Between the village and Garth the fields sank gently, to rise again to
the clump of beeches which masked the house. On the farther side the
ground fell more sharply into the narrow valley over which the Squire’s
window looked, and which separated the knoll whereon Garth stood from
the cliffs. Beyond the brook that babbled down this valley and turned
the mill rose, first, a meadow or two, and then the Thirty Acre covert,
a tangle of birches and mountain-ashes which climbed to the foot of the
rock-wall. Over this green trough, which up-stream and down merged in
the broad vale, an air of peace, of remoteness and seclusion brooded,
making it the delight of those who, morning and evening, looked down on
it from the house.
Viewed from the other side, from the cliffs, the scene made a different
impression. Not the intervening valley but the house held the eye. It
was not large, but the knoll on which it stood was scarped on that
side, and the walls of weathered brick rose straight from the rock,
fortress-like and imposing, displaying all their mass. The gables and
the stacks of fluted chimneys dated only from Dutch William, but
tradition had it that a strong place, Castell Coch, had once stood on
the same site; and fragments of pointed windows and Gothic work, built
into the walls, bore out the story.
The road leaving the village made a right-angled turn round Garth and
then, ascending, ran through the upper part of the Thirty Acres,
skirting the foot of the rocks. Along the lower edge of the covert,
between wood and water, there ran also a field-path, a right-of-way
much execrated by the Squire. It led by a sinuous course to the
Acherley property, and, alas, for good resolutions, along it on the
afternoon of the very day which saw the elder Ovington at Garth came
Clement Ovington, sauntering as usual.
He carried a gun, but he carried it as he might have carried a stick,
for he had long passed the bounds within which he had a right to shoot;
and at all times, his shooting was as much an excuse for a walk among
the objects he loved as anything else. He had left his horse at the
Griffin Arms in the village, and he might have made his way thither
more quickly by the road. But at the cost of an extra mile he had
preferred to walk back by the brook, observing as he went things new
and old; the dipper curtseying on its stone, the water-vole perched to
perform its toilet on the leaf of a brook-plant, the first green shoots
of the wheat piercing through the soil, an old laborer who was not
sorry to unbend his back, and whose memory held the facts and figures
of fifty-year-old harvests. The day was mild, the sun shone, Clement
was happy. Why, oh, why were there such things as banks in the world?
At a stile which crossed the path he came to a stand. Something had
caught his eye. It was a trifle, to which nine men out of ten would not
have given a thought, for it was no more than a clump of snowdrops in
the wood on his right. But a shaft of wintry sunshine, striking athwart
the tiny globes, lifted them, star-like, above the brown leaves about
them, and he paused, admiring them—thinking no evil, and far from
foreseeing what was to happen. He wondered if they were wild, or—and he
looked about for any trace of human hands—a keeper’s cottage might have
stood here. He saw no trace, but still he stood, entranced by the white
blossoms that, virgin-like, bowed meek heads to the sunlight that
visited them.
He might have paused longer, if a sound had not brought him abruptly to
earth. He turned. To his dismay he saw a girl, three or four paces from
him, waiting to cross the stile. How long she had waited, how long
watched him, he did not know, and in confusion—for he had not dreamed
that there was a human being within a mile of him—and with a hurried
snatch at his hat, he moved out of the way.
The girl stepped forward, coloring a little, for she foresaw that she
must climb the stile under the young man’s eye. Instinctively, he held
out a hand to assist her, and in the act—he never knew how, nor did
she—the gun slipped from his grasp, or the trigger caught in a bramble.
A sheet of flame tore between them, the blast of the powder rent the
air.
“O my God!” Clement cried, and he reeled back, shielding his eyes with
his hands.
The smoke hid the girl, and for a long moment, a moment of such agony
as he had never known, Clement’s heart stood still. What had he done?
oh, what had he done at last, with his cursed carelessness! Had he
killed her?
Slowly, the smoke cleared away, and he saw the girl. She was on her
feet—thank God, she was on her feet! She was clinging with both hands
to the stile. But was she—“Are you—are you——” he tried to frame words,
his voice a mere whistle.
She clung in silence to the rail, her face whiter than the quilted
bonnet she wore. But he saw—thank God, he saw no wound, no blood, no
hurt, and his own blood moved again, his lungs filled again with a
mighty inspiration. “For pity’s sake, say you are not hurt!” he prayed.
“For God’s sake, speak!”
But the shock had robbed her of speech, and he feared that she was
going to swoon. He looked helplessly at the brook. If she did, what
ought he to do? “Oh, a curse on my carelessness!” he cried. “I shall
never, never forgive myself.”
It had in truth been a narrow, a most narrow escape, and at last she
found words to say so. “I heard the shot—pass,” she whispered, and
shuddering closed her eyes again, overcome by the remembrance.
“But you are not hurt? They did pass!” The horror of that which might
have been, of that which had so nearly been, overcame him anew, gave a
fresh poignancy to his tone. “You are sure—sure that you are not hurt?”
“No, I am not hurt,” she whispered. “But I am very—very frightened.
Don’t speak to me. I shall be right—in a minute.”
“Can I do anything? Get you some water?”
She shook her head and he stood, looking solicitously at her, still
fearing that she might swoon, and wondering afresh what he ought to do
if she did. But after a minute or so she sighed, and a little color
came back to her face. “It was near, oh, so near!” she whispered, and
she covered her face with her hands. Presently, and more certainly,
“Why did you have it—at full cock?” she asked.
“God knows!” he owned. “It was unpardonable. But that is what I am! I
am a fool, and forget things. I was thinking of something else, I did
not hear you come up, and when I found you there I was startled.”
“I saw.” She smiled faintly. “But it was—careless.”
“Horribly! Horribly careless! It was wicked!” He could not humble
himself enough.
She was herself now, and she looked at him, took him in, and was sorry
for him. She removed her hands from the rail, and though her fingers
trembled she straightened her bonnet. “You are Mr. Ovington?”
“Yes. And you are Miss Griffin, are you not?”
“Yes,” smiling tremulously.
“May I help you over the stile? Oh, your basket!”
She saw that it lay some yards away, blackened by powder, one corner
shot away; so narrow had been the escape! He had a feeling of sickness
as he took it up. “You must not go on alone,” he said. “You might
faint.”
“Not now. But I shall not go on. What——” Her eyes strayed to the wood,
and curiosity stirred in her. “What were you looking at so intently,
Mr. Ovington, that you did not hear me?”
He colored. “Oh, nothing!”
“But it must have been something!” Her curiosity was strengthened.
“Well, if you wish to know,” he confessed, shamefacedly, “I was looking
at those snowdrops.”
“Those snowdrops?”
“Don’t you see how the sunlight touches them? What a little island of
light they make among the brown leaves?”
“How odd!” She stared at the snowdrops and then at him. “I thought that
only painters and poets, Mr. Wordsworth and people like that, noticed
those things. But perhaps you are a poet?”
“Goodness, no!” he cried. “A poet? But I am fond of looking at
things—out of doors, you know. A little way back”—he pointed up-stream,
the way he had come—“I saw a rat sitting on a lily leaf, cleaning its
whiskers in the sun—the prettiest thing you ever saw. And an old man
working at Bache’s told me that he—but Lord, I beg your pardon! How can
I talk of such things when I remember——?”
He stopped, overcome by the recollection of that through which they had
passed. She, for her part, was inclined to ask him to go on, but
remembered that this, all this was very irregular. What would her
father say? And Miss Peacock? Yet, if this was irregular, so was the
adventure itself. She would never forget his face of horror, the appeal
in his eyes, his poignant anxiety. No, it was impossible to act as if
nothing had happened between them, impossible to be stiff and to talk
at arm’s length about prunes and prisms with a person who had all but
taken her life—and who was so very penitent. And then it was all so
interesting, so out of the common, so like the things that happened in
books, like that dreadful fall from the Cobb at Lyme in “Persuasion.”
And he was not ordinary, not like other people. He looked at snowdrops!
But she must not linger now. Later, when she was alone in her room, she
could piece it together and make a whole of it, and think of it, and
compass the full wonder of the adventure. But she must go now. She told
him so, the primness in her tone reflecting her thoughts. “Will you
kindly give me the basket?”
“I am going to carry it,” he said. “You must not go alone. Indeed you
must not, Miss Griffin. You may feel it more by and by. You may—go off
suddenly.”
“Oh,” she replied, smiling, “I shall not go off, as you call it, now.”
“I will only come as far as the mill,” humbly. “Please let me do that.”
She could not say no, it could hardly be expected of her; and she
turned with him. “I shall never forgive myself,” he repeated. “Never!
Never! I shall dream of the moment when I lost sight of you in the
smoke and thought that I had killed you. It was horrible! Horrible! It
will come back to me often.”
He thought so much of it that he was moving away without his gun,
leaving it lying on the ground. It was she who reminded him. “Are you
not going to take your gun?” she asked.
He went back for it, covered afresh with confusion. What a stupid
fellow she must think him! She waited while he fetched it, and as she
waited she had a new and not unpleasant sensation. Never before had she
been on these terms with a man. The men whom she had known had always
taken the upper hand with her. Her father, Arthur even, had either
played with her or condescended to her. In her experience it was the
woman’s part to be ordered and directed, to give way and to be silent.
But here the parts were reversed. This man—she had seen how he looked
at her, how he humbled himself before her! And he was—interesting. As
he came back to her carrying the gun, she eyed him with attention. She
took note of him.
He was not handsome, as Arthur was. He had not Arthur’s sparkle, his
brilliance, his gay appeal, the carriage of the head that challenged
men and won women. But he was not ugly, he was brown and clean and
straight, and he looked strong. He bent to her as if he had been a
knight and she his lady, and his eyes, grey and thoughtful—she had seen
how they looked at her.
Now, she had never given much thought to any man’s eyes before, and
that she did so now, and criticised and formed an opinion of them,
implied a change of attitude, a change in her relations and the man’s;
and instinctively she acknowledged this by the lead she took. “It seems
so strange,” she said half-playfully—when had she ever rallied a man
before?—“that you should think of such things as you do. Snowdrops, I
mean. I thought you were a banker, Mr. Ovington.”
“A very bad banker,” he replied ruefully. “To tell the truth, Miss
Griffin, I hate banking. Pounds, shillings, and pence—and this!” He
pointed to the country about them, the stream, the sylvan path they
were treading, the wood beside them, with its depths gilded here and
there by a ray of the sun. “A desk and a ledger—and this! Oh, I hate
them! I would like to live out of doors. I want”—in a burst of
candor—“to live my own life! To be able to follow my own bent and make
the most of myself.”
“Perhaps,” she said with naïveté, “you would like to be a country
gentleman?” And indeed the lot of a country gentleman in that day was
an enviable one.
“Oh no,” he said, his tone deprecating the idea. He did not aspire to
that.
“But what, then?” She did not understand. “Have you no ambition?”
“I’d like to be—a farmer, if I had my way.”
That surprised as well as dashed her. She thought of her father’s
tenants and her face fell. “Oh, but,” she said, “a farmer? Why?” He was
not like any farmer she had ever seen.
But he would not be dashed. “To make two blades of grass grow where one
grew before,” he answered stoutly, though he knew that he had sunk in
her eyes. “Just that; but after all isn’t that worth doing? Isn’t that
better than burying your head in a ledger and counting other folk’s
money while the sun shines out of doors, and the rain falls sweetly,
and the earth smells fresh and pure? Besides, it is all I am good for,
Miss Griffin. I do think I understand a bit about that. I’ve read books
about it and I’ve kept my eyes open, and—and what one likes one does
well, you know.”
“But farmers——”
“Oh, I know,” sorrowfully, “it must seem a very low thing to you.”
“Farmers don’t look at snowdrops, Mr. Ovington,” with a gleam of fun in
her eyes.
“Don’t they? Then they ought to, and they’d learn a lot that they don’t
know now. I’ve met men, laboring men who can’t read or write, and it’s
wonderful the things they know about the land and the way plants grow
on it, and the live things that are only seen at night, or stealing to
their homes at daybreak. And there’s a new wheat, a wheat I was reading
about yesterday, Cobbett’s corn, it is called, that I am sure would do
about here if anyone would try it. But there,” remembering himself and
to whom he was talking, “this can have no interest for you. Only
wouldn’t you rather plod home weary at night, feeling that you had done
something, and with all this”—he waved his hand—“sinking to rest about
you, and the horses going down to water, and the cattle lowing to be
let into the byres, and—and all that,” growing confused, as he felt her
eyes upon him, “than get up from a set of ledgers with your head aching
and your eyes muddled with figures?”
“I’m afraid I have not tried either,” she said. But she smiled. She
found him new, his notions unlike those of the people about her, and
certainly unlike those of a common farmer. She did not comprehend all
his half-expressed thoughts, but not for that was she the less resolved
to remember them, and to think of them at her leisure. For the present
here was the mill, and they must part. At the mill the field-path which
they were following fell into a lane, which on the right rose steeply
to the road, on the left crossed a cart-bridge, shaken perpetually by
the roar and wet with the spray of the great mill-wheel. Thence it
wound upwards, rough and stony, to the back premises of Garth.
He, too, knew that this division of the ways meant parting, and
humility clothed him. “Heavens, what a fool I’ve been,” he said,
blushing, as he met her eyes. “What must you think of me, prating about
myself when I ought to have been thinking only of you and asking your
pardon.”
“For nearly shooting me?”
“Yes—and thank God, thank God,” with emotion, “that it was not worse.”
“I do.”
“I ought never to carry a gun again!”
“I won’t exact that penalty.” She looked at him very kindly.
“And you will forgive me? You will do your best to forgive me?”
“I will do my best, if you will not carry off my basket,” she replied,
for he was turning away with the basket on his arm. “Thank you,” as he
restored it, and in his embarrassment nearly dropped his gun.
“Good-bye.”
“You are sure that you will be safe now?”
“If you have no fresh accident with your firearms,” she laughed.
“Please be careful.”
She nodded, and turned and tripped away. But she had hardly left him,
she had not passed ten paces beyond the bridge, before her mood
changed. The cloak of playfulness fell from her, reaction did its work.
The color left her cheeks, her knees shook as she remembered. She felt
again the hot blast on her cheek, lived through the flash, the shock,
the onset of faintness. Again she clung to the stile, giddy,
breathless, the landscape dancing about her. And through the haze she
saw his face, white, drawn, terror-stricken—saw it and strove vainly to
reassure him.
And now—now he was soothing her. He was pouring out his penitence, he
was upbraiding himself. Presently she was herself again; her spirits
rising, she was playing with him, chiding him, exercising a new sense
of power, becoming the recipient of a man’s thoughts, a man’s hopes and
ambitions. The color was back in her cheeks now, her knees were steady,
she could walk. She went on, but slowly and more slowly, full of
thought, reviewing what had happened.
Until, near the garden door, she was roughly brought to earth. Miss
Peacock, visiting the yard on some domestic errand, had discerned her.
“Josina!” she cried. “My certy, girl, but you have been quick! I wish
the maids were half as quick when they go! A whole afternoon is not
enough for them to walk a mile. But you’ve not brought the eggs?”
“I didn’t go,” said Josina. “I was frightened by a gun.”
“A gun?”
“And I felt a little faint.”
“Faint? Why, you’ve got the color of a rose, girl. Faint? Well, when I
want galeny eggs again I shan’t send you. Where was it?”
“Under the Thirty Acres—by the stile. A gun went off, and——”
“Sho!” Miss Peacock cried contemptuously. “A gun went off, indeed! At
your age, Josina! I don’t know what girls are coming to! If you don’t
take care you’ll be all nerves and vapors like your aunt at the
Cottage! Go and take a dose of gilly-flower-water this minute, and the
less said to your father the better. Why, you’d never hear the end of
it! Afraid because a gun went off!”
Josina agreed that it was very silly, and went quickly up to her room.
Yes, the less said about it the better!