At Love's Cost Part 2

"You'll make yourself most frightfully wet," said Stafford.

She glanced up at him with only faint surprise.

"You are a Londoner," she said, "or you would know that here, in these parts, we are so often more wet than dry that it makes no matter. Yes, I thought so; there was a thorn in its foot. May I trouble you to hold him a minute?"

Stafford held the lamb, which was tolerably quiet now; and she slowly took off her gauntlets, produced a little leather wallet from the saddle--the horse coming at her call as if he were a dog--took out a serviceable pair of tweezers, and, with professional neatness, extracted an extremely ugly thorn. Stafford stood and watched her; the collie and the fox-terrier upright on their haunches watching her also; the collie gave an approving bark as, with a pat she liberated the lamb, which went bleating on its way to join its distracted mother, the fox-terrier leapt round her with yaps of excited admiration; and there was admiration in Stafford's eyes also. The whole thing had been done with a calm, almost savage grace and self-possession, and she seemed to be absolutely unconscious of his presence, and only remembered it when the lamb and its mother had joined the flock.

"Thank you again," she said. "It was very kind of you. I am afraid you are wet."

As Stafford had gone completely under the water, this was a fact he could not deny, but he said with a laugh:

"Though I am a Londoner, in a sense, I don't mind a wetting--in a good cause; and I shall be dry, or as good as dry, before I get to the inn.

You must have eyes like a hawk to have seen, from the top of the hill, that that lamb was lame," he added, rather with the desire to keep her than to express his admiration for her sight.

"I have good eyes," she said, indifferently. "One has to have. But I saw that the lamb was lame from the way it kept beside its mother and the fuss she made over it: and I knew, too, by Donald's bark, that something was wrong. I am sorry you are wet. Will you--" She glanced towards the opening in the hills, paused, and for the first time seemed slightly embarra.s.sed; Stafford fancied that a faint touch of colour came to the clear pallor of the lovely young face. She did not finish the sentence, but with another "Thank you," and "I should not have liked to have lost the lamb," went towards her horse.

Stafford advanced to put her in the saddle; but, with a little shake of the head and a "Don't trouble," she sprang into her place and rode off.

Stafford looked after her, as he had done before; then he said, "Well, I'm d-----d!"

He felt for his pouch, filled his pipe and lit it, and in doing so his eyes fell upon the little wallet from which she had taken her tweezers.

He picked it up and quickly shouted to her; but the dogs were barking with furious delight, she was cracking her whip, and she had ridden too far for her to hear him through the noise. It would have been sheer folly to have run after her; so, with a shrug of his shoulders, Stafford put the little wallet in his pocket, waded the stream and, after a moment or two of consideration, made for the inn by the nearest way, to wit, across the hill.

The girl rode along the strip of level moorland beside the river until she came to a narrow and not particularly well--kept road which led through the opening of the hills towards which she had motioned her whip. Once or twice a smile crossed her face, and once she laughed as she thought of the comical picture which the young man had made as he struggled to dry land with the wet lamb in his arms; and the smile and her laugh made her face seem strangely girlish, because it was usually so calm, so gravely self-reliant. Some girls would have been quick to detect the romantic side of the incident, and would have dwelt with a certain sense of satisfaction upon the fact that the young man was tall and handsome and distinguished looking. But this girl had scarcely noticed it; at any rate, it had not affected her in any way. She had too much to do; there was too much upon her well-formed and graceful shoulders to permit her to indulge in romance: Diana herself was not more free from sentiment than this young girl who rode her horse just like a Mexican, who was vet enough to perform a surgical operation on a lamb, and who knew how many bushels of wheat should run to an acre, and the best dressing for permanent pastures. It did occur to her that she might, at any rate after he had rescued the lamb, have given him permission to go on fis.h.i.+ng; but she was not very sorry for having failed to do so, for after all, he had been poaching, and, as she had said, poaching was in her eyes a crime.

She went down the road at a swift trot, and presently it was blocked by a pair of wrought-iron gates, so exquisite in their antique conscientiousness that many a mushroom peer would have given almost their weight in gold to place them at the beginning of his newly made park; but no one came to open them, they were closed by a heavily padlocked chain, and the lodge beside them was empty and dilapidated; and the girl rode beside the lichen-covered wall in which they stood until she came to an opening leading to an old arch which faced a broad and s.p.a.cious court-yard. As she rode beneath the arch a number of dogs yelped a welcome from kennels or behind stable half-doors, and a bent old man, dressed like something between a stableman and a butler, came forward, touching his forehead, to take her horse. She slipped from the saddle, patted the horse, and murmured a word or two of endearment; but her bright eyes flashed round the court-yard with a glance of responsibility.

"Have you brought the colt in, Jason?" she asked.

Jason touched his forehead again.

"Yes, Miss Ida. It took me three-quarters of an hour; it won't come to me like it does to you. It's in a loose stall."

"Saddle it to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will come and try it.

The brindle cow has got into the corn, and the fence wants mending down by the pool; you must get William to help you, and do it at once. He has taken the steers to market, I suppose? I didn't see them in the three acre. Oh, and, Jason, I found someone fis.h.i.+ng in the dale; you must get a notice board and put it up where the road runs near the river; the tourists' time is coming on, and though they don't often come this side of the lake, some of them may, and we can't afford to have the river poached. And, Jason, look to Ruppert's off-hind shoe; I think it's loose; and--" She stopped with a short laugh. "But that's enough for one time, isn't it? Oh, Jason, if I were only a man, how much better it would be!"

"Yes, miss," a.s.sented Jason, simply, with another touch of his forehead.

She sighed and laughed again, and gathering up her habit--she hadn't to raise it much--she went through an open door-way into a wild, but pretty garden, and so to the back of one of the most picturesque houses in this land of the picturesque. It was built of grey stone which age had coloured with a tender and an appreciative hand; a rich growth of ivy and clematis clung lovingly over a greater portion of it so that the mullioned windows were framed by the dark leaves and the purple flower. The house was long and rambling and had once been flouris.h.i.+ng and important, but it was now eloquent of decay and pathetic with the signs of "better times" that had vanished long ago. A flight of worn steps led to a broad gla.s.s door, and opening the latter, the girl pa.s.sed under a curved wooden gallery into a broad hall. It was dimly lit by an oriel window of stained gla.s.s, over which the ivy and clematis had been allowed to fall; there was that faint odour which emanates from old wood and leather and damask; the furniture was antique and of the neutral tint which comes from age; the weapons and the ornaments of bra.s.s, the gilding of the great pictures, were all dim and lack-l.u.s.tre for want of the cleaning and polis.h.i.+ng which require many servants. In the huge fire-place some big logs were burning, and Donald and Bess threw themselves down before it with a sigh of satisfaction. The girl looked round her, just as she had looked round the stable-yard; then, tossing her soft hat and whip on the old oak table, she went to one of the large heavy doors, and knocking, said in her clear voice:

"Father, are you there?"

Inside the room an old man sat at a table. It was littered with books, some of them open as if he had been consulting them; but before him lay an open deed, and at his elbow were several others lying on an open deed-box. He was thin and as faded-looking and as worn with age as the house and the room, lined with dusty volumes and yellow, surface-cracked maps and pictures. He wore a long dressing-gown which was huddled round him as if he were cold, though a fire of logs almost as large as the one in the hall was burning in the open fire-place.

At the sound of the knock he raised his head, an expression, which was a mixture of fear and senile cunning came into his lined and pallid face, his dull eyes peered from under their lids with a flash of sudden alertness, and with one motion of his long hands he hurriedly folded the deed before him, crammed it, with the others, into the box, locked it with a hurried and trembling hand, and placed it in a cupboard, which he also locked; then he drew one of the large books into the place were the deed had been, and with a cautious glance round the room, shuffled to the door, and opened it.

As the girl entered, one would have noticed the resemblance between her and the old man, and have seen that they were father and daughter; for G.o.dfrey Heron had been one of the handsomest men of his time, and though she had got her dark eyes and the firm, delicate lips from her mother, the clear oval of her face and its expression of aristocratic pride had come from the Herons.

"Are you here still, father?" she said. "It is nearly dinner-time, and you are not dressed. You promised me that you would go out: how wicked of you not to have done so!"

He shuffled back to the table and made a great business of closing the book.

"I've been busy--reading, Ida," he said. "I did not know it was so late. You have been out, I see; I hope you have enjoyed your ride. Have you met anyone?"

"No," she replied; then she smiled, as she added: "Only a poacher."

The old man raised his head, a faint flush came on his face and his eyes flashed with haughty resentment.

"A poacher! What are the keepers about! Ah, I forgot; there are no keepers now; any vagrant is free to trespa.s.s and poach on Herondale!"

"I'm sorry, father!" she said, laying her hand on his arm soothingly.

"It was not an ordinary poacher, only a gentleman who had mistaken the Heron water for the Avory's. Come now, father, you have barely time to dress."

"Yes, yes, I will come in a moment--a moment," he said.

But after she had left the room, he still lingered, and when at last he got to the door, he closed it and went back to the cupboard and tried it, to see if it were locked, muttering, suspiciously:

"Did she hear me? She might have heard the rustle of the parchment, the turn of the lock. Sometimes I think she suspects--But, no, no, she's a child still, and she'd say something, speak out. No, no; it's all right. Yes, yes, I'm coming, Ida!" he said aloud, as the girl called to him on her way up the stairs.

CHAPTER II.

As Stafford climbed the hill steadily, he wondered who the girl was. It did not occur to him that she might be the daughter of the Mr. Heron to whom the stream belonged and from whose family name the whole dale had taken its own; for, though she had looked and spoken like a lady, the habit, the gauntlets, the soft felt hat were old and weather-stained: and her familiarity with the proper treatment of a sheep in difficulty indicated rather the farmer's daughter than that of the squire.

She was not by any means the first pretty girl Stafford had seen--he had a very large acquaintance in London, and one or two women whose beauty had been blazoned by the world were more than friendly with the popular Stafford Orme--but he thought as he went up the hill, which seemed to have no end, that he had never seen a more beautiful face than this girl's; certainly he had never seen one which had impressed him more deeply. Perhaps it was the character of the loveliness which haunted him so persistently: it was so unlike the conventional drawing-room type with which he was so familiar.

As he thought of her it seemed to him that she was like a wild and graceful deer--one of the deer which he had seen coming down to a mountain stream to drink on his father's Scotch moor; hers was a wild, almost savage loveliness--and yet not savage, for there had been the refinement, the dignity of high race in the exquisite grey eyes, the curve of the finely cut lips. Her manner, also, prevented him from forgetting her.

He had never met with anything like it, she had been as calm and self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her att.i.tude as she leant forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had the _abandon_ of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness, combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him as extraordinary, almost weird.

Stafford was not one of your susceptible young men; in fact, there was a touch of coldness, of indifference to the other s.e.x which often troubled his women-friends; and he was rather surprised at himself for the interest which the girl had aroused in him. He wondered if he should meet her again, and was conscious of a strong, almost a very strong, desire to do so which, he admitted to himself, was strange: for he did not at that moment remember any girl whom, at his first meeting with her, he had hankered to see again.

He got to the top of the hill at last and began to drop down; there was nothing but a wandering sheep-path here and there, and the mountain was by no means as easy to descend as the cla.s.sic Avernus; so that when he got to the bottom and came in sight of the little inn nestling in a crook of the valley he was both tired and hungry. Howard, beautiful in evening-dress, came sauntering to the door with his long white hands in his pocket and a plaintive reproach on his Vand.y.k.e face.

"I was just about to send off the search party, my dear Stafford," he said. "Is it possible that you have just come down that hill? Good heavens! What follies are committed in thy name, O Sport! And of course there are no fish--there never are! The water is always too thin or too thick, the sky too bright or too dull, the wind too high or too low.

Excuses are the badge of all the angling tribe."

Stafford took his basket from his shoulder and made a pretence of slinging it at Howard's head; then tossed it to the landlord, who stood by, smiling obsequiously.

"Cook some of 'em as soon as you can," he said; then he followed the neat and also smiling chamber-maid up to his room, where, for all his pretended indolence and cynicism, Howard had caused his friend's things to be laid out in readiness for him. Stafford dressed slowly, smoking a cigarette during the operation, and still thinking of the strange "farmer's daughter." And then he went down and joined Howard in the room he had ordered.

Lake hotels may lack the splendour to which we are all growing accustomed, and of which, alas! we are also growing rather wearied, but they are most of them extremely comfortable and cosy; and The Woodman at Carysford was no exception to the rule. Stafford looked round the low-pitched room, with its old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture, its white dinner-cloth gleaming softly in the sunset and the fire-light, and sighed with a nod of satisfaction.

"This is something like, eh, old man?" he said; and even Howard deigned to nod approvingly.

"Yes," he said. "If anything could compensate one for the miseries of travel, especially that awful drive, this should do so. I confess I had looked forward to a crowning discomfort in the shape of a cold and draughty and smelly room, fried chops or a gory leg of mutton and a heel of the cheese made by Noah in the Ark. I fancy that we are going to have a decent dinner; and I trust I may not be disappointed, for it is about the only thing that will save my life. Are you dry yet? You looked as if you had been walking through a river instead of beside it."