She was lying on her bed at the “Heather Bell,” with only a very
confused recollection of what had happened, and a bandaged foot that
hurt dreadfully. A doctor had been sent for from Barnard Castle, so she
was told, who had pronounced it only a slight sprain, but the skin of
her leg was abraded from knee to instep, and that was the cause of the
pain. She could not remember how it had happened--there was a jagged
bough, or a snag, she supposed, of the tree that Rivers had held on to,
as the flood rushed past them, and which had caught her, somehow, as she
slid down in his arms. She was a little light-headed still, and she kept
calling out for the artist like a fretful child, and upbraiding him for
refusing to come to her. Jane Anne, who was in and out of her room a
great deal, treated these appeals sternly, and ministered to her with
stony, condemnatory eyes, but Mrs. Watson’s motherly heart was melted by
her distress.
“Just ye get yerself well, ma honey, and then ye’ll see him! He’s sore
put out about ye, sure and that he is, and he’s alway axing me how you’s
getting on. But ye must just keep yerself quiet!”
Realizing that her only chance of seeing Rivers depended on her
recovery, the restless woman put great constraint upon herself, and in a
couple of days, was well enough to be carried downstairs and laid on a
horsehair sofa in the sitting-room.
Her first day downstairs happened to be a hopelessly wet day, and the
artist was perforce kept indoors, and painted all day at her side. He
was busy, of course, but with extreme unselfishness he offered to read
aloud to her.
Tears of gratitude came into her eyes as she realised this.
“I couldn’t let you,” she said, “but if you would let me talk to you a
little, and go on painting--the foreground, or some part that doesn’t
matter--?”
He smiled, and turned so as to face her. “Don’t let me get absorbed,
then, and stray into the middle distance! I can’t promise anything when
I have got a brush in my hand.”
“Tell me all about the other day,” she said. “You saved my life!”
“Which you very foolishly risked to save mine!” She was weak and he
unconsciously spoke in the aggressively cheerful, indulgent tone one
uses to an invalid. “I was very angry with you indeed for jumping in
after me like that. A shout would have done.”
“I did call to you, but I could not make you hear.”
“Your voice must have been drowned by the rushing of the water. I knew
that there was something wrong, though. I looked up from my drawing, and
saw the water coming, and you a yard from the bank!”
At the sound of the word drawing she gave a little scream--she had quite
forgotten it!
“I know--I know--the drawing! What became of the drawing?”
“Well, you know, I had to have my hands free--” he began, almost
apologetically.
“Of course! For me! And now I remember seeing you fling it away on to
the bank. Was it”--she spoke with bated breath, as one might speak of
the fall of empires--“was it quite spoiled?”
“Pretty bad,” he answered, moodily.
“You can’t think how I wish you had not saved me at its expense! Why did
you? Why did you?” she asked, with absolute sincerity.
Rivers seemed to repent of his lapse into temper, slight as it had been.
He said, laughingly, “Well, I must tell you that I thought it over! It
was a fearful wrench, of course, but I decided in your favour. Do you
blame me?”
She resented his not taking her seriously, and replied, gravely, “Yes, I
do. I was not worth the drawing to you, I am sure. You should have
considered it first of all. Who was it--was it Cæsar--who swam across
the Channel with his Commentaries in his mouth?”
“He did--something of the kind--but I never heard that he had a woman to
look after as well.”
“And then--you carried me home?” she went on, in a tone of sentimental
reminiscence.
“Yes,” he replied, briskly. “One couldn’t have got a carriage down
there, and I could hardly have packed you into Farmer Ward’s
wheelbarrow!”
“Did anyone see you carry me across the fields?”
“Mrs. Popham did,” he said, laughing at the recollection. “She even
offered to help me! A woman who could hardly lift a fly!”
“I must have looked awful!” Mrs. Elles pondered; she had often thought
it over. “A wet woman is such an abject object!... And then you carried
me up to bed?”
“Yes. Mrs. Watson was very anxious to get her son, Jock, to do it--but I
thought of Jock and how he would have knocked your head against the
banisters at every step, so I insisted on doing it myself.”
“And then?”
“And then the doctor came, and saw you, and saw me, and told me it was
not much--and then I was easier in my mind.”
“Then you were anxious about me?”
“Very,” he said. “Poor thing, you suffered so; and you were so good
about it!”
“Was I? I am glad.”
She then returned to the subject that was distressing her. “Are you sure
you don’t regret the drawing--are not cross with me about it? Isn’t it
in that portfolio--what remains of it? Show it me.”
“Oh, no, no!” he said, shuddering.
But she had reached out for the portfolio that lay near her hand, and,
with the wilfulness of illness, insisted on taking out the hopelessly
blurred, grey-streaked sheet of paper stretched on a board. There was a
hole in the paper, the size of a shilling, just where the sky-line met
the cliff. It was utterly ruined, as the merest tyro in art must have
realised.
“Oh, poor, poor thing! A snag has caught it, too, like my leg,” she
moaned.
Rivers dabbled furiously away in the glass of water with his fat brush.
He was an artist and human.
“I wish you would take it away!” he said, sulkily, without looking at it
or her.
“Where to?” asked Mrs. Elles, almost weeping.
“Oh, anywhere--to the devil, if you like.”
“I’ll put it in my room, then,” she said, calmly. “I shall like to have
it as a memento.”
She slyly dropped it behind the sofa until she could carry it upstairs,
and he did not seem even to notice what she was doing.
* * * * *
The next day was very fine, and the artist had perforce to go out and
paint as usual. Mrs. Elles felt unutterably solitary. She could not walk
as far as Brignal, but she could not expect Rivers to stop at home and
neglect his picture in order to amuse her. She virtuously stayed
upstairs on one floor, as she was recommended to do, until evening, but
she was too restless to sit or lie still, and wandered about from one
room of the old inn to another.
There were three bedrooms on the first story, hers and Rivers’ and one
unoccupied room whose floor was on a somewhat higher level than the
others, up a tiny flight of stairs. She “changed the air,” as Mrs.
Watson put it, by sitting in there some part of the morning, and once an
irresistible impulse led her into the artist’s room, which was the most
ascetic and the least comfortable of the three.
She stayed a long while looking out of the window, gazing fondly at the
view which must meet his eyes every morning as he lay in his bed. It was
very nearly the same as that which met hers, naturally, since the two
rooms adjoined.
She noticed a chair, drawn between the dressing-table and the window. He
sat there, she supposed, sometimes, and looked out. So would she.
But she found herself looking in, not out. Her loving eyes gloated on
all the details of his room; the little heap of sketch books on the
corner of the dressing-table; the martyred pocket-handkerchief, stained
all the colours of the rainbow, that he had used to dab his drawing
with; and the razors, that he kept so sharp, wherewith to scrape down
its surface, lying beside those devoted to his own use; the three mother
o’ pearl studs placed neatly on the ledge of the looking-glass, beside
the heap of pence he had last turned out of his pockets; the fair white
china palettes that he made a point of washing out carefully with his
own hands, and whereon it was now her adored occupation to “rub” the
delicate proportions of each colour required during the day. All this
curious intermixture of art materials and objects of personal use, so
characteristic of the artist’s room, struck her sense of dramatic
incongruity and pleased her. Then she leaned out over the sill in a
dream of what never could be, and forgot herself. Half an hour elapsed.
A slight rustle behind her warned her of the presence of Jane Anne, who,
aggressively remarking, “I came to see to the blind,” established
herself there with a needle and cotton and drove Mrs. Elles away,
although to uninitiated eyes the blind seemed in very good order.
She went into her own room and spent the afternoon there; she fell
asleep, or she would have heard voices in the room below--the
sitting-room she shared with Rivers.
A little, thin, consumptive-looking woman of fifty, in a homely
utilitarian suit of tweeds which made her look like a schoolgirl, was
interviewing Jane Anne on the subject of the harmonium’s programme for
next Sunday. She was the Vicar’s wife, and, that subject concluded, the
pair had moved across the hall and over the threshold of Rivers’
sitting-room, the door of which stood carelessly open.
“Out?” said Mrs. Popham, with an interrogatory gesture. “Both of them?”
“He’s out,” answered Jane Anne. “She’s upstairs!”
“Now, who and what is she?” asked the other, in the tone of decent
curiosity. “I asked your aunt, but she says she knows nothing, and
doesn’t care.”
“Aunt’s fulish!”
“I told her she’d care fast enough if her inn were to lose its
character, as it’s in a very fine way to do with all this. Mr. Popham
and I have been talking about it only to-day. Everybody is talking about
it!” Mrs. Popham spoke as if Rokeby were a centre of civilization.
“Several people saw Mr. Rivers carrying her back across the fields, the
day of her accident, and we all wonder what her relationship to him can
be! Frick is a foreign name. Is she a foreigner?”
“Nay, she’s right English!” Jane Anne replied, with conviction,
forgetting, in her excitement, to mince her words as usual. “And Frick
is not her name, neither!”
“How do you know that? Then I am right and my husband is wrong. He is
for taking the most charitable view of her, as indeed he does of
everyone--but I told him that I was perfectly convinced, in my own mind,
that the woman is an adventuress of the most disreputable kind!
Everything proves it!”
“Can you tell me what is meant precisely by an adventuress, Ma’am?” her
favourite Sunday-school teacher enquired, pedantically.
“People mean by an adventuress,” Mrs. Popham replied, “an unclassed
creature, a person with no visible means of subsistence or regular
occupation. They go about the country seeing whom they can make fools
of. There are plenty of them about, I am told. Russian spies, some of
them, who worm themselves into families as governesses, and so on, in
order to surprise secrets. What this one can possibly want with Mr.
Rivers, I can’t tell, but no good, I am sure!”
“Him to marry her!” said Jane Anne sombrely, as one who had thought out
thoroughly all the tragic issues of the case.
“It is possible,” said Mrs. Popham, “and he is so good, so trusting,
that anybody could take him in who set herself to do it, as this
creature is probably doing. I can’t tell you how it distresses me that
such a nice man should be made a prey of! It must really be put a stop
to, Jane Anne!”
“Yes, Ma’am,” eagerly agreed Jane, forgetting to be dignified. Whether
Mrs. Elles should prove to be a Russian spy or not, the important thing
was to separate her from Mr. Rivers. “She isn’t fit for him. I can’t
abide her myself. I mistrusted her from the very first time I set eyes
on her. Nasty painted thing! She’s only got two dresses to her back, and
yet she wears rings worth I don’t know how much! Great big stones. She
sings foreign songs to him, of an evening, in all sorts of queer
languages--on my piano! He niver speaks a word to me now that she’s
come! He used to say a kind word now and then. She was out with him in
the Park, one night lately, till I don’t know what hour. It’s not
decent! I was waiting at my window and I saw through a chink in the
trees--I can see all down the Broad Walk, if I have a mind. I waited
long enough, and I saw them come back down the walk together, and the
moon was shining full on them, and I saw--” She hesitated.
“Was he?--Was she--?” Mrs. Popham asked, with timid, scared eagerness.
“They were walking hand in hand,” said Jane Anne, shyly, “and if that’s
not being lovers, I don’t know what is!”
Her face relaxed, and she burst into tears.
“Don’t, Jane Anne, don’t go on like that! Perhaps they are engaged. My
husband says so,” said Mrs. Popham, assuming that the staid girl’s tears
proceeded from her sense of outraged morality. “But still, it is a very
odd way to behave. They ought to get married, that’s all I can say!”
“Oh, ma’am, Mr. Rivers and a woman like that, with her painted cheeks
and her hair--well, I shouldn’t like to have to swear that it is even
her own! She’s not respectable, even if she is engaged to him. I could
tell you things--and so could Dorothy, who waits on them!”
“Sh-h!” said the Vicar’s wife. “But we must get her away from him,
somehow, Jane Anne.”
“Oh, Ma’am, if we only could! Dear Mr. Rivers! I’d do anything I could.
Only, she can’t walk now.”
“If she is what we think her, that sprain of hers may be just a ruse.
It probably is. I can bring myself to believe anything of a woman who
masquerades under an assumed name. How do you know, by the way, that it
is so?”
Jane Anne went into Rivers’ room with the air of one performing a
religious rite, and fetched an umbrella out of the corner and handed it
solemnly to the Vicar’s wife.
“That is hers!” she said.
Mrs. Popham held it up to the light and read--in characters half effaced
by time, not by prudence--the letters “P. E.” on its battered, silver
handle, and, furthermore, the address, 59 Saville Place, Newcastle.
“E. doesn’t spell Frick!” said the Board School girl, proudly.
“I don’t quite like doing it,” murmured the Vicar’s wife.
“But--really--I can’t let this go on! It can do her no harm if she is
respectable, and if she isn’t--? One must think of Mr. Rivers! Read out
that address again, Jane Anne.”
Jane Anne looked quite animated as she did so, and Mrs. Popham wrote it
down in a note-book.
“Now, put the umbrella back!” that lady added, in rather a shame-faced
way, “and leave it all to me. And, Jane Anne, mind you practise up that
thing of Arcadelt’s in time for Divine service; you seemed rather weak
in it last Sunday, or perhaps you were not attending? I saw her in
church. She probably gets Mr. Rivers to take her there to throw a little
dust in all our eyes. I notice she never kneels or sings. It is
evidently the first time she has ever been regularly to church in her
life!”