Lawrence Clavering Part 40

It was still early in the morning, but I pushed on with perhaps greater urgency than suited my companion, since I was anxious that we should lie that night in Eskdale. Dorothy, indeed, walked more slowly than was usual with her, and there seemed to me to be an uncertainty in her gait, at which I was the more surprised, since the wind blew from the east, and we, who were moving eastwards, were completely sheltered from it by the cliffs of Great Gable, towering at the head of the valley. The steeper the ascent became, the greater grew the uncertainty of movement, so that I began to feel anxious lest some sickness should have laid hold upon her. I thought it best, however, to say nothing of my suspicion, but contented myself with glancing at her stealthily now and again. There was no hint of sickness discoverable upon her face, only she pursed her lips something sullenly, as though she was persisting in what she knew to be wrong; and once I thought that her eyes caught one of my troubled glances, and she coloured like one ashamed. At last, just as we had topped the summit of the pa.s.s, and were beginning to descend the broad, gra.s.sy cliffs between that mountain and the Pillar, she spoke, and it was the first time she had opened her lips since we had left Applegarth.

"It is an apology you need, I suppose," said she, with a singular aggressiveness, and my anxiety increased. For since I could not see that I had given her any occasion to take that tone, I was inclined to set it down to some bodily suffering.

"An apology?" I asked, with an effort at a careless laugh. "And what makes you fancy I need that?"

"It is so," she insisted, "else you would not be glowering at me in this ill-humour."

"Nay," I answered seriously, "I am in no ill-humour."

"You are," she interrupted almost viciously. "You are in the worst ill-humour in the world. Well, I do apologize. I should not have kept you waiting at Applegarth."

And I do not think that I ever heard an apology tendered with a worse grace.

"And now that I have begged your pardon," she continued, "I will carry my own bundle, thank you;" and she held out her hand for it.

"No indeed, and that you will not do," said I, hotly, "if you beg pardon from now to Doomsday."

"It is perfectly plain," said she, "that you mean to pick a quarrel with me."

Now, that I took to be the most unjust statement that she could make.

And--

"Who began it?" I asked. "Who began the quarrel?"

"It is a question," she replied, with the utmost contempt, "that children ask in a nursery;" and very haughtily she marched in front of me down the hillside.

We had not gone more than a few yards before I stopped, only half stifling the cry which rose to my lips. I plumped down on the gra.s.s and fumbled in my pockets. Dorothy paused in her walk, turned, and came back to me.

"What is it?" she cried, and, I must suppose, noting my face, her tone changed in an instant "Lawrence, what is it? What is the paper?"

The paper was that on which Mr. Curwen had sketched the line of our journey. We were come to the curve in our descent into Mosedale from which that line was visible, as plainly marked on the face of the country as on the paper which I held in my hand. On the ridge of the horizon I could see the long back of Muncaster Fell, but it was not that which troubled me. We could keep on the western flank of Muncaster Fell. It was that gap between Scafell and the Screes which leads on to Burnmoor! I looked east and west. This gap that I see, I said to myself, is not the gap which Mr. Curwen meant; there will be another--there will be another! But all the time I knew most surely that this was the gap, and that over it stretched our path. Slantwise across Wastdale, and bearing to the right, Mr. Curwen had said. Well, Wastdale lay at my feet, its fields marked off by their stone walls, like the squares on a chess-board. Yes, that indeed was our way. Why, I could see Burnmoor tarn, of which he had made particular mention, and--and it lay like a pool of ink upon a sheet of white paper. There was the trouble! The wind had blown from the southeast this many a day, and with the wind, the snow; so that while in Gillerthwaite, in Ennerdale, in Newlands, through which I had come to Applegarth, I had seen the snow only upon the hilltops, and had not been troubled with it at all; there on Burnmoor it was ma.s.sed from end to end. And Burnmoor was five miles across. I looked at Dorothy. Could she traverse it--she that was ailing? Five miles of snow, and the wind sweeping across those five miles like a wave! For there was no doubt but we should have the wind. If I looked upwards towards Scafell, I could see, as it were, the puff of a cannon's smoke rising up into the air. That was the wind whirling the snow. If I looked downwards into Wastdale, I could see the yew-trees by the church tossing their boughs wildly this way and that. I could hear it rus.h.i.+ng and seething in Mosedale bottom. I looked at Dorothy, and my anxiety grew to alarm.

"What is it troubles you?" she said again.

Well, somehow or another this line had to be traversed. I should serve no end by increasing her suffering with an antic.i.p.ation of the evils before us.

"Nothing," I answered, thrusting the paper back into my pocket "I was wondering whether or no I had mistaken our road." And I rose to my feet.

I could perceive from her face that she knew I was concealing some obstacle from her. She turned abruptly from me, and led the way without a word I followed, noticing, with an ever-increasing dismay, how more and more she wavered as the descent grew steeper. And then all at once I caught sight of something which set me laughing--loudly, extravagantly, as a man will at the sudden coming of a great relief.

Dorothy stopped and regarded me, not so much in perplexity, as in the haughtiest displeasure.

"Good lack!" I cried; "nay, don't stare at me. I cannot but laugh. For I believe it was the beginning of a fever troubled you, and now I know it to be a pair of heels."

She flushed very red and turned herself to face me, so that I could no longer see more than the tips of her toes.

"I know too the cause of your anger against me. It was a mere consciousness that you should not be wearing them."

"Oh, what a wiseacre!" says Dorothy, confiding her opinion to the rocks about her. "What a wonderful perceptive wiseacre! how Miss Curwen is honoured with his acquaintance!" All this in a tone of quiet sarcasm, which would have been more effectual had she not stamped her foot upon the ground. For on stamping, the heel slipped upon a loose stone, and had I not been near enough to catch her, the next instant she would have been lying full-length on the ground.

She gave something of a cry as I caught her, and sitting down, panted for a little. We both contemplated the heels. Then I drew out the paper again from my pocket.

"It was this I was considering;" and I handed it to her. "Mr. Curwen sketched it for me, and it is the way we have to go."

I pointed out the gap and the snow upon Burnmoor. She followed the direction of my gaze with a s.h.i.+ver, and again, but this time with equal melancholy, we fell to contemplating the heels.

"I put them on," she explained, with a touch of penitence, "before you said that about my father."

"But you could have changed them afterwards," I rejoined foolishly; and for my pains saw the penitence harden into exasperation.

"Besides, I cannot walk at all without heels," says she, briskly making a catch at her a.s.surance.

"You cannot walk with them, I know, that's a sure thing," I persisted.

She turned to me very quietly--

"In spite of this great knowledge of yours, Mr. Clavering, of which, during the last minute, I have heard so much," she began deliberately, "there is one lesson you have yet to learn and practise. I have remarked the deficiency not only on this but on many occasions. You lack that instinct of tact and discretion which would inform you of the precise moment when you have said enough----"

How much longer she would have continued in this strain I do not know.

For I sprang to my feet.

"If it is to be another lecture," I cried, "I accept the conclusion before it is reached. I can guess at it. Heels are your only wear, and the taller the better. Sailors should be enjoined by law to wear them, and they alone preserve the rope-dancer from a sure and inevitable death."

"A wiseacre first," says she, ticking off my qualities upon her fingers, "and now a humorist! Well there! a salad bowl of all the estimable virtues estimably jumbled. And meanwhile," she asked innocently, "are we not wasting time?"

I well-nigh gasped at her audacity; for who was to blame, if not she with the heels? However, this time I was sufficiently wise to keep silence, leaving it to experience to reprove her, as it most surely would. In which conviction I was right, for more than once she tripped on the gra.s.s as we descended; halfway down she reluctantly allowed me to a.s.sist her with a hand, and as we two moved along the side of Mosedale Beck at the entrance into Wastdale, she wrenched her ankle.

The pain of the wrench luckily was not severe, and lasted no great while. She was in truth more startled than hurt, for we were treading the narrowest steep path, and at the side the rocks fell clear for about twenty feet to the torrent.

Thereupon she gave in and allowed me to go forward to a farmhouse lying at no great distance in Wastdale, and procure for her foot-gear of a more suitable kind. And comical enough it looked when she put it on, but I dared not laugh or so much as give hint of a smile, since I saw that her eyes were on the alert to catch me; for the worthy housewife hearing a story that I made up about a young girl who was travelling in a great haste across Ennerdale to visit a father who lay sick beyond there, which story was altogether a lie, though every word of it was truth, made me a present of a pair of her own boots and would take no money for them.

These Dorothy put on. I slipped those she had been wearing into the pockets of my great-coat, and making a hurried meal off some provisions which Mary Tyson had added to the bundle, we again set out.

I was now still more inclined to push forward at our topmost speed, for it was well past midday, and the tokens of foul weather which I had noted in the morning had become yet more distinct. The clearness had gone from the day, the clouds, woolly and grey, sulked upon the mountain-tops and crept down the sides; the wind had suddenly fallen; there was a certain heaviness in the air, as of the expectation of a storm. We went forward into the valley. When we were halfway to the church, a puff of wind, keen and shrewd, blew for an instant in our faces, and then another and another. But that last breath did not die like the rest; it blew continuously, and gathered violence as it blew.

The yew-trees in the churchyard resumed their tossing; we were so near that I could hear the creaking of their boughs. I looked anxiously towards the gap through which we were to pa.s.s to Eskdale. It was still clear of the mist, but where a shrub grew, or a tree reached out a branch on the slope beneath the gap, I saw the wind evident as a beating rain; and even as I looked, the gap filled--filled in a second--not with these slow, licking mists, but with a column of tempest that drove exultant, triumphing, and now and again in the midst of it I perceived a whirling gleam of white like foam of the sea.

I looked forwards to the church, backwards to the house. The church was the nearer. I took Dorothy by the elbow.

"Run!" I cried.

"I cannot," she replied, lagging behind.

I pressed her forward.

"You must."

"These shoes----" she began.

"Devil take the shoes!" cried I; and thereupon, with a perversity which even I would not have attributed to her, she slipped a foot out of a shoe, and stepped deliberately into a puddle.