SOME time passed after this eventful evening before Kate had any opportunity of making the assault upon John’s principles which she proposed to herself. There were some days of tranquil peaceful country life, spent in doing nothing particular—in little walks taken under the mother’s eye—in an expedition to St Biddulph’s, the whole little party together, in which, though Dr Mitford took the office of cicerone for Kate’s benefit, there was more of John than of his father. This kind of intercourse which threw them continually together, yet never left them alone to undergo the temptation of saying too much, promoted the intimacy of the two young people in the most wonderful way. They were each other’s natural companions, each other’s most lively sympathisers. The father and the mother stood on a different altitude, were looked up to, respected perhaps, perhaps softly smiled at in the expression of their antiquated opinions; but the young man and the young woman were on the same level, and understood each other. As for poor John, he gave himself up absolutely to the spell. He had never been so long in the society of any young woman before; his imagination had not been frittered away by any preludes of fancy. He fell in love all at once, with all his heart and strength and mind. It was his first great emotion, and it took him not at the callow age, but when his mind (he thought) was matured, and his being had reached its full strength. He was in reality four-and-twenty, but he had felt fifty in the gravity of his thoughts; and, with all the force of his serious nature, he plunged into the extraordinary new life which opened like a garden of Paradise before him. It was all a blaze of light and splendour to his eyes. The world he had thought a sombre place enough before, full of painful demands upon his patience, his powers of self-renunciation, and capacity of self-control. But now all at once it had changed to Eden. And Kate, of whom he knew so little, was the cause.
She, too, was falling under this natural fascination. She was very much interested in him, she said to herself. It was so sad to see such a man, so full of talent and capability, immolate himself like this. Kate felt as if she would have done a great deal to save him. She represented to herself that, if he had felt a special vocation for the Church, she would have passed on her way and said nothing, as became a recent acquaintance; but when he was not happy! Was it not her duty, in gratitude to her preserver, to interfere according to her ability, and deliver him from temptation? Yes! she concluded it was her duty with a certain enthusiasm; and even, if that was necessary, that she would be willing to do something to save him. She would make an exertion in his behalf, if there was anything she could do. She did not, even to herself explain what was the anything she could do to influence John one way or another. Such details it is perhaps better to leave in darkness. But she felt herself ready to exert herself in her turn—to make an effort—what, indeed, if it were a sacrifice?—to preserve him as he had preserved her.
It was only on what was to be the day before her departure that Kate found the necessary opportunity. About a mile from Fanshawe Regis was a river which had been John’s joy all his life; and on Kate’s last day, he was to be permitted the delight of introducing her to its pleasures. Mrs Mitford was to have accompanied them, but she had slackened much in her ferocity of chaperonage, and had grown used to Kate, and not so much alarmed on her account. And it was a special day at the schools, and her work was more than usual. “My dear, if you wish it, of course I will go with you,” she said to her young guest; “and you must not think me unkind to hesitate—but you are used to him now, and you will be quite safe with John. You don’t mind going with John?”
“Oh, I don’t mind it at all,” said Kate, with a little blush, which would have excited John’s mother wonderfully two days before. But custom is a great power, and she had got used to Kate. So Mrs Mitford went to her parish work, and the two young people went out on their expedition. They had nearly a mile to walk across fields, and then through the grateful shade of a little wood. It was a pretty road, and from the moment they entered the wood, the common world disappeared from about the pair. They walked like a pair in romance, often silent, sometimes with a touch of soft embarrassment, in that silent world, full of the flutter of leaves and the flitting of birds, and the notes of, here and there, an inquiring thrush or dramatic blackbird. Boughs would crackle and swing suddenly about them, as if some fairy had swung herself within the leafy cover: unseen creatures—rabbits or squirrels—would dart away under the brushwood. Arrows of sunshine came down upon the brown underground. The leaves waved green above and black in shadow, strewing the chequered path. They walked in an atmosphere of their own, in dreamland, fairyland, by the shores of old romance; the young man bending his head in that attitude of worship, which is the attitude of protection too, towards the lower, slighter, weaker creature, who raised her eyes to his with soft supremacy. It was hers to command and his to obey. She had no more doubt of the loyalty of her vassal than he had of her sweet superiority to every other created thing. And thus they went through the wood to the river,—two undeveloped lives approaching the critical point of their existence, and going up to it in a dream of happiness, without shadow or fear.
The river ran through the wood for about a mile; but as it is a law of English nature that no stream shall have the charm of woodland on both sides at once, the northern bank was a bit of meadowland, round which ran, at some distance, a belt of trees. Kate recovered a little from the spell of silence as she took into her hands the cords of the rudder, and looked on at her companion’s struggle against the current. “It must be hard work,” she said. “How is it you are so fond of taking trouble, you men? They say it ruins your health rowing in all those boat-races and things—all for the pleasure of beating the other colleges or the other university; and you kill yourselves for that! I should like to do it for something better worth, if it were me.”
“But if you don’t get the habit of the struggle, you will want training when you try for what is better worth,” said John. “How one talks! I say you, as if by any chance you could want to struggle for anything. Pardon the profanity—I did not mean that.”
“Why shouldn’t I want to struggle?” said Kate, opening her eyes very wide. “I do, sometimes—that is, I don’t like to be beaten; nobody does, I suppose. But hard work must be a great bore. I sit and look at my maid sometimes, and think, after all, how much superior she is to me. There she sits, stitching, stitching the whole day through, and it does not seem to do her any harm—whereas it would kill one of us. And then I order this superior being about—me, the most useless wretch! and she gets up from her work to do a hundred things for me which I could quite well do for myself. Life is very odd,” said the young moralist, pulling the wrong string, and sending the boat high and dry upon a most visible bank of weeds and gravel. “Oh, Mr John, I am sure I beg your pardon! What have I done?”
“Nothing of the least importance,” said John; and while Kate sat dismayed and wondering, he had plunged into the sparkling shallow stream, and pushed the fairy vessel off into its necessary depth of water. “Only pardon me for jumping in in this wild way and sprinkling your dress,” he said, as he took his seat and his oars again. Kate was silent for the moment. She gazed at him with her pretty eyes, and her lips apart, wondering at the water-god; from which it will be clear to the reader that Kate Crediton was unused to river navigation, and the ways of boating men.
“But you will catch your death of cold, and what will your mother say?” said Kate; and this danger filled her with such vivid feminine apprehensions, that it was some time before she could be consoled. And then the talk ran on about a multitude of things—about nothing in particular—while the one interlocutor steered wildly into all the difficulties possible, and the other toiled steadily against the current. It was a rapid, vehement little river, more like a Scotch or Welsh stream than a placid English one; and sometimes there were snags to be avoided, and sometimes shallows to be run upon, so that the voyage was not without excitement, with such a pilot at the helm.
But when John turned his little vessel, and it began to float down stream, the dreamy silence of the woodland walk began to steal over the two once more. “Ah! now the work is over,” Kate said, with a little sigh; “yes, it is very nice to float—but then one feels as if one’s own will had nothing to do with it. I begin to understand why the other is the best.”
“I suppose they are both best,” said John—which was not a very profound observation; and yet he sighed too. “And then it is so much easier in everything to go with the stream, and to do what you are expected to do.”
“But is it right?” said Kate, with solemnity. “Ah! now I know what you are thinking about. I have so wanted to speak to you ever since that night. Don’t you think that doing what you are expected to do would be wrong? I have thought so much about it——”
“Have you?” said John; and a delicious tear came to the foolish fellow’s eye. “It was too good of you to think of me at all.”
“Of course I could not help thinking of you,” said Kate, “after what you said. Perhaps you will not think my advice of much value; but I don’t think—I don’t really think you ought to do it. I feel that it would be wrong.”
“There is no one in the world whose advice would be so much to me,” cried foolish John. “My sight is clouded by—by self-interest, and habit, and a thousand things. I have never opened my heart to any one but you—and how I presumed to trouble you with it I can’t tell,” he went on, gazing at her with fond eyes, which Kate found it difficult to meet.
“Oh, that is natural enough. Don’t you remember what you said?” she answered, softly; “what you did for me—and that moment when you said we might have died;—we should be like—brother and sister—all our lives.”
“Not that,” said John, with a little start; “but—— Yes, I hold by my claim. I wish I had done something to deserve it, though. If I had known it was you——”
“How could you possibly know it was me when you did not know there was such a person as me in the world?” said Kate. “Don’t talk such nonsense, please.”
“No; was it possible that there was once a time when I did not know that there was you in the world? What a cold world it must have been!—how sombre and miserable!” cried the enthusiast. “I can’t realise it now.”
“Oh, please!—what nonsense you do talk, to be sure!” cried Kate; and then she gave her pretty head a little shake to dissipate the blush and the faint mist of some emotion that had been stealing over her eyes, and took up the interrupted strain. “Now that you do know there is a me, you must pay attention to me. I have thought over it a great deal. You must not do it—indeed you must not. A man who is not quite certain, how can he teach others? It would be like me steering—now there! Oh, I am sure, I beg your pardon. Who was to know that nasty bank would turn up again?’
“Never mind,” said John, when he had repeated the same little performance which had signalised their upward course; “that is nothing—except that it interrupted what you were saying. Tell me again what you have thought.”
“But you never mean to be guided by me all the same,” said Kate, incautiously, though she must have foreseen, if she had taken a moment to think, that such a remark would carry her subject too far.
“Ah! how can you say so—how can you think so?” cried John, crossing his oars across the boat, and leaning over them, with his eyes fixed upon her, “when you must know I am guided by your every look. Don’t be angry with me. It is so hard to look at you and not say all that is in my heart. If you would let me think that I might—identify myself altogether—I mean, do only what pleased you—I mean, think of you as caring a little——”
“I care a great deal,” said Kate, with sudden temerity, taking the words out of his mouth, “or why should I take the trouble to say so much about it? I consider that we are—brother and sister; and that gives me a sort of right to speak. Stay till I have done, Mr John. Don’t you think you could be of more use in the world, if you were in the world and not out of it? Now think! Looking at it in your way, no doubt, it is very fine to be a clergyman; but you can only talk to people and persuade them, you know, and don’t have it in your power to do very much for them. Now look at a rich man like papa. He does not give his mind to that, you know. I am very sorry, but neither he nor I have had anybody to put it in our heads what we ought to do—but still he does some good in his way. If you were as rich as he is, how much you could do! You would be a good angel to the poor people. You could set right half of those dreadful things that Mrs Mitford tells us of, even in the village. You could give the lads work, and keep them steady. You could build them proper cottages, and have them taught what they ought to know. Don’t shake your head. I know you would be the people’s good angel, if you were as rich as papa.”
Poor John’s countenance had changed many times during this address. His intent gaze fell from her, and returned and fell again. A shade came over his face—he shook his head, not in contradiction of what she said so much as in despondency; and when he spoke, his voice had taken a chill, as it were, and lost all the musical thrill of imagination and passion that was in it. “Miss Crediton,” he said, mournfully, “you remind me of what I had forgotten—the great gulf there is between you and me. I had forgotten it, like an ass. I had been thinking of you not as a rich man’s daughter, but as—— And I, a poor aimless fool, not able to make up my mind as to how I am to provide for my own life! Forgive me—you have brought me to myself.”
“Now I should like to know what that has to do with it,” cried Kate, with a little air of exasperation—exasperation more apparent than real. “I tell you I want you to be rich like papa, and you answer me that I remind you I am a rich man’s daughter! Well, what of that? I want you to be a rich man too. I can’t help whose daughter I am. I did not choose my own papa—though I like him better than any other all the same. But I want you to be rich too, you understand; for many reasons.”
“For what reasons?” said John, lighting up again. She had drooped her head a little when she said these last words. A bright blush had flushed all over her. Could it be that she meant—— John was not vain, and yet the inference was so natural; he sat gazing at her for one long minute in a suggestive tremulous silence, and then he went faltering, blundering on. “I would be anything for your sake—that you know. I would be content to labour for you from morning to night. I would be a ploughman for your sake. To be a rich man is not so easy; but if you were to tell me to do it—for you—I would work my fingers to the bone; I would die, but I should do it—for you. Am I to be rich for you?”
“Oh, fancy! here we are already,” cried Kate, in a little tremor, feeling that she had gone too far, and he had gone too far, and thinking with a little panic, half of horror, half of pleasure, of the walk that remained to be taken through the enchanted wood. “How fast the stream has carried us down! and yet I don’t suppose it can have been very fast either, for the shadows are lengthening. We must make haste and get home.”
“But you have not answered me,” he said, still leaning across his oars with a look which she could not face.
“Oh, never mind just now,” she cried; “let us land, please, and not drift farther down. You are paying no attention to where the boat is going. There! I knew an accident would happen,” cried Kate, with half-mischievous triumph, running the boat into the bank. She thought nothing now of his feet getting wet, as he stepped into the water again to bring it to the side that she might land. She even sprang out and ran on, telling him to follow her, while he had to wait to secure the boat, and warn the people at the forester’s cottage that he had left it. Kate ran on into the wood, up the broad road gradually narrowing among the trees, where still the sunshine penetrated like arrows of gold, and the leaves danced double, leaf and shadow, and the birds carried on their ceaseless interluding, and the living creatures stirred. She ran on mischievously, with a little laugh at her companion left behind. But that mood did not long balance the influence of the place. Her steps slackened—her heart began to beat. All at once she twined her arms about a birch to support herself, and, leaning her head against it, cried a little in her confusion and excitement. “Oh, what have I done? what shall I say to him?” Kate said to herself. Was she in love with John that she had brought him to this declaration of his sentiments? She did not know—she did not think she was—and yet she had done it with her eyes open. And in a few minutes he would be by her side insisting on an answer. “And what shall I say to him?” within herself cried Kate.
But when John came up breathless, she was going along the road very demurely, without any signs of emotion, and glanced at him with the same look of friendly sovereignty, though her heart was quailing within her. He joined her, breathless with haste and excitement, and for a moment neither spoke. Then it was Kate who, in desperation, resumed the talk.
“You must tell me what you think another time,” she said, with an air of royal calm. “Perhaps what I have said has not been very wise; but I meant it for good. I meant, you know, that the man of action can do most. I meant—— But, please, let us get on quickly, for I am so afraid we shall be too late for dinner. Your father does not like to wait. And you can tell me what you think another time.”
“What I think has very little to do with it,” said John. “It should be what you think—what you ordain. For you I will do anything—everything. Good heavens, what a nuisance!” cried the young man.
At this exclamation Kate looked up, and saw,—was it Isaac’s substitute—the ram caught in the thicket?—Fred Huntley riding quietly towards them, coming down under the trees, like somebody in romance. “It is Mr Huntley,” said Kate, with a mental thanksgiving which she dared not have put into words. “It is like an old ballad. Here is the knight on the white horse appearing under the trees just when he is wanted—that is, just when you were beginning to tire of my society; and here am I, the errant damosel—— What a nice picture it would make if he were only handsome, which he is not! But all the same, his horse is white.”
“And I suppose I am the magician who is to be discomfited and put to flight,” said John, with a grim attempt at a smile.
And here Kate’s best qualities made her cruel. “You are—whatever you please,” she said, turning upon him with the brightest sudden smile. She could not bear, poor fellow, that his feelings should be hurt, when she felt herself so relieved and easy in mind; and John, out of his despondency, went up to dazzling heights of confidence and hope. Fred, riding up, saw the smile, and said to himself, “What! gone so far already?” with a curious sensation of pique. And yet he had no occasion to be piqued. He had never set up any pretensions to Kate’s favour. He had foreseen how it would be when he last saw them together. It was something too ridiculous to feel as if he cared. Of course he did not care. But still there was a little pique in his rapid reflection as he came up to them. And they were all three a little embarrassed, which, on the whole, seemed uncalled for, considering the perfectly innocent and ordinary circumstances, which the boating-party immediately began with volubility to explain.
“We have been on the river,” said Kate. “Mr Mitford so kindly offered to take me before I went away. And we hoped to have Mrs Mitford with us; but at the last moment she could not come.”
I daresay not, indeed, Fred Huntley said in his heart; but he only looked politely indifferent, and made a little bow.
“Perhaps it was better she did not, for the boat is very small,” said John, carrying on the explanation. Was it an apology they were making for themselves? And so all at once, notwithstanding Kate’s romance about the knight on the white horse, all the enchantment disappeared from the fairy wood. Birds and rabbits and squirrels, creatures of natural history, pursued their common occupations about, without any fairy suggestions. It was only the afternoon sun that slanted among the trees, showing it was growing late, and not showers of golden arrows. The wood became as commonplace as a railroad, and Kate Crediton related to Fred Huntley how she was going home, and what was to happen, and how she hoped to meet his sisters at the Camelford ball.
Thus the crisis which John thought was to decide everything for him passed off in bathos and commonplace. He walked on beside the other two, who did all the talking, eating his heart. Had she been playing with him, making a joke of his sudden passion? But then she would give him a glance from time to time which spoke otherwise. “There is still an evening and a morning,” John said to himself; and he stood like a churl at the Rectory gate, and suffered Huntley to ride on without the slightest hint of a possibility that he should stay to dinner. Such inhospitable behaviour was not common at Fanshawe Regis. But there are moments in which politeness, kindness, neighbourly charities, must all give way before a more potent feeling, and John Mitford had arrived at one of these. And his heart was beating, his head throbbing, all his pulses going at the highest speed and out of tune—or, at least, that was his sensation. Kate disappeared while he stood at the gate, shutting it carefully upon Fred, and heaven knows what frightful interval might be before him ere he could resume the interrupted conversation, and demand the answer to which surely he had a right!
John’s mind was in such a whirl of confusion that he could not realise what he was about to do. If he could have thought it over calmly, and asked himself what right he had to woo a rich man’s daughter, or even to dream of bringing her to his level, probably poor John would not only have stopped short, but he might have had resolution enough to turn back and leave his father’s door, and put himself out of the reach of temptation till she was safe in her own father’s keeping. He had strength enough and resolution enough to have made such a sacrifice, had there been any time to think; but sudden passion had swept him up like a whirlwind, and conquered all his faculties. He wanted to have an answer; an answer—nothing more. He wanted to know what she meant—why it was that she was so eager with him to bring his doubtfulness to a conclusion. If he took her advice, what would follow? There was a singing in his ears, and a buzzing in his brain. He could not think, nor pause to consider which was right. There was but one thing to do—to get his answer from her; to know what she meant. And then the Deluge or Paradise—one thing or the other—would come after that, but were it Paradise, or were it the Flood, John’s anchors were pulled up, and he had left the port. All his old prospects and hopes and intentions had vanished. He could no more go back to the position in which he had stood when he first opened his heart to Kate than he could fly. Fanshawe Regis, and his parents’ hopes, and the old placid existence to which he had been trained, all melted away into thin air. He was standing on the threshold of a new world, with an unknown wind blowing in his face, and an unknown career before him. If it might be that she was about to put her little hand in his, and go with him across the wilderness! But, anyhow, it was a wilderness that had to be traversed; not those quiet waters and green pastures which had been destined for him at home.
“How late you are, John!” his mother said, meeting him on the stair. She was coming down dressed for dinner, with just a little cloud over the brightness of her eyes. “You must have stayed a long time on the river. Was that Kate that has just gone up-stairs?”
“Miss Crediton went on before me. I had to stop and speak to Huntley at the gate.”
“You should have asked him to stay dinner,” said Mrs Mitford. “My dear, I am sure you have a headache. You should not have rowed so far, under that blazing sun. But make haste now. Your papa cannot bear to be kept waiting. I will tell Jervis to give you five minutes. And, oh, make haste, my dear boy!”
“Of course I shall make haste,” said John, striding past—as if ten minutes more or less could matter to anybody under the sun!
“It is for your papa, John,” said Mrs Mitford, half apologetic, half reproachful; and she went down to the drawing-room and surreptitiously moved the fingers of the clock to gain a little time for her boy. “Jervis, you need not be in such a hurry—there are still ten minutes,” she said, arresting the man-of-all-work who was called the butler at Fanshawe, as he put his hand on the dinner-bell to ring it; and she was having a little discussion with him over their respective watches, when the Doctor approached in his fresh tie. “The drawing-room clock is never wrong,” said the deceitful woman. And no doubt that was why the trout was spoiled and the soup so cold. For Kate did not hurry with her toilette, whatever John might do; and being a little agitated and excited, her hair took one of those perverse fits peculiar to ladies’ hair, and would not permit itself to be put up properly. Kate, too, was in a wonderful commotion of mind, as well as her lover. She was tingling all over with her adventure, and the hair-breadth escape she had made. But had she escaped? There was a long evening still before her, and it was premature to believe that the danger was over. When Kate went down-stairs, she had more than one reason for being so very uncomfortable. Dr Mitford was waiting for his dinner, and John was waiting for his answer; she could not tell what might happen to her before the evening was over, and she could scarcely speak with composure because of the frightened irregular beating of her heart.