A maid deposited a can of hot water, and knocked at Mrs. Elles’ door
next morning, as the latter had desired her to do over night. Thinking,
perhaps, of her faithful Jane, she sleepily called out “Come in!” from
force of habit.
The servant stared at the new inmate of the “Heather Bell,”
unrestrainedly, as she lay there, in bed, her pretty hair ruffled over
her forehead, and the disfiguring spectacles lying on the dressing-table
beside her. Mrs. Elles did not know what hour it was; she had left her
watch behind her in Newcastle, but she was sure she had been lying awake
for hours and hours, listening to the bewildering chorus of birds from
the pear tree all round her window, and the rub-a-dub of the churning in
the yard below.
“Nine o’clock, you say? Why did you not call me earlier? Has Mr. Rivers
gone out sketching already?” was her first thoughtless question.
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Does he go every day?” Mrs. Elles further enquired, forgetting, too, to
correct the title.
“Every day, unless it rains.”
“And what does he do then?”
“Bides at home and pents.”
Mrs. Elles was recalled to a sense of the impropriety of all these
questions on her part, and she dismissed the girl haughtily. She
dressed, put back her hair, and resumed her spectacles with a sigh, but
without hesitation. She had no full length mirror here to show her the
oddish, but not ungraceful appearance that she presented, for, although
her facial beauties were temporarily obscured, her slight figure in its
boyish trim had a certain attractiveness of its own. The average glance
would cursorily set her down for a well-grown school girl, labouring
under a temporary affection of the eyes, which was, however, not serious
enough to interfere with her health and spirits.
After she had breakfasted, in pursuance of a plan that she had
conceived, she got one of the landlady’s sons to drive her over to
Barnard Castle, where she purchased an outfit of drawing materials and a
cheap Student’s Manual of Art. In the afternoon--Mr. Rivers, she
ascertained, never came back to the inn for luncheon, but took out some
sandwiches, which he ate, if he remembered to do so--she selected a
point of view, just by the bridge over the Greta, a stone’s throw from
the inn. She there began a study of the Student’s Manual, and her own
capabilities in the way of handling a pencil.
She had had no previous training, but she was just clever enough to
produce a not utterly despicable result, and that was all she had dared
to hope. She did not expect to see the artist that day, nor did she; but
she was not bored, although she had no one to speak to, and, to a woman
of her temperament, that fact alone would, in the ordinary course of
things, have engendered complete despair. But then, things were not by
any means in their ordinary course; the very air was full of adventure
and excitement of the vaguest and most blameless nature. Mrs. Elles had
no precise idea of what it was that she hoped and desired, and with the
unconscious diplomacy of the dual mind, took very good care not even to
formulate it.
But next day, as she sat on her camp stool, with a half finished sketch
of the picturesque stone bridge across her knee, she felt, rather than
heard, Mr. Rivers coming down the road behind her. Hastily she pushed
her spectacles back into position over her eyes, and turned a very
little in his direction.
“Good morning,” he said, pleasantly enough.
“Good morning,” she said, half rising. “I have been wanting to thank you
so much all these days.”
“For what?”
“For recommending this delightful inn to me, of course.”
The spectacles interfered somewhat with the arch play of her eyebrows as
she said this, very demurely.
He looked, if possible, a little abashed.
“Well, I can hardly say that I recommended it. In fact, I rather tried
to warn you off it. I thought it would be too rough for a lady. I am
glad you find it pretty comfortable.”
“I only wanted quiet, like you,” she said. “I have been very much
overwrought, lately, and this is the very thing for me. You see, I am
trying to occupy myself a little!” she pointed to her sketch.
“But you have not got the best point of view--not by any means,” he
exclaimed. “I am not venturing to look at your drawing, of course, but I
know---- ”
“Oh, please!” she said, holding up the sketch. “If only you would, I
should be so grateful.”
He looked at her drawing carefully and critically.
“You really have not at all a bad idea; but I should sacrifice that
sketch if I were you--you have not got very far on with it, and the
abutment of the bridge comes so badly in it--and begin a new one, here,
further down ... I will show you.”
Without any exhibition of the amateur’s stubbornness, she rose
cheerfully, and allowed him to move her camp-stool for her to a place
where the abutment presented a more graceful aspect. Little did she care
for abutments, but she was delighted that he should take an interest in
her work. He stood looking at the view he had chosen for her with
professionally half-closed eyes.
“It comes better from here, don’t you think!” he said.
“Oh, I don’t think--I know nothing about it!” she cried. “I am only a
beginner, and have never had any instruction at all!”
“Yes, I can see that,” he replied drily, “but let me tell you, you
haven’t at all a bad notion of perspective! Plenty of people learn
perspective painfully and never get as near it as that. I have always
held that perspective came by nature--I never learned it, at any rate!”
He looked down at her then with considerable benignity, as supporting a
beloved theory, adding, however, sharply, “I cannot understand how you
manage to see through those. Well, persevere! You will find it come very
nicely like that--And now, I must be off--!”
“Are you going to that place where I saw you the other day?” she
enquired, with eager simplicity. Since he spoke to her as if he
considered her a schoolgirl, she would use the privileges appertaining
to that inchoate and irresponsible age towards him. At the same time she
shot a glance--not precisely of the schoolgirl--in his direction, that
was only rendered void and vain by the smoky barrier interposed between
it and its object. In another minute she would have summoned up courage
to ask him if she might go to Brignal with him, but he nonplussed her by
raising his cap, in token of farewell, and making a quick, decisive
movement across the bridge, as if he had not heard her question.
She sat down resignedly in the new place he had chosen for her, and made
a few ineffectual strokes with her pencil. To herself she muttered, “I
wonder how old?--a forward sixteen?--or a stunted eighteen, perhaps?”
words which had obviously no reference to her drawing. She knitted her
brows with all the petty rage of the amateur; she aggressively sharpened
her pencil and broke it, five times over; and at last, in a flt of
temper consistent with the extreme juvenility of Rivers’ presumed
conception of her, tossed both the sketches into the Greta and watched
them float easily away on the changing ripples.
“They will go down to where he is,” she thought, full of a sense of the
continuity of this stream flowing down that long dark glen leading to
the light, where the master sat in his earthly paradise and recked not
of his hopeless and despairing pupil.
“And why should he?” was her next reflection. “What a fool I am! But,
indeed, a man like that is wasted on Nature, and Nature is evidently the
only thing in the world that he cares for!”
Signs of unusual activity, and the smell of piping hot pie-crust greeted
her when she went rather drearily back to the inn for her luncheon.
The bare, barn-like room was swept and garnished unusually. Great
bunches of pink phlox, tied up with blue ribbons, were nailed into the
corners and clashed with the lavender-coloured plaster; festoons of
miscellaneous verdure were disposed across and all round the severe
texts on the walls, and the terrors of “Prepare to meet thy God!” were
veiled in purple fuchias and yellow marigolds. Her humble little lunch
of cold British beef was laid for her, as usual, on a corner of the
tressel table. The landlady of the “Heather Bell” came up to her as she
was eating it, and her buxom arms were floured to the elbow, where a
couple of currants were sticking in token of her recent occupation.
“We’re that busy,” she began, breathlessly. “We’ve got a cheap trip
comin’ fra’ Barney Cassel this afternoon--near a hundred of ’em. I’ve
baked thirty pies this very morning, and I was a-goin’ to ask ye, Miss,
if ye would mind gettin’ yer dinner along o’ the gentleman, for we shall
na have seen the last on ’em till fair on to neet, and a tarrible mess
they’se leave behind, I’se warrant ’em!”
Mrs. Elles’ heart leaped, but she controlled her emotions and recalled
the busy landlady, who had turned away as if the point was settled.
“Stop, Mrs. Watson--I am not sure that Mr. Rivers will like that!”
“Hout, lassie, then he’ll just hae to put up wi’ it! Leave him alone;
I’ll settle it wi’ him.”
“No, no!” dubiously.
“But I tell ye, ye must! We canna let ye have the room to-day, and
that’s flat!” repeated Mrs. Watson, sturdily, but without acrimony.
“Then I won’t dine at all!” Mrs. Elles said, vehemently, but without
decision.
She took up her hat, however, and walked slowly down the road to the
Park Gates, rang the porter’s bell, and was admitted. She went along
the Broad Walk and through the yew grove, till she came to the right
bank of the Greta, which flows through the Park of Rokeby on its way to
join the Tees, just outside its limits.
She sat there for the whole of the afternoon, watching the owner of the
Park and the Hall, whose smoke she could just see curling through the
trees, as he waded about in his own river, in his loose india-rubber
leggings, and caught his own trout in calm and contentment.
She was surprised to find how little bored she was. She did not intend
to be. She made a point of being amused by the varied aspects of
nature--free untrammelled exuberant nature--that were being presented to
her. It was the very quintessence of wild life that surrounded her now.
The ceaseless ripple of the river was relieved by the frequent splash
and flicker of the enormous trout that tenanted it, as they rose
flippantly to the surface or were dragged there by the imperious rod.
Queer cries, that came out of the brake behind her, betokened the sad
little dramas of animal life that were going on behind the leafy screen.
The squeak of the rabbit at its last stand before the murderous weasel;
the scuffle of the little birds upon whom the sparrow-hawk dashed,
leaving those sad heaps of grey, white-rooted feathers to tell the tale
of rapine, came to her ears, as did the more peaceful coo of the
wood-pigeons from the coverts of thorn and hazel on the other and
steeper side of the river. “Milk the coo, Katie!” such was Mrs. Watson’s
homely interpretation of their cry, and she found herself repeating it
over and over again to herself.
Everything pleased her and responded to the mood she was in. There was a
“distant dearness” in the hills that bowered in this happy valley, “a
secret sweetness in the stream” that flowed to a place two miles off,
where, indeed, she would fain have been, but that would come in time.
She was full of a great peace. She thought she could almost feel the
wrinkles of ennui and harassment slowly fading out of her forehead, and
the tangle of rebellious nerves that had driven her away from her home
smoothing themselves out, as she sat there, and, like Wordsworth’s Lucy,
allowed “beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face.” True to
herself, she immediately forced a personal application, and reduced
Nature into subserviency to the Human Interest. With a well pointed tag
of verse she pointed and emphasized the sensations of Phœbe Elles now
become the motive and main pivot of the most beautiful landscape in the
world.
For the moment with her the health motive reigned supreme. She was no
longer a runaway wife, she was an invalid profiting by change of air.
Nothing was going to happen; let the world stand still while she was
happy for the first time in her life. Surely she had a right to a little
happiness!
She stayed there until the one red-trunked fir tree, up there on the
heights by Mortham Peel, caught and glowed in the sunset light, and the
damp mists began to rise in their proportion from this enormous area of
rank foliage that engendered them. The fisherman put up his rod and went
home. The doves cooed in a continuous monotone. Mrs. Elles knew well
enough by all these signs that it was getting late. As she loitered
slowly home, she could hear on the other side of the high Park wall the
noisy passage of char-à-bancs, and vans full of jovial people, whose
hoarsely shouted refrain of “She’s a jolly good fellow!” testified to
their appreciation of Mrs. Watson’s thirty pies and cheerful welcome.
Peace was evidently restored, and Mr. Rivers would have had his dinner
quietly and be done by the time she got back. She was not at all hungry;
she would have a glass of milk and a sandwich in her room. She was a
woman who habitually took strong coffee twice a day.
“How changed I am!” she thought.
The party of trippers had gone, silence reigned, but the open door of
the meeting room, as she crossed the hall on her way in, showed a wild
and hideous scene of tea-stained table-cloths and broken meats.
“An awful sight, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Rivers, who was standing--a dark
shape filling up the space, at the door of his own room. Then he
hesitated a little....
“Mrs. Watson tells me that I am to have the pleasure of your company
to-night?”
His tone was absolutely courteous, but she failed to detect any very
strong cordiality in it, as was of course natural.
“He thinks me an awful bore!” she thought, but what she said was “I
thought you would have dined by this time.”
“Of course I have not,” he replied, raising his eyebrows, “but I believe
dinner is just ready.”
He held the door of the sitting-room wide open for her with just the
right gesture and the right attitude of courtly invitation.
“I must go and take off my hat,” she said, quite humbly, and ran
upstairs.
Indeed, she had given fate every chance of depriving her of this
pleasure. Fate was against her--or for her! She conscientiously rubbed
her hair flat with a wet brush, disposed her spectacles squarely over
her eyes and walked demurely downstairs to join Mr. Rivers.
“Yes, it is fate!” she said to herself again, as she sat down opposite
him. The slatternly maid removed the dull pewter cover from three sad
and starved looking chops and the shapeless ghosts of three potatoes,
and then shuffled out of the room like an escaped convict. It was not
luxury, but it was Paradise.
Still, in order to lead up to a question she wished to ask him about the
black-browed girl who had waited on her a day or two before, Mrs. Elles
remarked, carelessly, “I don’t think much of the service at this inn; do
you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I think I warned you not to expect much, did
I not? But it is clean, at any rate, and that’s all I care for.”
“Oh, yes, it is quite charming. But still that clumsy servant must be
rather a trial to you?”
“I am not fidgety,” he said. “And I have taught her not to touch my
painting things. That is the main point, for me. I had to be very strict
about that, for she completely ruined a drawing of mine, once.”
“How?” asked Mrs. Elles, interested.
“Oh, with the enquiring thumb of her class. It lighted on the sky,
unfortunately. She was dreadfully sorry about it, and actually brought
me five shillings and asked me if that would cover the damage? You know
it takes an expert to handle a drawing as the painter of it would like
to see it handled. I am quite beside myself sometimes, when I have to
stand by and see intending purchasers take hold of them, and run their
thumbs into the corners, and make creases in the paper! But one can say
nothing, of course.”
She looked at the artist’s own hands, and noticed the way he took hold
of things. His long, thin, eminently prehensile fingers had a way of
deliberately grasping an object in exactly the place where the eye had
previously decreed that it should be grasped, without false shots or
clumsy bungling of any kind. It was a hand skilled in all mechanical
exercises, and apt at all delicate manœuvres. It was firm and strong,
too--the hand of an artist and a craftsman.
He did not seem to notice that she was looking at his hands and
neglecting to carry on the conversation; he had a trick of becoming
absorbed in his own thoughts at a moment’s notice, so she had observed;
but he could be recalled just as easily and quickly. She went on
presently--
“That other girl’s hands wouldn’t make a mark, would they? She seems
rather superior.”
“Who? The landlady’s niece. Oh, she has been at school in London, and is
quite a personage--plays this piano in the winter, and reads ‘George
Eliot.’”
“I don’t like her,” said Mrs. Elles, “and she doesn’t like me.”
“Nonsense!” he said, as if he were speaking to a child; “Jane Ann is a
very good girl indeed.”
“Her head is too big for her body,” Mrs. Elles added, irrelevantly; “and
I can’t bear people who are what is called above their station. A little
education is a dangerous thing, I think, if it makes people priggish and
stunts their growth. I notice she never looks one straight in the face.”
“Why should she?” said the painter, unexpectedly, and that rather put an
end to the conversation.
“I think of going and taking a little walk in the Park, if I can, after
dinner,” Mrs. Elles presently remarked, wishing to show that she did not
intend to be a nuisance. “I have spent the whole afternoon there,
already, and I think it must be most mysterious and wonderful at night.”
“Are you not afraid to meet the ghost?”
“I should perfectly love to meet it!” cried she, clasping her hands
together.
“Then, of course, you won’t. ‘The White Lady of Mortham’--I believe here
she is called by the less poetical name of the ‘Dobie!’--won’t show
unless she is to produce her effect and frighten you.”
“I might frighten her,” said Mrs. Elles, still harping on her own
grotesque personal metamorphosis, which was ever present to her mind.
But he did not take her up and she went on--
“The Park reminds me of the Forest in Undine. Do you remember Küheleborn
and the mysterious faces that used to come out of the Forest and peer in
at the window of the fisherman’s cottage?”
She glanced as she said this at the window of the room they were sitting
in, the blind of which was not drawn down, as usual. She could only
suppose that it was a fad of his, and that he had given the maid orders
to leave it so. She had not been in his company a couple of hours
without realizing that he was full of fads.
“The black night comes straight against the pane,” she went on dreamily.
“All the ghosts in the forest may come and look in on us if they choose!
I rather like it, I have a weakness for ghosts. I feel as if the White
Lady of Mortham--I prefer to call her the spirit of the Greta--might be
looking in on us now!”
She gave a little shudder, part real, part affected.
“I did see a woman’s face at the window--not now, but last night!” mused
the painter with a touch of unexpected seriousness that finished the
subjugation of his sentimental listener. “I saw it quite clearly, as I
see you now. It was wild and distraught looking, as a spirit’s face
should be---- ”
“Oh, you believe in ghosts, then? I am so glad.”
“A landscape painter must personify Nature a little, don’t you think? He
should raise altars to propitiate the divinities of rivers and groves,
so important for him. The Greta especially has a very wicked tutelary
spirit, who needs keeping in a good humour, only I have not time.”
“What do you mean?”
“It has its bore, like the Severn, or the Seine its Mascaret, and comes
down occasionally without the slightest warning, like a brown wall, and
sweeps everything, including landscape painters, before it.”
“You have seen it?”
“No, I have only heard of it, as yet. And I hope, when it comes, it will
not take me unawares--sitting in the bed of the river as I so often do!
I should have to run--or rather leap for it!”
“It is a danger!” she said, quite seriously.
“Oh, one of the very few that beset the artistic field of battle,” he
said, laughing; “there are not many. It teaches us painters to ‘look
alive’ and cultivate some of the qualities of a sailor. I do have to get
into such funny places to paint from sometimes--places where I literally
must hang on by my eyelids!... Now shall I ring for Dorothy to bring in
some other luxuries?”
Dorothy, summoned by a handbell, shambled in, bringing a bleached and
tremulous cornflour pudding and three doddering baked apples, and set
them down solemnly before Mr. Rivers and Mrs. Elles. The infatuated
woman did not mind--
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread--and thou
Beside me, singing in the Wilderness,
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
But when the maid had cleared the table, in her own primitive,
knock-me-down fashion, and replaced the white cloth by the hideous
tapestry one, covered with its pattern of pink roses, faded and dulled,
moreover, by the constant splashing of the painter’s brush in the
tumbler full of water which she, as regularly as clockwork, placed on
the middle patch of flowers every evening, Mrs. Elles was suddenly
overcome by an unusual sense of shyness. This man made her shy as no man
before had ever done. He was so polite and yet so distant. His want of
self-consciousness seemed a reproof to her imperious and pampered
personality.
To cover it, she rose and shyly looked round the room that the artist
had occupied year after year, and on which he had presumably impressed
himself, his tastes, his prevailing habit of mind.
That habit, to judge by its chosen surroundings, was a very ascetic one;
as different from her own as possibly could be imagined. This was a
workroom pure and simple. Not an attempt had been made, it would seem,
to redeem its humble, commonplace ugliness. Abraham, in coloured
worsteds, complacently sacrificed Isaac, over the mantelpiece; Mrs.
Elles would have covered the pair with an art rug of some sort. The
frosted-sugar top of Mrs. Watson’s wedding cake stood on the console;
Mrs. Elles would, regardless of offence to the poor old lady, have
requested her to remove it. Every other available table and cornice was
heaped and piled with sketch books; easels and bulging umbrellas filled
up all the four corners. There was a little stack of books on the
mantelshelf, but not a single work of fiction was to be discerned among
them. There was Shelley--just the watery, bloodless, spiritually intense
poet that she would expect Rivers to appreciate. There were some flowers
in a little china dog on the side table, garden flowers, phloxes and
stocks, but these Mrs. Elles rightly attributed to the solicitude of the
landlady’s niece. The whole room was intensely significant to her of
those qualities, which, with her trick of hasty generalization, she now
chose to attribute to this man,--modesty, endurance, and
self-abnegation, and a whole-souled devotion to his art and the purposes
of his art.
There was the old-fashioned, silk-fluted piano on one side of the room,
to which he had alluded, and she paused, with her hand on the curved
lid.
“Oh, that has stood there ever since I first came here,” the artist
said; “I have never dared to open it. Jane Anne plays on it in the
winter, I believe. This house, from its neighbourhood to the park, is so
damp that I am sure that no piano could endure it and live. That is the
worst of all embowering trees! Have you noticed that one’s notepaper
becomes like blotting paper?”
How should she notice, who had no notepaper of her own, and wrote no
letters? She opened the instrument and played a bar or two.
“Quite tolerable!” she pronounced.
He quietly put a chair in front of it, without saying anything, and she
sat down and played a bit of her favourite Chopin.
He thanked her, not very warmly.
“Don’t you like Chopin?”
“He does me no good. Too restless! What is the use of setting all one’s
nerves in an uproar, as he does, and giving one no solution? I confess
that I like music that resolves me. Beethoven, for instance.”
“Oh, Beethoven resolves you, does he?” She hardly knew what Rivers
meant, but she knew that she did not care for Beethoven. “What a pity I
don’t know any of him! Is he--” she hesitated; she was becoming shy of
airing her tentative little theories to this man whose culture, as she
apprehended, had its roots in tradition, in a knowledge far deeper than
she could claim for her own, mere “self-made” woman that she was--“is
he the landscape painter’s musician, as Shelley is his poet?”
“I should say that Wordsworth was that, more properly.”
“I hate Wordsworth!” she answered, with vigour and truth, “and as for
Shelley, I should call him the poet of physical geography!”
He laughed. “You don’t care for atmospheric effects in poetry, I see.
You prefer Keats.”
“Yes, I do. And as for putting on his tombstone that his name was to be
writ in water, I think that would have suited Shelley far better. Keats’
name should have been written in blood--he was passionate.... Shall I
try to sing something to you.” Her singing was nothing wonderful, but
sweet and sympathetic and never out of tune. All her gifts were natural,
she had always been too restless to apply herself to any but that of
pose, which she had brought to so high a pitch of perfection.
But the songs which she sang were the kind of songs that Rivers seemed
to like, for his brown eyes grew soft and limpid and his face looked
less set and more open as he listened.
For this parity in their likings she had to thank her husband, who, in
the days when she had cared to please him, had insisted on her
cultivating an acquaintance with the simple national airs of all
countries that he could join in. She felt, somehow, that a little French
repertory she had would not be appropriate just now and refrained from
producing it.
She sang on until the sound of shutters closing and the tramp of
heavy-booted men--the landlady’s two stalwart sons--trooping up to their
beds in the attics, warned them of the lateness of the hour according to
country canons.
“If you do care at all for my songs,” she asked, deprecatingly, as he
lit her candle for her at the foot of the stairs, “may I come and play
for you again another evening?”
Her glance--both their glances, as she spoke, were irresistibly directed
to that scene of havoc and disaster, the meeting-room, whose open door
confronted them. It was swept and cleared now of the litter of the tea,
and freshly sanded, but still as dreary and comfortless an abiding place
as could well be imagined.
“You had better use my sitting-room in future--that is, if you will.
That barrack of a room is not fit for anyone to inhabit. But you will
not mind my working as usual, and then, I am afraid I get so absorbed
that I cannot talk, or even be ordinarily civil!”
“Oh, may I really?” she cried. “I assure you I shall be quite happy
sitting--beside you,” she was going to say, but corrected it into “with
my book!” Though where the literature was to come from that was to keep
her quiet was more than she knew. Excepting the Shelley, Taine’s
“Historie de l’Esthétique Anglaise” was quite the lightest work on
Rivers’ mantelpiece, and she had had, of course, no books among her
luggage.
“Very well, then, we will look upon that as settled,” he said, shortly,
and held out his hand again to say good-night.
“I will come in in the evenings, if you will let me, when it really is
melancholy in that big meeting-room, but during the day---- ”
“During the day I am generally out, so you will be able to have the room
entirely to yourself,” he rejoined, in his own disconcerting manner, and
the candle he was holding seemed to her to light up a little flicker of
something like amusement in his eyes.
“Yes, I know,” she said, desperately, “at that place in the woods where
I first met you. Has the foxglove grown again? I wanted to ask you. I
shall come and see for myself some day.”
She spoke with an assumed archness, with all the while a fearful
stricture about the heart, lest she was alienating him by her boldness
as of the schoolgirl she believed him to believe her to be. Her
candlestick, which she had now taken from his hand, trembled in her own.
“Do!” he replied, civilly, in a tone absolutely devoid of all
enthusiasm. Jane Anne crossed the hall as they loosed their hands. “And
now, good-night!”
Mrs. Elles waited a whole day before she profited by the artist’s
invitation to visit him at the place where he worked. She was rewarded
for her discretion, for, at dinner that very evening, he asked her
coolly why she had not been? So, the day after, she walked over to
Brignal and stayed full fifteen minutes at his side. She managed to be
so little of a nuisance that, next day, she was emboldened to take over
her drawing materials at the artist’s own suggestion, and began a series
of minute and painstaking sketches of the vegetation of the immediate
foreground, to be used by him afterwards as memoranda. He had admitted
that it would be useful to him.
Then it became a settled thing that she should walk over every day after
twelve o’clock, and take him his letters and the papers which were left
at the “Heather Bell” by the postman from Barnard Castle quite an hour
after his departure. Thus the compromising fact of her own total dearth
of correspondence escaped his attention, if, indeed, he should take
cognizance of such a detail.
She marvelled at his extraordinary power of detachment. Did matters
merely mundane ever impress him? Did anything, humanly speaking, ever
put him out, except in so far as it interfered with his work? Was he
literally, as he used to say himself, only a registering machine of
effects and views, pledged to render an actual transcript of Nature,
seen, as is the condition of all art, through a temperament, but a
temperament merely receptive, limpid, clear, and untroubled by the waves
of passionate human yearnings and desires? There was actually something
of what Browning calls the “terrible composure” of Nature about him, she
thought, a patient, broad-minded, magnificent way of regarding things
entailed by a continual contemplation of her vastness, her
implacabilities, her unconscious cruelties and brutalities. She never
could forget Rivers’ behaviour in a thunderstorm that overtook them one
Sunday afternoon by Scargill Tower. Out came the sketch book, quick as
the lightning that seemed to flicker in its horribly malicious way down
by the stone wall that edged the road they were walking along.
“I must have that!” he murmured. “By Jove!”
He actually stopped, and stood still on the white road among the falling
thunderbolts, as it seemed to her. She stopped too and opened her puny
umbrella, trying to ward off some of the heavy rain-drops from the
leaves of the sketch book. It never even seemed to occur to the artist
that she might be afraid, or wet. She was not afraid, such was the
contagion of his courage, but she was wet through. The rain splashed on
his paper in spite of her efforts, and blended together colours that the
artist hastily cast on, into shapes unexpected by him, but still a
memorandum of the breathing light and steam of mist over there by
Cotherstone, where the storm that oppressed them now was passing off,
had been secured. It was quite worth her while; she had the satisfaction
of knowing that Rivers could not think her a coward. He did not tell her
so, but took her pluck and superiority to feminine weakness as a matter
of course.
She was driven to try and please him by the achievement of new virtues,
entirely foreign to her nature. She laughed, sometimes, when she thought
of herself, the leader of what there was of advanced literary thought in
Newcastle--the lady who could discuss the higher ethics, and expound the
morbidities of Amiel and Meredith to a select cultured circle,--being
forced to recommend herself to the man she loved by a display of mere
physical courage, and even manual dexterity. Yes, she found she could
really please Rivers best by attending to his bridge for him.
This was a rough arrangement of stepping stones, which the painter had
made for himself before he came there, by manipulating the loose
boulders of the river bed a little. It constituted a short cut from the
inn to his sketching place, and saved him a mile’s walk at least. He had
taken good care to give the stream play between the rough piers of his
bridge as it were, leaving enormous gaps and chasms, but still the river
resented being interfered with, and altered the position of the stones
and washed them away sometimes in the night, of malice prepense, as Mrs.
Elles declared. She found plenty to do every day in replacing the stones
that had been dislodged and adding new ones, and worked away merrily,
thinking of Cincinnatus and his plough, and of the picture Dante began
to paint for Beatrice, in this connection.
“The very first time the river comes down,” Rivers prophesied, “all our
work will have to be done over again. There will be no bridge left!”
She could, of course, have shown herself a great deal more agile without
her spectacles, which hampered her continually, but she had made a point
of never removing them in sight of her fellow creatures, and only
ventured to push them up over her brows when she was alone with only
cows and squirrels for witnesses. She clung to them, as a saint might
hug his cross or an anchorite his hair-shirt. They symbolized the purity
of her intentions, they were her armour of honourable woman and loyal
wife to Mortimer; her ticket-of-leave indeed, when she thought of him
and all that he implied. She put the odious and tiresome things on every
morning, as a knight endures his panoply or buckles on his shield of
proof, and honourably continued to wander about in a cold, blue, local
atmosphere of her own, aware only through her other senses of the glow
of yellow light and hope that lay outside, besieging the frigid
unreceptive discs of her self-imposed barrier in vain.
“It is hateful, but it just saves the situation,” she would say to
herself. “And it makes me free. I can say what I like and do what I
like, so long as I don’t look what I like!” But, indeed, there were
times when that last item of forbearance seemed the hardest item of all.
Yes, the odd and distressing thing was that, in consequence of her
wearing them, she had never really seen Rivers’ face, and, worse than
that even, he had never seen hers. He betrayed no curiosity, no desire
at all to see it, and his indifference affronted her vanity not a
little. There must be something left out of a man, she argued, who could
take pleasure in the society of such an example of unsexed, negative
womanhood as she presented. For she was sure that he did take pleasure
in her society, now, in an odd, misogynistical way--that he was glad
when he saw her come stumbling and tottering across the bridge of
slippery stones to him of a morning, sometimes even staying herself by
one hand on the moist slabs of moss-grown rock that lay in her passage,
the other holding high and dry her budget of letters and news. His
voice, as he bade her good morning, sometimes even without looking
up--he was so occupied--testified to a certain pleasurable anticipation
of her company, or at least she thought so.
“Oh, only your bridge-maker!” she used to say to him as she came up,
frankly accepting the position. “I have put three new stones in to-day.”
“He doesn’t treat me as if I were a woman at all!” she said to herself
bitterly, “and I believe I am less of a woman than I was. I am more
manly; I think less of my looks and more of my muscles. I never even
knew I had any, till I came here!” She sighed. “Yes, I see I must
cultivate this aspect of me, and keep the eternal feminine relentlessly
down. It would frighten him, or at any rate disturb him. Would it? Ah, I
dare not try. I must stay as I am, absolutely non-committal!”
She sighed again.