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She had learned to love once, truly and warmly, and the gay, young, reckless hero whom she had silently but devotedly honored at the secret shrine of her unsullied heart, had suddenly passed out of her life, without a sign, or a token, or a word, leaving her to weep over the wasted treasure of sentiment she had so greedily hoarded up for him alone; not that this caused her to lose her faith in man or vow to live a life of solitary sceptic amendment for having indulged a foolish passion in her early days, but because she firmly believed the object of her fond regard to be at heart a worthy one, and because she felt that her happy lively sentiment, becoming spent and weary, had only laid itself obscurely away, to taste the hopeful sweetness of a "love's young dream," by and bye, she promised herself, when her "fairy prince" came back, and woke up the sleeping cupid from his bed of sighs, the world would be happier and brighter, and full of pleasure unalloyed forevermore.
We saw a Venus and a Cupid, both of them tinted; and, side by side with them, other statues identical with these, except that the marble was left in its pure whiteness. We found Miss in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright.
And so that night the lights of the blue room shone on Fiddle Flippin and her new grandmother. "Do you think she would let me put her to bed?" Mrs. Beaufort had asked Mary. "If you will sing, 'Jack-Sam Bye." Mary pulled the last little garment from the pink plump body, and Fiddle, like a rosy Cupid, counted her toes gleefully in the middle of the wide bed.
I dreaded the result; but I sez to myself, "Now surely that doggone ijit won't throw a call-down into the lady." but he did. "Miss Johnston," sez he, "that ain't no bulldog. That's a high-bred London bull-terrier. How would you like to be called a Chinaman? Come here, Cupid." It was like throwin' a bucket o' water on a bed o' coals.
Nor was Reddy the only young man who had dreams those days at the Lazy D. Cupid must have had his hands full, for his darts punctured more than one honest plainsman's heart. The reputation of the young women at the Lazy D seemed to travel on the wings of the wind, and from far and near Cattleland sent devotees to this shrine of youth and beauty.
"There are, in Provence and the South, what I wish there were here in Flanders, Courts of Love, at which all offenders against the sacred laws of Venus and Cupid are tried by an assembly of their peers, and punished according to their deserts." Torfrida turned scarlet.
Everything about it was of the solid Tudor days and bespoke, even as the portraits, a period when the family must have been of some considerable importance. She wandered about the room touching some things timidly others boldly. For example on the piano she found a perfectly carved bronze statuette of Cupid. She gave a little elfish cry of delight, took the statuette in her arms and kissed it.
The Cupid who had thrown his to her was the little Maltese Hannibal, who sang with other boys as "Voices of the Flowers," and later was to take part in the great chorus. This friendly remembrance of her young fellow-artist cheered Barbara, and when a fight began, which was carried on by a dozen trained champions brought from Strasburg expressly for this purpose, she turned her attention to it.
The hunchback patted the notary on the back with a pat that made him give at the knees and look somewhat ruefully about him as if an earthquake had occurred, and introduced him to the company: "Here, sirs, is my Cupid nay, better than Cupid, for Cupid had no pockets, whereas Maître Griveau has, and my marriage contract in one of them."
How Ramsay succeeded in keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell.
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