Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://www.archive.org/details/romanceofwastdal00maso
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
A ROMANCE
OF WASTDALE
_NOVELS BY_
_A. E. W. MASON_
THE WINDING STAIR
THE SUMMONS
THE TURNSTILE
THE WITNESS FOR THE DEFENCE
AT THE VILLA ROSE
A ROMANCE OF WASTDALE
THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE WORLD
RUNNING WATER
THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE BUCKLER
MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY
LAWRENCE CLAVERING
THE PHILANDERERS
ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY
CLEMENTINA
THE WATCHERS
THE FOUR FEATHERS
THE TRUANTS
THE BROKEN ROAD
A ROMANCE OF
WASTDALE
BY
A. E. W. MASON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIMITED LONDON
_Made and Printed in Great Britain_
_Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury_.
CHAPTER I
"Mrs. Jackson!"
Mrs. Jackson was feeding her ducks at the beck behind the house. But
the kitchen door stood open, and she not only heard her name, but
recognised the voice which shouted it.
"It's Mr. Gordon," she said to the servant who was with her, and she
bustled through the kitchen into the parlour, drying her hands with
her apron as she went.
David Gordon stood by the window, looking dreamily out across the
fields. He turned as she entered the room, and shook hands with her.
"I have given you a surprise," he laughed.
"You have, indeed, Mr. Gordon. I never expected to see you again at
Wastdale Head. You should have written you were coming."
And she proceeded to light the fire.
"I didn't know myself that I was coming until yesterday."
"It is three years since you were here."
"Three years," Gordon repeated slowly. "Yes! I did not realise it
until I caught sight of the farm-house again."
"You will be wanting breakfast?"
"The sooner, the better. I have walked from Boot."
"Already?"
"It didn't seem really far;" and a smile broke over his face as he
added--
"I heard my marriage bells ringing all the way across Burnmoor."
Mrs. Jackson retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and to ponder
over his remark. The result of her reflections was shown in the
unusual strength of the tea and in an extra thickness of butter on the
toast. She decked the table with an assortment of jams, and carefully
closed the door which opened into the lane, although the April
sunlight was pouring through it in a warm flood. It seemed as if
Gordon had gained an additional value and herself an additional
responsibility. She even took a cushion from the sofa and placed it on
his chair, and then waited on him while he breakfasted, nodding and
smiling a discreet but inquisitive sympathy.
On Gordon, however, her pantomime was lost. His thoughts no longer
chimed to marriage bells. For Wastdale, and this farmhouse in
particular, were associated in his mind with the recollection of two
friends, of whom one was dead in reality, the other dead to him; and
always vividly responsive to the impression of the moment, he had
stepped back across the interval of the past three years, and now
dwelled with a strange sense of loneliness amidst a throng of
quickening memories.
The woman, however, got the upper hand in Mrs. Jackson, and she
suggested, tentatively--
"Then maybe, Mr. Gordon, you are going to be married?"
"You can omit the 'maybe,'" he laughed.
"Well, I should never have thought it!" she exclaimed.
"Time brings in his revenges," said he.
"The way you three gentlemen used to rail at women! Well, there!"
"But, then, they weren't women. They were Aunt Sallies of our own
contriving--mere pasteboard. We were young and we didn't know."
Mrs. Jackson inquired the date and place of the ceremony. At Keswick,
she was told, and in a week's time. She floated out garrulous on a
tide of sentiment. She hoped that Mr. Gordon's two friends would
follow his example and find out their mistake, not noticing the shadow
which her words brought to her lodger's face. She dropped the name of
Hawke and the shadow deepened.
"I rather fancy," he said abruptly, "that Mr. Hawke found out the
mistake at exactly the same time as I did myself."
Mrs. Jackson was a quick woman, and she took his meaning from the
inflection of his voice.
"He was your rival!"
"I have not seen much of him lately."
She thought for a moment and said, "Then it's just as well he's
staying at the Inn."
Gordon sprang to his feet.
"At the Inn?" he exclaimed.
"Yes," she answered. "He still comes to climb at Wastdale every
Easter. But he has always stayed at the Inn, since you and Mr.
Arkwright have stopped away."
Gordon stood drumming with his fingers on the table-cloth. A sudden
impulse of a sentimental kind had persuaded him to spend his last week
of bachelorhood alone in the familiar privacy of this spot, and he had
obeyed it on the instant, thoughtlessly it now appeared to him. He
might have foreseen the likelihood of Hawke's presence. After all,
however, it could not matter. It would be, perhaps, a little awkward
if they met, though, indeed, it need not be even that. Their actual
rivalry had ended with the announcement of his engagement two years
ago. Hawke could gain no end by sustaining the feud. There was, in
truth, no reason why they should not shake hands over the matter. So
he argued to himself, desire pointing the argument and stifling
certain uneasy reflections as to the tenacity of Hawke's nature.
He sat down to resume his breakfast. The third member of the trio
which for years had made the farmhouse the resort during Easter
vacations claimed Mrs. Jackson's attention.
"And Mr. Arkwright?" she asked.
"He's dead," Gordon replied after a pause. "He died last year in
Switzerland. It was an accident. I was with him at the time."
He spoke with spasmodic jerks and ended with something like a sigh of
relief. But if Mrs. Jackson loved marriages, she hankered after
violent deaths, and so, while she expressed unbounded pity, she
insisted upon details. Gordon submitted reluctantly.
"It happened in the Oberland," he said, and Mrs. Jackson took a chair.
"We were coming down a mountain towards the evening--Arkwright,
myself, and a guide. We chanced to be late. The descent was new to us,
and knowing that we should not get off the snow before dark we looked
out for a spot to camp on. We came to a little plateau of rock just as
the night was falling, and determined to remain there. The guide had a
bottle of wine left out of our provisions. We had kept it back
purposely."
Gordon paused for a moment and then went on again with a certain
deliberateness of speech as though the episode fascinated him in the
telling of it.
"Arkwright volunteered to draw the cork. The neck of the bottle burst
and cut into his arm. It severed the main artery just above the wrist.
I sent the guide down to the valley, but, of course, no help came
until the morning. He was dead then."
"And you stayed with him all the time?"
"Yes!" said Gordon, and he rose from the table.
Mrs. Jackson, however, failed to take the hint. She wanted a
description of his feelings during that night of watching, and she
persisted until she had obtained it.
"I wonder you can bear to speak about it at all!" she said almost
reproachfully when he had finished.
Left to himself, Gordon became the prey of a singular depression. The
sensation of horror which the recital of the incident revived in him
was intensified, not merely by its sombre contrast with the former
liveliness of his thoughts, but by the actual surroundings amongst
which he stood. The room itself was so suggestive of reminiscences
that it seemed instinct with the presence of his dead friend. For the
fact that he had but lately entered it after a lapse of years gave a
fresh vividness to his memories. It was as if the dust had been
suddenly swept from them by a rough hand.
He walked over to the oak chest which stood against the wall by the
fireplace. A book in a red cover lay upon it and he took it up. It was
a novel which Arkwright had written at the farmhouse, and it contained
an inscription to that effect from the author's hand.
"I seem likely to pass a pleasant week," he said to himself, and
taking his hat, stepped out into the clear sunshine.
But his thoughts ran ever in the same channel. Each familiar object
that he passed recalled his friend, and the remembrance of that night
in the Alps hung like a black cloud about his heart. He tried to
thrust it aside, but the more earnestly he tried, the more
persistently it chained his attention, until in the end it seemed to
shadow forth something sinister, something almost of menace. For some
distance he followed the bed of the valley and then struck upwards to
the right, on to the slopes of Scafell Pike. After a while he stopped
to light his pipe, and, turning, saw over against him the track
mounting in sharp zigzags towards the summit of the Styhead Pass. It
was as clearly defined on the hill-side as a pencilled line on paper,
and his eyes followed its direction mechanically until it bent over
the edge of the Pass and disappeared from view. Then equally
mechanically he began to picture in his mind its subsequent course. He
had traced it past the tarn and half the way to Borrowdale, when of a
sudden a smile dawned through the gloom on his face, "The path to
Keswick!" he thought. He traced it consciously after that; he saw it
broaden out into a road, and his imagination set a dainty figure in a
white dress and a sailor hat at the end of it.
Gordon had met Kate Nugent for the first time some three years before
at Hawke's home in London, and from the outset of their acquaintance
she had commenced to dominate his thoughts, not so much on account of
her beauty as from a certain distinctness of personality which
appealed to him at that time with a very peculiar force. For she came
to him at a somewhat critical period in his life.
Left an orphan while yet a child, David had spent his boyhood alone in
the north of Scotland. His guardian--an uncle with a seat in
Parliament and an estate near Ravenglass--he never saw; his tutor--an
unpractical scholar of the old-fashioned type--he neglected, in order
to follow the marsh-lamps of his own dreamy and somewhat morbid
imagination. And so dividing his time between the study of the more
exuberant poets and solitary rides along the bleak sea-coast, he
mapped out the world for himself upon a purely fanciful plan. He first
came into contact with actual life on his migration to Oxford. He was
brought face to face with new facts and new experiences, which, strive
as he might, he could not fit in with his theories. And, besides, he
seemed to see all around him men actuated by the interests of truth
toiling noisily at the overthrow of creeds and erecting nothing in
their place. As a consequence, his false idealism crumbled beneath
him, he lost his self-reliance, and felt hemmed in by a confused
tangle of truth and falsehood which there was no clue to help him to
unravel. The step between an intellectual scepticism and personal
cynicism is an easy one for most men to take. Gordon strode over the
intervening gaps unconsciously the moment he ceased to trust himself,
since his own sensations had, of necessity, been the one standard by
which he judged.
His meeting with Kate Nugent, however, changed the whole tenor of his
mind. She appeared to him the one real thing that he had found in his
journey through a world of shadows. He pictured her standing out
white and clear from a background of shifting haze, and his very
self-distrust diminished since he referred his thoughts and actions to
his conception of her as to a touchstone for the testing of them.
After their engagement, she became almost his religion. He
re-fashioned a second world in her image, faith coming to him like a
child born from the joining of their hearts. His ambitions, so long
dulled to inaction, sprang into new vigour and he followed their lead
with a confident patience. There was, in fact, an element of quaint
extravagance in his devotion, such as one finds mirrored in the
love-poems of the seventeenth century.
Hence it came about that as he walked home in the fall of the
afternoon, matching the sunset with the colour of his thoughts, the
sight of the white Inn walls, prominent in a dark clump of firs,
recalled to him not only the fact of Hawke's proximity, but his desire
to put an end to their estrangement. The desire grew as he dwelled
upon it, until he began to feel an absolute repulsion from the
prospect of starting along this new stage of his life at enmity with
an old comrade.
He determined to make the overture, and continuing his way onwards to
the Inn, inquired for Mr. Hawke. He was out, they told him. He had
waited until the postman came at twelve, and had then set out for the
fells. Gordon rummaged in his pockets and unearthed a card. He
scribbled on it a request that Hawke would visit him during the
evening, and turned back to the farm-house in a glow of satisfaction.
A wild fancy shot through him that Hawke and himself had been
designedly brought together into the seclusion of the valley. He
laughed it aside for the moment.
But it returned to him afterwards with overwhelming conviction.