Indeed it is,’ said Mr Bailey smiling. ‘For your birthday, dear Mrs Lavender, with my best respects and humble duty. Ah, but I’ve something else here. A copy of verses specially written in your honour.’
‘Ah Mr Bailey, I never had no head for pottery.’ She stared nervously at the manuscript he proffered her. ‘I’ll ’low tis very elegant verses. And all by your own hand.’ The man’s erudition intimidated her. ‘Please to tell me how it reads,’ she begged him.
‘With pleasure, madam,’ said Mr Bailey. Holding the manuscript at arm’s length, he declaimed, not without pomp but with manifest sincerity, a poetical effusion of which some fragments are already known to us:
Mr Bailey, not venturing as yet to face his charmer, folded the manuscript and placed it on the table without a word. His self-confidence had suddenly deserted him; he wondered if he seemed to Mrs Lavender as foolish as he felt. But when at last he ventured a glance in her direction he was both heartened and touched by what he saw. She was regarding him with shy admiration, and with something of wistfulness. He doubted whether she understood what in his verses he had tried to tell her; or it may be that she took it to be no more than a piece of playful gallantry on the part of one elderly person to another. Sitting there with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes gravely wondering at him, she looked lonely, courageous, and curiously young. It was almost as if his florid praises had awakened a young girl in her; and though she knew his nonsense to be nonsense she wished it might be true. Elderly and wise she was, but would fain have been young and credulous.
‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, after a long silence—and for a moment she thought he was about to take his leave. ‘Well, my dear—what do you say to that?’
‘Tis wondrous, I’m sure,’ she answered, with a smile. ‘It do fair terrify me how you think of such things, Mr Bailey.’
It was so sweet a smile, so delicate and fragrant, and for all its youthfulness so richly mellowed by the years that had gone to its making, that Mr Bailey forgot himself and his embarrassment and became a lover.
‘You’re a very distracting creature, Mrs Lavender my dear, and you must please marry me. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When you smile like that, I can’t bear the thought of leaving you even for a minute. Bless my soul, I’m in love with ee, old as I am. And that’s the sense of the matter. Come,’ he said urgently—for she was staring in silence at the floor—‘make up your mind to it, my dear. For I won’t leave this house till you say yes, so I warn you.’