The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen from
the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river dell. The
mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the bare branches, and
the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet with the fragrance of
new grass.
Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter ‘S.’ The
lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep projection
which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed a lawny
promontory, fringed by thorn and willow. It was easy to reach it from
the castle side, for the river ran in this part very quietly among
innumerable boulders and over dam-like walls of rock. The place was all
enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so it was
chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.
One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to wring and
lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on the far side,
drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence on the grass. Nance
looked up to greet him with a smile, but finding her smile was not
returned, she fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily to her
employment. Man or woman, the whole world looks well at any work to
which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed of what she did. She
was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet that so well became her, and
ashamed of her bare arms, which were her greatest beauty.
‘Nausicaa,’ said Mr. Archer at last, ‘I find you like Nausicaa.’
‘And who was she?’ asked Nance, and laughed in spite of herself, an empty
and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer’s ears, indeed, like
music, but to her own like the last grossness of rusticity.
‘She was a princess of the Grecian islands,’ he replied. ‘A king, being
shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore. Certainly I, too, was
shipwrecked,’ he continued, plucking at the grass. ‘There was never a
more desperate castaway—to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of
honour, a grateful conscience, duties willingly taken up and faithfully
discharged; and to fall to this—idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.’
He seemed to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her
again. ‘Nance,’ said he, ‘would you have a man sit down and suffer or
rise up and strive?’
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘I would always rather see him doing.’
‘Ha!’ said Mr. Archer, ‘but yet you speak from an imperfect knowledge.
Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil—misconduct upon either
side, not a fault behind him, and yet naught before him but this choice
of sins. How would you say then?’
‘I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,’ returned Nance. ‘I
would say there was a third choice, and that the right one.’
‘I tell you,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘the man I have in view hath two ways
open, and no more. One to wait, like a poor mewling baby, till Fate save
or ruin him; the other to take his troubles in his hand, and to perish or
be saved at once. It is no point of morals; both are wrong. Either way
this step-child of Providence must fall; which shall he choose, by doing
or not doing?’
‘Fall, then, is what I would say,’ replied Nance. ‘Fall where you will,
but do it! For O, Mr. Archer,’ she continued, stooping to her work, ‘you
that are good and kind, and so wise, it doth sometimes go against my
heart to see you live on here like a sheep in a turnip-field! If you
were braver—’ and here she paused, conscience-smitten.
‘Do I, indeed, lack courage?’ inquired Mr. Archer of himself. ‘Courage,
the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a
poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a
weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder?
But what is courage, then? The constancy to endure oneself or to see
others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere
shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire of the
significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we seem to know, and
yet, of all things, certainly to stand still is the least heroic.
Nance,’ he said, ‘did you ever hear of _Hamlet_?’
‘Never,’ said Nance.
‘’Tis an old play,’ returned Mr. Archer, ‘and frequently enacted. This
while I have been talking Hamlet. You must know this Hamlet was a Prince
among the Danes,’ and he told her the play in a very good style, here and
there quoting a verse or two with solemn emphasis.
‘It is strange,’ said Nance; ‘he was then a very poor creature?’
‘That was what he could not tell,’ said Mr. Archer. ‘Look at me, am I as
poor a creature?’
She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her hours;
the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless ruffles, the
slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven face, the wide and
somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that were so full of depth and
change and colour. He was gazing at her with his brows a little knit,
his chin upon one hand and that elbow resting on his knee.
‘Ye look a man!’ she cried, ‘ay, and should be a great one! The more
shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before the fire.’
‘My fair Holdaway,’ quoth Mr. Archer, ‘you are much set on action. I
cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.’ He continued, looking at her with a
half-absent fixity, ‘’Tis a strange thing, certainly, that in my years of
fortune I should never taste happiness, and now when I am broke, enjoy so
much of it, for was I ever happier than to-day? Was the grass softer,
the stream pleasanter in sound, the air milder, the heart more at peace?
Why should I not sink? To dig—why, after all, it should be easy. To
take a mate, too? Love is of all grades since Jupiter; love fails to
none; and children’—but here he passed his hand suddenly over his eyes.
‘O fool and coward, fool and coward!’ he said bitterly; ‘can you forget
your fetters? You did not know that I was fettered, Nance?’ he asked,
again addressing her.
But Nance was somewhat sore. ‘I know you keep talking,’ she said, and,
turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet across her
shoulder. ‘I wonder you are not wearied of your voice. When the hands
lie abed the tongue takes a walk.’
Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water’s edge. In
this part the body of the river poured across a little narrow fell, ran
some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles, then getting wind, as
it were, of another shelf of rock which barred the channel, began, by
imperceptible degrees, to separate towards either shore in dancing
currents, and to leave the middle clear and stagnant. The set towards
either side was nearly equal; about one half of the whole water plunged
on the side of the castle, through a narrow gullet; about one half ran
ripping past the margin of the green and slipped across a babbling rapid.
‘Here,’ said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time at the fine
and shifting demarcation of these currents, ‘come here and see me try my
fortune.’
‘I am not like a man,’ said Nance; ‘I have no time to waste.’
‘Come here,’ he said again. ‘I ask you seriously, Nance. We are not
always childish when we seem so.’
She drew a little nearer.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you see these two channels—choose one.’
‘I’ll choose the nearest, to save time,’ said Nance.
‘Well, that shall be for action,’ returned Mr. Archer. ‘And since I wish
to have the odds against me, not only the other channel but yon stagnant
water in the midst shall be for lying still. You see this?’ he
continued, pulling up a withered rush. ‘I break it in three. I shall
put each separately at the top of the upper fall, and according as they
go by your way or by the other I shall guide my life.’
‘This is very silly,’ said Nance, with a movement of her shoulders.
‘I do not think it so,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘And then,’ she resumed, ‘if you are to try your fortune, why not
evenly?’
‘Nay,’ returned Mr. Archer with a smile, ‘no man can put complete
reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.’
By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and, bidding
her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of the intake. The
rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall, came up again far on the
right hand, leaned ever more and more in the same direction, and
disappeared under the hanging grasses on the castle side.
‘One,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘one for standing still.’
But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a while
about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the
bleaching-green and danced down the rapid under Nance’s eyes.
‘One for me,’ she cried with some exultation; and then she observed that
Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock, with his hand
raised like a person petrified. ‘Why,’ said she, ‘you do not mind it, do
you?’
‘Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?’ said Mr.
Archer, rather hoarsely. ‘And this is more than fortune. Nance, if you
have any kindness for my fate, put up a prayer before I launch the next
one.’
‘A prayer,’ she cried, ‘about a game like this? I would not be so
heathen.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘then without,’ and he closed his eyes and dropped the
piece of rush. This time there was no doubt. It went for the rapid as
straight as any arrow.
‘Action then!’ said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; ‘and then God
forgive us,’ he added, almost to himself.
‘God forgive us, indeed,’ cried Nance, ‘for wasting the good daylight!
But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so serious I shall begin to think
you was in earnest.’
‘Nay,’ he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile; ‘but is not
this good advice? I have consulted God and demigod; the nymph of the
river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-eyed Minerva. Both
have said the same. My own heart was telling it already. Action, then,
be mine; and into the deep sea with all this paralysing casuistry. I am
happy to-day for the first time.’