Johnny’s little social successes were so frequent that the memory of the
poor lady who had lost her child at his age soon died away, and the toy
got broken and went the way of all toys. Their life was spent in a very
simple round of occupations. Rosalind, whose powers as an artist were
not beyond the gentlest level of amateur art, took to sketching, as a
means of giving some interest to her idle hours, and it became one of
the habits of the family that Aunt Sophy, when well enough to go out for
her usual afternoon drive, should deposit her niece and the children on
the bank of the lake, the spot which Rosalind had chosen as the subject
of a sketch. The hills opposite shone in the afternoon sun with a gray
haze of heat softening all their outlines; the water glowed and sparkled
in all its various tones of blue, here and there specked by a slowly
progressing boat, carrying visitors across to the mock antiquity of
Hautecombe.
After the jingle and roll of Mrs. Lennox’s carriage had passed away, the
silence of the summer heat so stilled the landscape that the distant
clank of the oars on the water produced the highest effect. It was very
warm, yet there was something in the haze that spoke of autumn, and a
cool but capricious little breeze came now and then from the water.
Rosalind, sitting in the shade, with her sketching-block upon her knee,
felt that soft indolence steal over her, that perfect physical content
and harmony with everything, which takes all impulse from the mind and
makes the sweetness of doing nothing a property of the very atmosphere.
Her sketch was very unsatisfactory, for one thing: the subject was much
too great for her simple powers. She knew just enough to know that it
was bad, but not how to do what she wished, to carry out her own ideal.
To make out the open secret before her, and perceive how it was that
Nature formed those shadows and poured down that light, was possible to
her mind but not to her hand, which had not the cunning necessary for
the task; but she was clever enough to see her incapacity, which is more
than can be said of most amateurs. Her hands had dropped by her side,
and her sketch upon her lap. After all, who could hope to put upon paper
those dazzling lights, and the differing tones of air and distance, the
shadows that flitted over the mountainsides, the subdued radiance of the
sky? Perhaps a great artist, Turner or his chosen rival, but not an
untrained girl, whose gifts were only for the drawing-room. Rosalind was
not moved by any passion of regret on account of her failure. She was
content to sit still and vaguely contemplate the beautiful scene, which
was half within her and half without. The “inward eye which is the bliss
of solitude” filled out the outline of the picture for her as she sat,
not thinking, a part of the silent rapture of the scene. The children
were playing near her, and their voices, softened in the warm air, made
part of the beatitude of the moment--that, and the plash of the water on
the shore, and the distant sound of the oars, and the breeze that blew
in her face. It was one of those exquisite instants, without any actual
cause of happiness in them, when we are happy without knowing why. Such
periods come back to the mind as the great events which are called
joyful never do--for with events, however joyful, there come
agitations, excitements--whereas pure happiness is serene, and all the
sweeter for being without any cause.
Thus Rosalind sat--notwithstanding many things in her life which were
far from perfect--in perfect calm and pleasure. The nurse, seated lower
down upon the beach, was busy with a piece of work, crochet or some
other of those useless handiworks which are a refreshment to those who
are compelled to be useful for the greater portion of their lives. The
children were still nearer to the edge of the water, playing with a
little pleasure-boat which was moored within the soft plash of the lake.
It was not a substantial craft, like the boats native to the place,
which are meant to convey passengers and do serious work, but was a
little, gayly painted, pleasure skiff, belonging to an Englishman in the
neighborhood, neither safe nor solid--one of the cockleshells that a
wrong balance upsets in a moment. It was to all appearance safely
attached to something on the land, and suggested no idea of danger
either to the elder sister seated above or to the nurse on the beach.
Amy and Johnny had exhausted their imagination in a hundred dramatic
plays; they had “pretended” to be kings and queens; to be a lady
receiving visitors and a gentleman making a morning call; to be a
clergyman preaching to a highly critical and unsatisfactory audience,
which would neither stay quiet nor keep still; to be a procession
chanting funeral hymns; even coming down sadly from that level of high
art to keep a shop, selling pebbles and sand for tea and sugar. Such
delights, however, are but transitory; the children, after a while,
exhausted every device they could think of; and then they got into the
boat, which it was very easy to do. The next thing, as was natural, was
to “pretend” to push off and row. And, alas! the very first of these
attempts was too successful. The boat had been attached, as it appeared,
merely to a small iron rod thrust into the sand, and Johnny, being
vigorous and pulling with all his little might--with so much might that
he tumbled into the bottom of the boat head over heels in the revulsion
of the effort--the hold gave way. Both nurse and sister sat tranquilly,
fearing no evil, while this tremendous event took place, and it was not
till the shifting of some bright lines in the foreground caught
Rosalind’s dreaming eye that the possibility of any accident occurred to
her. She sprang to her feet then, with a loud cry which startled the
nurse and a group of children playing farther on, on the beach, but no
one who could be of any real assistance. The little bright vessel was
afloat and already bearing away upon the shining water. In a minute it
was out of reach of anything the women could do. There was not a boat or
a man within sight; the only hope was in the breeze which directed the
frail little skiff to a small projecting point farther on, to which, as
soon as her senses came back to her, Rosalind rushed, with what
intention she scarcely knew, to plunge into the water though she could
not swim, to do something, if it should only be to drown along with
them. The danger that the boat might float out into the lake was not
all; for any frightened movement, even an attempt to help themselves on
the part of the children, might upset the frail craft in a moment, and
end their voyage forever.
She flew over the broken ground, stumbling in her hurry and agitation,
doing her best to stifle the cries that burst from her, lest she should
frighten the little voyagers. For the moment they were quite still,
surprise and alarm and a temporary confusion as to what to do having
quieted their usual restlessness. Amy’s little face, with a smile on it,
gradually growing fixed as fear crept over her which she would not
betray, and Johnny’s back as he settled himself on the rowing seat, with
his arms just beginning to move towards the oars which Rosalind felt
would be instant destruction did he get hold of them, stood out in her
eyes as if against a background of flame. It was only the background of
the water, all soft and glowing, with scarcely a ripple upon it, safe,
so peaceful, and yet death. There could not have been a prettier
picture. The boat was reflected in every tint, the children’s dresses,
its own lines of white and crimson, the foolish little flag of the same
colors that fluttered at the bow--all prettiness, gayety, a picture that
would have delighted a child, softly floating, double, boat and shadow.
But never was any scene of prettiness looked at with such despair. “Keep
still, keep still,” Rosalind cried, half afraid even to say so much, as
she flew along, her brain all one throb. If but the gentle breeze, the
current so slight as to be scarcely visible, would drift them to the
point! if only her feet would carry her there in time! Her sight seemed
to fail her, and yet for years after it was like a picture ineffaceably
printed upon her eyes.
She was rushing into the water in despair, with her hands stretched out,
but, alas! seeing too clearly that the boat was still out of her reach,
and restraining with pain the cry of anguish which would have startled
the children, when she felt herself suddenly put aside and a coat,
thrown off by some one in rapid motion, fell at her feet. Rosalind did
not lose her senses, which were all strung to the last degree of vivid
force and capability; but she knew nothing, did not think, was conscious
neither of her own existence nor of how this came about, of nothing but
the sight before her eyes. She stood among the reeds, her feet in the
water, trying to smile to the children, to Amy, upon whom terror was
growing, and to keep her own cries from utterance. The plunge of the
new-comer in the water startled Johnny. He had got hold of the oar, and
in the act of flinging it upon the water with the clap which used to
delight him on the lake at home, turned sharply round to see what this
new sound meant. Then the light vanished from Rosalind’s eyes. She
uttered one cry, which seemed to ring from one end of the lake to the
other, and startled the rowers far away on the other side. Then
gradually sight came back to her. Had it all turned into death and
destruction, that shining water, with its soft reflections, the pretty
outline, the floating colors? She heard a sound of voices, the tones of
the children, and then the scene became visible again, as if a black
shadow had been removed. There was the boat, still floating double,
Amy’s face full of smiles, Johnny’s voice raised high--“Oh, _I_ could
have doned it!”--a man’s head above the level of the water, a hand upon
the side of the boat. Then some one called to her, “No harm done; I will
take them back to the beach.” The throbbing went out of Rosalind’s brain
and went lower down, till her limbs shook under her, and how to get
through the reeds she could not tell. She lifted the coat instinctively
and struggled along, taking, it seemed to her, half an hour to retrace
the steps which she had made in two minutes in the access of terror
which had left her so weak. The nurse, who had fallen helpless on the
beach, covering her eyes with her hands not to see the catastrophe, had
recovered and got the children in her arms before Rosalind reached them.
They were quite at their ease, and skipped about on the shingle, when
lifted from the boat, with an air of triumph. “I could have doned it if
you had left me alone,” said Johnny, careless of the mingled caresses
and reproaches that fell upon him in a torrent--the “Oh, children,
you’ve almost killed me!” of nurse, and the passionate clasp with which
Rosalind seized upon them. “We were floating beautiful,” said little
Amy, oblivious of her terrors; and they began to descant both together
upon the delights of their “sail.” “Oh, it is far nicer than those big
boats!” “And if he had let me get the oars out I’d have doned it
myself,” cried Johnny. The group of children which had been disturbed by
the accident stood round, gaping open-mouthed in admiration, and the
loud sound of hurrying oars from a boat rushing across the lake to the
rescue added to the excitement of the little hero and heroine.
Rosalind’s dress was torn with her rush through the reeds, her shoes
wet, her whole frame trembling; while nurse had got her tidy bonnet awry
and her hair out of order. But the small adventurers had suffered no
harm or strain of any kind. They were jaunty in their perfect success
and triumph.
“I thought it safest to bring them round to this bit of beach, where
they could be landed without any difficulty. Oh, pray don’t say anything
about it. It was little more than wading, the water is not deep. And I
am amply--Miss Trevanion? I am shocked to see you carrying my coat!”
Rosalind turned to the dripping figure by her side with a cry of
astonishment. She had been far too much agitated even to make any
question in her mind who it was. Now she raised her eyes to meet--what?
the eyes that were like Johnny’s, the dark, wistful, appealing look
which had come back to her mind so often. He stood there with the water
running from him, in the glow of exertion, his face thinner and less
boyish, but his look the same as when he had come to her help on the
country road, and by the little lake at Highcourt. It flashed through
Rosalind’s mind that he had always come to her help. She uttered the
“Oh!” which is English for every sudden wonder, not knowing what to say.
“I hope,” he said, “that you may perhaps remember I once saw you at
Highcourt in the old days, in a little difficulty with a boat. This was
scarcely more than that.”
“I recollect,” she said, her breath coming fast; “you were very
kind--and now-- Oh, this is a great deal more; I owe you--their lives.”
“Pray don’t say so. It was nothing--any one would have done it, even if
there had been a great deal more to do, but there was nothing; it was
little more than wading.” Then he took his coat from her hand, which she
had been holding all the time. “It is far more--it is too much that you
should have carried my coat, Miss Trevanion. It is more than a reward.”
She had thought of the face so often, the eyes fixed upon her, and had
forgotten what doubts had visited her mind when she saw him before. Now,
when she met the gaze of those eyes again, all her doubts came back.
There was a faint internal struggle, even while she remembered that he
had saved the lives of the children. “I know,” she said, recollecting
herself, “that we have met before, and that I had other things to thank
you for, though nothing like this. But you must forgive me, for I don’t
know your name.”
“My name is Everard,” he said, with a little hesitation and a quick
flush of color. His face, which had always been refined in feature, had
a delicacy that looked like ill-health, and as he pulled on his coat
over his wet clothes he shivered slightly. Was it because he felt the
chill, or only to call forth the sudden anxiety which appeared in
Rosalind’s face? “Oh,” he said, “it was momentary. I shall take no
harm.”
“What can we do?” cried Rosalind, with alarm. “If it should make you
ill! And you are here perhaps for the baths? and yet have plunged in
without thought. What can we do? There is no carriage nor anything to be
got. Oh, Mr. Everard! take pity upon me and hasten home.”
“I will walk with you if you will let me.”
“But we cannot go quick, the children are not able; and what if you
catch cold! My aunt would never forgive me if I let you wait.”
“There could be nothing improper,” he said hastily, “with the nurse and
the children.”
Rosalind felt the pain of this mistaken speech prick her like a
pin-point. To think in your innermost consciousness that a man is “not a
gentleman” is worse than anything else that can be said of him in
English speech. She hesitated and was angry with herself, but yet her
color rose high. “What I mean,” she said, with an indescribable,
delicate pride, “is that you will take cold--you understand me,
surely--you will take cold after being in the water. I beg you to go on
without waiting, for the children cannot walk quickly.”
“And you?” he said; still he did not seem to understand, but looked at
her with a sort of delighted persuasion that she was avoiding the walk
with him coyly, with that feminine withdrawal which leads a suitor on.
“You are just as wet as I am. Could not we two push on and leave the
children to follow?”
Rosalind gave him a look which was full of almost despairing wonder. The
mind and the words conveyed so different an impression from that made by
the refined features and harmonious face. “Oh, please go away,” she
said, “I am in misery to see you standing there so wet. My aunt will
send to you to thank you. Oh, please go away! If you catch cold we will
never forgive ourselves,” Rosalind cried, with an earnestness that
brought tears to her eyes.
“Miss Trevanion, that you should care--”
Rosalind, in her heat and eagerness, made an imperious gesture, stamping
her foot on the sand in passionate impatience. “Go, go!” she cried. “We
owe you the children’s lives, and we shall not forget it--but go!”
He hesitated. He did not believe nor understand her! He looked in her
eyes wistfully, yet with a sort of smile, to know how much of it was
true. Could any one who was a gentleman have so failed to apprehend her
meaning? Yet it did gleam on him at length, and he obeyed her, though
reluctantly, turning back half a dozen times in the first hundred yards
to see if she were coming. At last a turn in the road hid him from her
troubled eyes.