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.{120}
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{121} 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 demon{122}stration, 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.{123}
“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!{124}”
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{125} 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 ir?, 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!{126}
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,{127} 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.{128}
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{129} 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.{130}
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{131} 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 ph?be 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 her{132}self. 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{133} 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{134} 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{135} 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{136} 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 ph?be 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.
