Starvecrow Farm. Stanley John Weyman

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СКАЧАТЬ more amenable, should he then think it worth while to convert her. For the present his eloquence was stayed in midstream. Yet he could not be altogether silent, for he was a man to whom words were very dear.

      "Well," he said in a lower tone, "there is something in that, sweet. But I know worse of him than that. You may think it right to transport a man for seven years for poaching a hare----"

      "They should not poach," she said lightly, "and they would not be transported!"

      "But you will think differently of flogging a man to death!"

      Her face flushed.

      "I don't believe it!" she cried.

      "On his ship in Plymouth Harbour they will tell you differently."

      "I don't believe it!" she replied, with passion. And then, "How horrid you are!" she continued. "And it is nearly dark! Why do you talk of such things? You are jealous of him--that is what you are!"

      He saw the wisdom of sliding back into their old relations, and he seized the opportunity her words offered.

      "Yes," he murmured, "I am jealous of him. And why not? I am jealous of the wind that caresses your cheek, of the carpet that feels your tread, of the star that peeps in at your window! I am jealous of all who come near you, or speak to you, or look at you!"

      "Are you really?"--in a tone of childish delight. "As jealous as that?"

      He swore it with many phrases.

      "And you will be so always?" she sighed softly, leaning towards him. "Always--Alan?"

      "To eternity!" he answered. And emboldened by her melting mood, he would have taken her hand, and perhaps more than her hand, but at that moment the lights of the inn at Newby Bridge flashed on them suddenly, the roar of the water as it rushed over the weirs surprised their ears, the postboys cracked their whips, and the carriage bounded and rattled over the steep pitch of the narrow bridge. A second or two later it came to a stand before the inn amid a crowd of helpers and stable lads, whose lanthorns dazzled the travellers' eyes.

      They stayed only to change horses, then were away again. But the halt sufficed to cool his courage; and as they pounded on monotonously through the night, the darkness and the dim distances of river and lake--for they were approaching the shores of Windermere--produced their natural effect on Henrietta's feelings. She had been travelling since early morning cooped and cramped within the narrow chaise; she had spent the previous night in a fever of suspense and restlessness. Now, though slowly, the gloom, the dark outlines of the woods, and that sense of loneliness which seizes upon all who are flung for the first time among strange surroundings, began to tell upon the spirits even of nineteen. She did not admit the fact to herself--she would have died before she confessed it to another; but disillusion had begun its subtle task.

      Here were all the things for which she had panted--the dear, delightful things of which she had dreamed: the whirl of the postchaise through the night, the crack of the whips, the cries of the postboys, the lighted inns, the dripping woods, the fear of pursuit, the presence of her lover! And already they were growing flat. Already the savour was escaping from them. There were tears in her heart, tears very near her eyes.

      He could have taken her hand then, and more than her hand. For suddenly she recognised, with a feeling nearer terror than her flighty nature had ever experienced before, her complete dependence on him. Henceforth love, comfort, kindness, companionship--all must come from him. She had flung from her every stay but his, every hand but his. He was become her all, her world. And could she trust him? Not only with her honour--she never dreamed of doubting that--but could she trust him afterwards? To be kind to her, to be good to her, to be generous to her? Thoughtless, inexperienced, giddy as she was, Henrietta trembled. A pitiful sob rose in her throat. It needed but little, very little, and she had cast herself in abandonment on her lover's breast and there wept out her fears and her doubts.

      But he had also his anxieties, and he let the moment pass by him unmarked. He had reasons, other and more urgent than those he had given her, for taking this road and for staying the night in a place whence Whitehaven and Carlisle were equally accessible; and those reasons had seemed good enough in the day when the fear of pursuit had swayed him. They seemed less pertinent now. He began to wish that he had taken another road, pursued another course. And he was deep in a brown study, in which love had no part, when an exclamation, at once of surprise and admiration, recalled him to the present.

      They had topped a bare shoulder and come suddenly in sight of Lake Windermere. The moon had not long risen above the hills on their right, the water lay on their left; below them stretched a long pale mirror, whose borrowed light, passing over the dark woods which framed it, faintly lit and explored the stupendous fells and mountains that rose beyond. To Stewart it was no unfamiliar or noteworthy sight; and his eyes, after a passing glance of approval, turned to the road below them and marked with secret anxiety the spot where two or three lights indicated their halting-place.

      But to Henrietta the sight, as unexpected as it was beautiful, appealed in a manner never to be forgotten. She held her breath, and slowly her eyes filled. Half subdued by fatigue and darkness, half awake to the dangers and possibilities of her situation, she was in the mood most fit to be moved by the tender melancholy of the scene. She was feeling a craving for something--for something to comfort her, for something to reassure her, for something on which to lean in the absence of all the common things of life: and there broke on her the mystic beauty of this moonlit lake, and it melted her. Her heart, hitherto untouched, awoke. The compact which she had made with her lover stood for naught. The tears running down her face, she turned to him, she held out her hands to him.

      "Kiss me!" she murmured. "And say--say you will be good to me! I have only you now!--only you!--only you!"

      He caught her in his arms and kissed her rapturously; and the embrace was ardent enough to send the scarlet surging to her temples, to set her heart throbbing. But the chaise was in the very act of drawing up at the door of the inn; and it may be doubted if he tasted the full sweetness of the occasion. A face looked in at the carriage window, on the side farther from the lake appeared a bowing landlord, a voice inquired, "Horses on?" The postchaise stopped.

CHAPTER II

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A RED WAISTCOAT

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      Cheerful lights shining from the open doorway and the red-curtained windows of the inn, illumined the road immediately before it; and if these and the change in all the surroundings did not at once dispel the loneliness at Henrietta's heart, at least they drove the tears from her eyes and the blushes from her cheeks. The cold moonlight, the unchanging face of nature, had sobered and frightened her; the warmth of fire and candle, the sound of voices, and the low, homely front of the house, with its two projecting gables, reassured her. The forlorn child who had flung herself into her lover's arms not forty seconds before was not to be recognised in the girl who alighted slowly and with gay self-possession, took in the scene at a glance, and won the hearts of ostler and stableboy by her ease and her fresh young beauty. She was bare-headed, and her high-dressed hair, a little disordered by the journey, gleamed in the lanthorn-light. Her eyes were like stars. The landlord of the inn--known for twenty miles round as "Long Tom Gilson"--saw at a glance that the missus's tongue would run on her. He СКАЧАТЬ