I owe this story to my delightfully imaginative friend Ella (@e.kmeyer). Some time ago, she posted a lovely painting by Filippo Palizzi titled “Over the Wall” and wrote short dramatised prose version of the scene and what the girl was looking at over the wall. (If you haven’t taken a peek at it, I strongly urge you to!! It was such fun imagining a story to this beautiful painting! [P. S. Speaking of which, Ella, where do you find these paintings?? Please, please let me know!])
I wrote a short vignette (a brief evocative description account, or episode) for this painting and found the concept so delightful, I thought I might share it with you!
But before you read, I’d love to ask you: what do you see in the painting? I can’t wait to read your own dramatic versions of this painting!
Over the Wall: A Vignette
THE MORNING was warm and sultry and her hair curled into little eddies about her head like the windblown grass on the Yorkshire Moors, no matter how much she pressed it down with her sweaty palms. As if he could see it from such a distance! He was traveling down the hill on that pebbly road below the wall, in his fine lake-blue waistcoat. Not like her scratchy and earthy yellow working clothes that had no ornament. They were simple cotton clothes, bare as her dirt brushed feet.
They said he was wealthy, the people in the village, and that he was a recluse and not at all in the habits of most young gentlemen. He didn’t ride, he didn’t hunt, and he never had balls or parties at his estate – the one with the gold tips that glared in the sun as you rode down the path (such a neat path too, without a blade of grass out of place and quiet sort of slumber over the whole park without the promise of a gunshot and the soft flop of a fowl ever heard). But she had seen him from afar, and watched him pass every day by her house in the carriage.
He had taken that road for as long as she could remember. Why, she had been a grubby little girl then, still sucking her fingers, when she saw him for the first time. A boy with black hair and the finest blue outfit she had ever seen – he was only ever in a blue outfit, seemingly in the same one every time, with a white cravat tied at the neck.
And then there was that time when the carriage had stopped at the farm, had roiled over the stones and knocked his head about as they mounted the slope to the house and the driver stepped down. She was eight then, with a mass of unkempt ringlets that were something between the colors of wheat and the hue of nutmeg.
She had run over to meet the driver – he must know of all the curiosities of the gentleman! – and found that her mother had already fought against the wind to meet the stranger, and nodded and said something or other and nodded again. Her mother had disappeared into the house, and emerged with a tin mug of something foamy and white – milk, perhaps. The driver bobbed his head and thanked Mother (the wind whistled in her ears too strongly now for her to hear anything at all) and she leaned her cheek against the cool stone wall to see the boy within. But the boy did not come out, and the driver handed him the cup. The older man saw her after about a minute or so, wrestling a strand of hair whipping against her lips, and passed her the cup, urging her to “Give it back to the misus,” and thank her mother for the kindness. He dropped a sixpence into her palm, too, and winked at her and trudged back.
That had been almost a decade ago.
Yet the carriage was stopping now in the middle of the road, not in the direction of the house, and the driver, the same cleanshaven fellow with the weathered face who had dropped the sixpence in her palm, descended from his seat. He whistled.
She craned her neck and stood on tiptoe to better see the gentleman in the carriage, her feet brushing against the little weedy cluster of white flowers woven into the garden wall like ivy. She could see the scene a little better now. The driver was bending over a black, long object that had fallen in the dirt, rather like her father’s walking stick. He addressed the nobleman within the carriage.
“Next time your lordship ought to be more careful with it, see.”
The gentleman muttered something, she couldn’t hear exactly what, and the driver, who had held out what appeared to be a cane, withdrew it and opened the door of the carriage.
Out of the darkness, the gentleman stepped down – a little awkwardly – and stood in place. The driver passed him his cane with a mutter and the young man immediately commenced striking it; now by his left foot, now by his right, now again by his left, over and over as he walked into the valley among the heather, feeling about before his feet like a…
But it was too terrible to be true.
For the man whom she had considered so rich was truly poorer than she.