is dearer to me. I'd rather have that than anything else.

Now I shall take a part of Germany with me over the ocean. Oh, Herr Knopf is right; it is all one whether you have a pebble or a diamond, if you only hold it dear; and it's very stupid for people to wear pearls and think that it's something very fine, because they must be got away down deep in the sea. Herr Knopf is right; it doesn't make a thing beautiful or good to cost a great deal."

Roland was silent; his heart beat fast.

"You are the Roland then, of whom the good Herr Knopf is always talking? You can't think how much he loves you."

"Probably he loves you as much?"

"Yes, he loves me too, and he has promised to come to America to see us."

"I am from America, too."

"Ah, yes! Welcome, my dear countryman; come with me into the garden, and help me get a nosegay to take away with me to-morrow."

"But where are you going to-morrow?"

"Very early we start for home."

The children were confronted, as it were, by a riddle. These children of the New World met each other to welcome the arrival in the Old World, and now to bid each other farewell.

"We see one another only to say a welcome and a good-bye," said Roland.

"Come into the garden with me," replied Lilian.

CHAPTER III.

AN HOUR IN PARADISE.

The children walked about the garden and gathered flowers, and they seemed to be in fairy land. They went first into the vegetable garden, where dwarf pear-trees were set out at regular intervals, and Lilian, thinking that she must explain everything to the visitor, in a matronly manner, said:--

"Yes, yes, there's no rose-bush, no little tree, which my aunt has not budded, and she hates all vermin. Now just think what aunt reckons as vermin! But you musn't laugh at her for it."

"What? Tell me."

"She considers the birds vermin, too. Oh, you laugh exactly like my brother Hermann. Laugh once more! Yes, he laughs exactly so. But my brother has been in business for three years. Come, we'll look for some flowers now."

They went into the flower garden and gathered many different kinds of flowers, but Lilian threw a large bunch of them into the brook, and pleased herself with thinking how the flowers would float down to the Rhine, and from the Rhine to the sea, and who knows but they would go straight to New York, even before she got there herself!

"I shall come to America, too, to see you," Roland all at once exclaimed.

"Give me your hand that you will."

For the first time, the children took each other by the hand.

A shot was heard behind them. Roland trembled.

"Just be quiet. Are you really frightened?" Lilian said, soothingly.

"It's aunt; she's only frightening away the sparrows; she fires every time she comes into the orchard. A pistol is always lying upon the table yonder."

Roland now saw Frau Weidmann putting the discharged pistol down on the table.

"We'll be perfectly quiet, so that she won't hear us," he said to Lilian.

They sat down on the margin of the brook, and Lilian whispered:--

"The mignonettes I'll keep, they smell so sweet, even after they're wilted."

"Yes," Roland rejoined, "give me a mignonette too, and as often as we smell them, we will think of each other. The field-guard Claus, told me once--he's a real bee-father--that the mignonette yields the most honey."