Mrs. Elles never put the spectacles on again. They had made no
difference--except to herself. And further intimacy with Rivers
convinced her that any such artificial safeguards against flirtation
were quite unnecessary.
She realized his want of sympathy and humanity, his elaborate attitude
of standing aside from the problems of life in favour of a closer
contemplation of those of Nature. It was Nature he loved, and Nature
only, with his full heart. The human interest was a purely secondary
consideration with him. Not “in many mortal forms” did he seek “the
shadow of that idol.” He was Alastor and she was the Lady. She must
remember that. Alastor could doubtless have done quite well without the
Lady. She represented the ever-restless Spirit of Humanity which Alastor
had come into the wilderness to avoid. And, for his sake, for the sake
of her valued privileges, she must learn to keep it in abeyance and
suppress it as far as she could. She must love Nature too. It was
difficult, for though, in her quality of romanticist, she had always
talked a good deal about it. Nature, to her, was merely a background for
people, just as flowers were an adornment for her bodice or her parlour.
But the very conditions of her tenure here demanded that she should
accommodate herself to the mood of her companion. Since, by happy
chance, she was admitted to be an inmate with him of the terrestrial
Paradise of which he was the tutelary God, she must contrive, as animals
do, to adapt herself to her new habitat. She thought of herself as a
tremulous, storm-tossed soul, newly entered into bliss, and afraid to
compromise her precarious happiness by any assumption of right or too
marked a signalizing of her presence there.
With this end in view, she began to cultivate a capacity for silence, an
art of self-effacement, a spirit-like vagueness of outline. Her wish was
to dissimulate her personality as far as was possible, and merely to
form, as it were, part of the silent, unobtrusive world of Nature that
he loved. It was a stiff novitiate to a complete education.
Her plan was successful, on the whole. The painter began to take her as
a matter of course, to treat her as if she had always been there, as a
busy man might treat a sister, or a college companion, without ceremony,
but with much protective kindness and camaraderie. She was sure that the
notion of her being in any way compromised by her stay with him in this
lonely inn never so much as entered his mind. It was not that he was
ignorant of conventions; he was simply too preoccupied to think of them.
But, indeed, the new brightness of her eyes, bred of her happiness, the
lovely, natural colour in her cheeks, the conscious curve of her red
lips, inevitably suggested the world’s cry for a chaperon. She had been
an interesting woman when she came to Rokeby; she was now almost a
beautiful one. The little hollows in her cheeks had filled up; her
figure had improved; she was like a blue serge wood nymph darting about
the broken pathways and shelving banks of this embowered painter’s
paradise.
She knew, with a woman’s intuition, that he was not entirely blind to
her beauty. His eye rested on her with the same searching and
affectionate gaze with which it might linger on a “beautiful bit,” as
the technical phrase runs; and the light in her eyes and the changes in
her expression, as the varying moods flitted over her face, were to him
as the cloud shadows chasing each other over Barningham Moor, or the
sunlight glinting in the brown pools of the Greta where it was deepest.
It was something, but not enough. A woman does not care to be looked at
as if she were a landscape by the man whom she passionately loves. She
longed to draw from him some personal expression of admiration; but,
beyond an occasional “Well done!” upon the performance of some unusually
agile feat of climbing, she was always disappointed.
Others noticed the improvement in her looks and health and told her of
it.
“On my word, Miss,” remarked the landlady of the “Heather Bell” to her,
one afternoon, when she was “learning her,” by a course of practical
demonstration, to make the cake of the country, “ye’re fair credit to
the ‘Heather Bell!’ Ye look twice the woman ye did when ye first comed
here, not near so peaked and piny like! I’ll be bound the gentleman
thinks so, too! Eh, we shall see what we shall see!”
“What shall we see, Mrs. Watson?” asked Mrs. Elles, complaisantly,
leaning her elbows on the floury table. She was always most susceptible
to any kind of compliment, and to do her justice, she had no idea of the
woman’s meaning.
“You and he will be setting up together, one of these fine days! Eh, I
see what I see! I’m none blind, honey.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Watson!”
“Nae nonsense at all! He tak’s a good deal o’ notish on ye, I consider.
I was just a-saying sae to oor Jane Anne later than yesterday. Sorrow
befaa’ my tongue--she’s fair upset aboot it, I can tell ye!”
“Jane Anne! Upset?”
“Ay, sure, who but Jane Anne Cawthorne? She’s got a bit fancy for Mr.
Rivers hersel’, ye mun knaw. She sends a’ the ither lads away on his
account, he that’s never thinkin’ of her! I whiles say to her, ‘Hout,
lass, he’ll never tak’ that much notice on ye, beyond lending ye some
beuk ye’s a deal better without.’ I don’t hold wi’ readin’, mysel’, he
knaw. But the fond lass shakes her head and says nowt, and throws away
the bonny flowers ye put in his glass, and sets some on her own pickin’
there.”
“Yes, I have noticed that,” said Mrs. Elles sharply.
“And I’ll wager he’s niver so much as gien her a chuck on the chin, for
all she’s walk barefoot to Barney Cassel and back for him. Eh, it’s you
that’s got him. Mistress Popham was axing me, only the other day, when
ye was going to get the vicar to call ye?”
“Call us! What’s that?”
“Ask ye; call the banns in church. Eh, that’ll be a grand day for us
all. Noo, there’s a bonny cake,” she ended, clapping it on to the
“girdle,” “and you and he can have it cold to your teas.”
“Did you ever lend or give Jane Anne books?” she asked Rivers, at
dinner, that night.
“I ordered her a set of George Eliot’s novels once,” he said, “and all
Scott’s. She’s clever enough to get something out of them. I see that
from what she says to me about them. She is quite a superior girl.”
“I don’t like her, and she doesn’t like me. And novels--that she only
half understands--put things into her head that are better out of it.
Now, suppose this girl, Jane Anne, were to write to my people and betray
me,” she said, with a slightly simulated expression of apprehension.
“Why should she betray you?” he said, showing by his slight accent on
the betray that he thought it somewhat too forcible. “She would have no
object.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Elles. “I am not a criminal. And besides, there is no
one for her to betray me to. I owe nobody any allegiance. I am perfectly
independent. There is not a soul in the world who cares what becomes of
me!”
She sighed appropriately as she uttered this fiction, but if she had
expected Mr. Rivers to openly commiserate her, she was disappointed. It
was by no means the first time. Alastor always refused to take any
interest in the fortunes of the Lady before she came to him.
She wondered if he even took in the idea of the lonely and friendless
condition. Did he really swallow the legend of herself that she had been
at such pains to concoct and serve up to him when she first came?
The lies she had told him, in the light of the new morality that her
intercourse with his blameless rectitude had flashed upon her, began to
weigh heavily upon her regenerate soul. He was so straight, so sincere,
so guileless, so simple, she might tell him what she chose and he would
credit her story as that of one holding the same rigid code of honour as
himself. She was beginning to realize, as she had never realized before,
what that code of honour--what every gentleman’s code of honour--was.
It was not so much that it was wrong to lie, but it was a mark of
ill-breeding, and her cheeks burned at the recollection of the
imposition she had practised--was still practising--on this gentleman.
He had asked her no questions, and she had told him lies!
The only little point of comfort which she could wrest for herself from
circumstances was the possibility that he had not chosen to burden his
mind--full of tree and cloud forms, and such artistic lumber--with her
story as she had related it to him. Was it likely that a man, with his
strange and disconcerting capacity for the ignoring of details and all
the minor facts of life, should have permitted anything so human and
unimportant to make an impression on his mind? No, it had probably
glided off him, while every mutation of the sunset they had watched
together yesterday was indelibly fixed in his memory. Of what
consequence were she and her trifling affairs in comparison? So she
thought and hoped, in the new humility which her love for him had
engendered in her.
Still, in spite of these halcyon days, it was impossible that she could
entirely shut out the thought of the future. Things could not stay as
they were. The stack of canvas umbrella covers, and packing cases, piled
out of the way in all the four corners of the sitting-room, reminded the
poor young woman only too painfully of the dies iræ, dies illa--when the
autumn tints, beloved of amateurs, would begin to show and bear their
indubitable message. The leaves would turn brown and fall, and the lover
of Nature would pack up his colour box, and strap his easels together,
and look out a train in Bradshaw, and order the trap over-night to take
him to the station at Barnard Castle.
What should she say then? What should she do? He was everything to her,
and she was nothing to him. She was the wife of Mortimer Elles, and her
home was in Newcastle!
But it was borne in upon her that, come what might, she could never go
back to Mortimer. The mere contemplation of a renewed term of life with
him was terrible and impossible to her, now that she had known the
greatest good, the highest development of which human nature was
capable, in the person of this man in whose intimacy she was living.
There were times when she could not bear her own thoughts, when she
would jump up and leave the room where Rivers sat composedly working,
and, hatless and cloakless, run out into the moonlit road and even into
the Park itself. The painter, in his absorption, would never even look
up or seem to hear the panting breaths that betrayed her emotion.
Bitterly did she con this and other signs of his indifference, as she
wandered deviously about the glades and alleys of the great demesne, now
under the staring moonlight, now where the over-arching trees shut it
hopelessly out and made walking a mere matter of outstretched hands and
groping steps. Even the darksome yew grove--the haunt of the Lady of
Mortham--had no terrors for her now. Love casts out fear; a woman in her
state of mind has no horror of the supernatural.
One night, the most beautiful moonlight night of the whole year, she
wandered far into the Park and along to the banks of the Greta, where it
runs under the shadow of the cliffs crowned with fir trees, and the
desolate tower of Mortham stands out against the sky behind them. She
scrambled down the bank, on the hither side, to one of the little
stretches of pebbly shore that line the stream here and there and stood
wistfully gazing into its flow, her hands crossed at the back of her
neck, a white lady, “mystic, wonderful.”
The further shore lay all in mysterious shadow, but at her feet was a
sheet of rippling silver, with dark oily rocks, like islands or sleeping
seals, breaking through its course here and there. She saw, in
imagination, a drowned woman lying there in mid-stream, face upwards,
caught among the snags and snares that clogged the shallows, and
irradiated by the same moon rays that turned the brown water white.
“Look there!” she said, wildly, turning sharply round to Rivers, who was
standing behind her. “Look! I see myself there!”
She was so wrought up that she felt and showed no surprise at his
presence. It was so picturesquely natural that she should be standing
there in the moonlight, on the bank of the most romantic river in the
whole world, with the only man she had ever loved. Time and chance had
combined to bring about this hour. Rivers had never thought of following
her before.
But he completely ignored her morbid speech. She was hurt, though,
indeed, it was what she might have expected. She said no more, but stood
looking tragically down into the flood.
“By Jove, but it is fine!” the artist presently murmured to himself, in
tones of deep conviction.
Nature--mere non-sentient, abstract Nature again--and a woman, eager,
passionate and romantic, standing by him!
“Don’t you wish you had your sketch book here?” that woman asked him,
bitterly.
“Oh, I can remember it!” he replied, simply. “But I am very glad I came
out. How did you happen to know there was a moon, and that she would be
shining over this reach of the river?”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I just came out--I don’t know why--I
suppose, because I was restless.”
She sighed, and fingered her sash, and sighed again.
“How did you know where I had gone? I have been”--reproachfully--“an
hour away, and you never even looked up when I left the room!”
“I missed you, though,” he said. “I feel things, sometimes, when I am
very busy, without seeing them.”
“Perhaps, then, it occurred to you that I might have got into mischief,”
she went on lightly. “You didn’t know that I come here nearly every
night?”
“Why not?”
“And yet this is the first time you have followed me!” she said,
regretfully. “Yes, I come here, night after night, and I look down into
this pool, and I imagine myself lying in it with my face turned up to
the moon, drowned and dead, and at an end of all my troubles, and you
hearing of it, and being a little--a very little--sorry for me!”
“But you are surely not thinking of committing suicide, are you?” he
asked her, quite calmly, “for, really, no one would have the slightest
excuse for falling in off this miniature beach?”
She made a gesture of impatience--then she laughed, in tragic impotence.
“One can drown oneself in a teacup, if one has a mind. But I think I
will go up the bank, now, and put myself out of the reach of
temptation.”
“Do you want to go indoors? If not, let us walk a little way to the
Junction, if you don’t mind? I want to see the Greta meet the Tees under
this strong moonlight. It must be magnificent. It is a shame to stay in
the house when the moon is out like this. Browning speaks of her
‘unhandsome thrift of silver.’ There’s plenty of her now, isn’t there?
Glorious! It is a night of nights!”
Mrs. Elles agreed with him--but from a different point of view.
“Are you frightened?” he asked her, as they left the river bank and
began gropingly to follow a track between two darknesses of tangled
brushwood.
“Not with you!” she said, manfully; and he did not offer his arm.
She walked along, a little in front of him, in the narrow path they had
chosen, a short cut to the place where the two rivers meet. She was
wearing her thin, clinging white gown, and, without the unromantic
adjuncts of hat, parasol, or gloves, she looked as ghostly, as unreal,
as far removed from the commonplace, as even she herself could have
wished.
They reached the Junction, just outside the Park confines, where the
brown moorland flood of the Greta, hasty, capricious, passionate, like
herself, merged into the broad, calm flood of the Tees--flowing quietly,
in its great volume and depth, over its granite-bouldered bed under
Wycliffe. Rivers, for some reason or other, took off his hat, stood--his
hair looking quite white in the moonshine--silent, his artist soul,
presumably, stirred to the very depths by the mysterious harmonies of
tone and magnificent lines of composition which the sight afforded him.
“How well that comes!” he murmured, passionately, while the woman beside
him stood breathless, affected, too, by the vision, but in her own way;
weaving her fanciful, personal allegories of him, and her, and the two
rivers, and longing for some signs in him of the more human enthusiasm
that she could have shared.
She shivered, but not from cold. “We must go back!” he said, in response
to her unspoken complaint.
They turned and walked up the glen--the moon had gone behind a cloud,
and the Greta lay dull and sullen under the hanging terraces of trees.
But in the yew grove was darkness unspeakable.
“Oh, I can’t see you,” she murmured, involuntarily; “I shall lose you!”
He silently held out his hand to her, and she took it.
When they came out into the Broad Walk where it was lighter, she
dutifully made a little movement to withdraw her hand--a very slight
movement--but he did not accept it.
He had forgotten! Was there another man in the world who could thus hold
and retain a woman’s hand without knowing it?
In all her life, such pure, unalloyed happiness had not been hers, as
they walked up to the gates of the Park together. It was just ten
o’clock.
In the hall of the inn, he lit her candle, as usual, and gave it to her.
She held it just under her chin, and it lighted up her face, blanched
and spiritualized by the emotions she had gone through. He looked at
her, for once, very closely.
“You look, to-night,” he said, in the dreamy voice he only used
sometimes, “like the Spirit of the Greta that peered through the window
at me the other night. I told you about it at the time, did I not? It
was a strange hallucination! Quite white and pale, and its eyes fixed
meaningly on me. The lines of the face, as I remember it now, were
curiously like yours, or is it that you have identified yourself with
that spirit in my thoughts? I have never got it quite out of my head, do
you know!”
“Why should you try?” was all that Phœbe Elles could find to say. A mist
seemed to have come over her eyes, and she bade him “good-night,” and
stumbled helplessly over her gown as she went upstairs.
She lay awake all night. She cried quietly to herself. This was what she
had wanted. This was life. She was very happy and yet most miserable.
Did this man care for her? Yes? No? A little? There was no knowing. His
ways were not as the ways of other men--at least, not the men she had
known--and the ordinary canons of flirtation, as she knew them, had no
correspondence with his conduct towards her.
She thought he liked her; she knew she loved him; that was what it all
came to.
She was an honourable woman, with a newly super-added canon of honour,
and she did not dream of being false to her husband. If Rivers loved her
as she loved him, she ought to go away. That was her clear duty to
herself, to him and to Mortimer.
Mortimer would take her back--of that she had not the slightest doubt.
There was no reason why he should ever hear of this, her vagary, among
the green shades of Brignal. She might take the train back to Newcastle,
refuse to give any further account of herself than that she had been
away for a holiday or any reason for that holiday except the usual
“nerves” of society, and resume her end of the matrimonial chain without
let or hindrance.
But since she was uncertain as to Rivers’ feelings with regard to her,
hardly that, indeed, since he gave her, literally, no reason to suppose
that he looked upon her in any other light than the light of a friend,
might she not--oh, might she not!--take the benefit of the doubt and
stay there till he went away, and be as happy as she could for as long
as she could? She felt that she must not quarrel with Rivers’ reserve,
since it gave her the title to his company. She decided not to do so.
She was beginning to find him less obscure, for she had learned to seek
for the expression of him in his art: the art by which he chose to
reveal himself to those who had the will and the skill to read. Where
other men spoke or wrote, he painted. She had only to look at the
beautifully stained bits of paper that issued from his hand, to watch
the wonderful combinations of colour--subtle, passionate, striking,
tender--that were evolved by this man of few words, to see that he was
no stranger to the whole gamut of human emotions, full of delightful,
undisciplined moods, and mutabilities, and pleasant perversions of
character. There were strength and force in certain abrupt combinations
that stirred like the sound of a trumpet; there were tenderness and the
fancifulness that women love in certain harmonies that moved almost to
tears. She read sentiment and sweetness in the delicacy of his sunsets,
and character and passion in the gloom of deep cloud-shadows, and sullen
mist-wreaths lurking in clefts and hollows of the hills, and mystery in
the tangled undergrowth whose complication and variety he rendered so
well.
There was one drawing of his that she specially cared for, and whose
progress she surveyed as she might that of a beloved child of his brain
and hers. “Oh, Brignal Banks are wild and fair!” says the lady in
Scott’s ballad, and here they were, caught and immortalized forever on
one piece of Whatman’s paper, three feet by two. There was hardly any
sky in it. The leafy, heavily-berried coverts hung tossing from the
cliff, streaming down to the water’s edge, that lay, in brown pools,
deep and immutable, like a true man’s heart, at its base. In the
immediate foreground was the broken mass of stones that formed the bed
of the wayward river that had so many moods, both of grave and gay.
There the painter sat, on one of these stones, with the water parted and
rippling all round him, in the most precarious of positions, his drawing
propped on his knee, uncomfortably, his feet nearly in the stream. The
burning sun shone straight down on his head, for there was no foothold
for his umbrella in the spot which he had chosen. He never spared
himself, or complained of the terrible constriction of the chest, which
the constrained attitude of stooping necessarily engendered. Perhaps he
did not notice it in the excitement of his work. She sat under his
umbrella, on the bank, and watched him.
Morning after morning she sat there, as it were in a bay of opalescent
colours; the horizon of her landscape bounded by the pink cliffs and
overhanging belts of trees, the foreground quivering with refraction,
and golden with the flowering ragwort. She was drunk, but not blind with
light, and lulled continually by the hum of the bees at their task and
the self-satisfied purl of the stream at her feet, she sat peacefully
noting and enjoying the dreamy transitions of a painter’s day.
To herself, she seemed to be fast becoming a “green thought in a green
shade”--the fanciful title of Rivers’ picture, adopted from his
favourite poet, Marvel--her favourite, too, now. Rivers was for ever
associated in her mind with green, the colour of hope; she had banished
grey--the colour of despair and Newcastle--from her mind, as it
certainly existed not in the landscape before her eyes. Newcastle, under
its smoky pall, and Rokeby, in its gorgeous vestiture of many colours,
could not surely form a part of the same hemisphere. And the
extraordinary thing was, that she had run away to find adventure, and
had found peace! She had thought she had need of a world full of men,
and now the society of one summed up all interest, all excitement, all
hope, all that she had ever dreamed. She had longed for the fuller life
of cities; now a lonely grove by the side of the river sufficed her.
Her eyes--she never read, or cared to read--were continually fixed on
the stooping figure, in its neutral garb of brown, perched so
precariously on a rock in mid-stream. In front of his post was the dell
of Brignal, where the river wound round abruptly, and seemed to issue
from a darksome hollow, formed by the meeting trees on either bank.
Suddenly, her eyes grew eager and then startled--she fancied all was not
right. Something was different. The hollow was filled up. A brown wall
of water was gathering from that hollow, was advancing, rushing, with a
dull, murmurous roar as of distant thunder, straight down between the
two banks towards the painter.
She sprang to her feet.
Rivers had told her of the Bore of the Greta--she knew how, after a very
slight rainfall such as they had had, the river was used to come down
without warning. This was it! And his life was in danger! She screamed
frantically to the artist, whose head had for an unconscionable time
been bent over his drawing. She screamed as loudly as she could, but her
voice came thinly and hoarsely, so he did not hear her.
Then she began to leap from rock to rock to go to him, when she saw him
suddenly spring to his feet, take in the whole situation at a glance,
and, his drawing held high in the air in one hand, begin to make for the
shore.
Then he caught sight of Phœbe Elles, and his course deviated. She had
not got very far from the bank, but she was in danger, and he was coming
to her. The flood was very nearly on them both. Even in her agony, she
noticed his slight pause of hesitation before he tossed the drawing he
held recklessly on to the bank without looking after it, and the next
moment his protecting arm was round her, and the flood swept partially
over them. His other arm was round the bough of a tree that hung over
the stream near where she was standing when he reached her. They were
both overthrown by the rush of water, which passed over them, and then
seemed to subside somewhat. She fainted, for the first time in her life.