North and South
to be asked to spend the day, and accepted the invitation with a glad
readiness that made Mrs. Hale wish she could add something to the cold
beef. He was pleased with everything; delighted with Margaret’s idea of
going out sketching together; would not have Mr. Hale disturbed for the
world, with the prospect of so soon meeting him at dinner. Margaret
brought out her drawing materials for him to choose from; and after the
paper and brushes had been duly selected, the two set out in the
merriest spirits in the world.
“Now, please, just stop here for a minute or two,” said Margaret. “These
are the cottages that haunted me so during the rainy fortnight,
reproaching me for not having sketched them.”
“Before they tumbled down and were no more seen. Truly, if they are to
be sketched—and they are very picturesque—we had better not put it off
till next year. But where shall we sit?”
“Oh! You might have come straight from chambers in the Temple, instead
of having been two months in the Highlands! Look at this beautiful trunk
of a tree, which the woodcutters have left just in the right place for
the light. I will put my plaid over it, and it will be a regular forest
throne.”
“With your feet in that puddle for a regal footstool! Stay, I will move,
and then you can come nearer this way. Who lives in these cottages?”
“They were built by squatters fifty or sixty years ago. One is
uninhabited; the foresters are going to take it down, as soon as the
other is dead, poor old fellow! Look—there he is—I must go and speak
to him. He is so deaf you will hear all our secrets.”
The old man stood bareheaded in the sun, leaning on his stick at the
front of his cottage. His stiff features relaxed into a slow smile as
Margaret went up and spoke to him. Mr. Lennox hastily introduced the two
figures into his sketch, and finished up the landscape with a
subordinate reference to them—as Margaret perceived, when the time came
for getting up, putting away water, and scraps of paper, and exhibiting
to each other their sketches. She laughed and blushed: Mr. Lennox
watched her countenance.
“Now, I call that treacherous,” said she. “I little thought that you
were making old Isaac and me into subjects, when you told me to ask him
the history of these cottages.”
“It was irresistible. You can’t know how strong a temptation it was. I
hardly dare tell you how much I shall like this sketch.”
He was not quite sure whether she heard this latter sentence before she
went to the brook to wash her palette. She came back rather flushed, but
looking perfectly innocent and unconscious. He was glad of it, for the
speech had slipped from him unawares—a rare thing in the case of a man
who premeditated his actions so much as Henry Lennox.
The aspect of home was all right and bright when they reached it. The
clouds on her mother’s brow had cleared off under the propitious
influence of a brace of carp, most opportunely presented by a neighbour.
Mr. Hale had returned from his morning’s round, and was awaiting his
visitor just outside the wicket gate that led into the garden. He looked
a complete gentleman in his rather threadbare coat and well-worn hat.
Margaret was proud of her father; she had always a fresh and tender
pride in seeing how favourably he impressed every stranger; still her
quick eye sought over his face and found there traces of some unusual
disturbance, which was only put aside, not cleared away.
Mr. Hale asked to look at their sketches.
“I think you have made the tints on the thatch too dark, have you not?”
as he returned Margaret’s to her, and held out his hand for Mr.
Lennox’s, which was withheld from him one moment, no more.
“No, papa! I don’t think I have. The house-leek and stone-crop have
grown so much darker in the rain. Is it not like, papa?” said she,
peeping over his shoulder, as he looked at the figures in Mr. Lennox’s
drawing.
“Yes, very like. Your figure and way of holding yourself is capital. And
it is just poor old Isaac’s stiff way of stooping his long rheumatic
back. What is this hanging from the branch of the tree? Not a bird’s
nest, surely.”
“Oh no! that is my bonnet. I never can draw with my bonnet on; it makes
my head so hot. I wonder if I could manage figures. There are so many
people about here whom I should like to sketch.”
“I should say that a likeness you very much wish to take you would
always succeed in,” said Mr. Lennox. “I have great faith in the power of
will. I think myself I have succeeded pretty well in yours.” Mr. Hale
had preceded them into the house, while Margaret was lingering to pluck
some roses, with which to adorn her morning gown for dinner.
“A regular London girl would understand the implied meaning of that
speech,” thought Mr. Lennox. “She would be up to looking through every
speech that a young man made her for the _arrière-pensée_ of a compliment.
But I don’t believe Margaret,—Stay!” exclaimed he, “Let me help you”;
and he gathered for her some velvety cramoisy roses that were above her
reach, and then dividing the spoil he placed two in his button-hole, and
sent her in, pleased and happy, to arrange her flowers.
The conversation at dinner flowed on quietly and agreeably. There were
plenty of questions to be asked on both sides—the latest intelligence
which each could give of Mrs. Shaw’s movements in Italy to be exchanged;
and in the interest of what was said, the unpretending simplicity of the
parsonage-ways—above all in the neighbourhood of Margaret, Mr. Lennox
forgot the little feeling of disappointment with which he had at first
perceived that she had spoken but the simple truth when she had
described her father’s living as very small.
“Margaret, my child, you might have gathered us some pears for our
dessert,” said Mr. Hale, as the hospitable luxury of a freshly-decanted
bottle of wine was placed on the table.
Mrs. Hale was hurried. It seemed as if desserts were impromptu and
unusual things at the parsonage; whereas, if Mr. Hale would only have
looked behind him, he would have seen biscuits and marmalade, and what
not, all arranged in formal order on the side-board. But the idea of
pears had taken possession of Mr. Hale’s mind, and was not to be got rid
of.
“There are a few brown beurrés against the south wall which are worth
all foreign fruits and preserves. Run, Margaret, and gather some.”
“I propose that we adjourn into the garden, and eat them there,” said
Mr. Lennox. “Nothing is so delicious as to set one’s teeth into the
crisp, juicy fruit, warm and scented by the sun. The worst is, the wasps
are impudent enough to dispute it with one, even at the very crisis and
summit of enjoyment.”
He rose, as if to follow Margaret, who had disappeared through the
window: he only awaited Mrs. Hale’s permission. She would rather have
wound up the dinner in the proper way, and with all the ceremonies which
had gone on so smoothly hitherto, especially as she and Dixon had got
out the finger-glasses from the store-room on purpose to be as correct
as became General Shaw’s widow’s sister; but as Mr. Hale got up
directly, and prepared to accompany his guest, she could only submit.
“I shall arm myself with a knife,” said Mr. Hale: “the days of eating
fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me. I must pare it
and quarter it before I can enjoy it.”
Margaret made a plate for the pears out of a beet-root leaf, which threw
up their brown gold colour admirably. Mr. Lennox looked more at her than
at the pears; but her father, inclined to cull fastidiously the very
zest and perfection of the hour he had stolen from his anxiety, chose
daintily the ripest fruit, and sat down on the garden bench to enjoy it
at his leisure. Margaret and Mr. Lennox strolled along the little
terrace-walk under the south wall, where the bees still hummed and
worked busily in their hives.
“What a perfect life you seem to live here! I have always felt rather
contemptuously towards the poets before, with their wishes, ‘Mine be a
cot beside a hill,’ and that sort of thing; but now I am afraid that the
truth is, I have been nothing better than a Cockney. Just now I feel as
if twenty years’ hard study of law would be amply rewarded by one year
of such an exquisite serene life as this—such skies!” looking up—“such
crimson and amber foliage, so perfectly motionless as that!” pointing to
some of the great forest trees which shut in the garden as if it were a
nest.
“You must please to remember that our skies are not always as deep a
blue as they are now. We have rain, and our leaves do fall, and get
sodden: though I think Helstone is about as perfect a place as any in
the world. Recollect how you rather scorned my description of it one
evening in Harley Street: ‘a village in a tale.’”
“Scorned, Margaret! That is rather a hard word.”
“Perhaps it is. Only I know I should have liked to have talked to you of
what I was very full at the time, and you—what must I call it
then?—spoke disrespectfully of Helstone as a mere village in a tale.”
“I will never do so again,” said he, warmly. They turned the corner of
the walk.
“I could almost wish, Margaret——” he stopped and hesitated. It was so
unusual for the fluent lawyer to hesitate that Margaret looked up at
him, in a little state of questioning wonder; but in an instant—from
what about him she could not tell—she wished herself back with her
mother—her father—anywhere away from him, for she was sure he was
going to say something to which she should not know what to reply. In
another moment the strong pride that was in her came to conquer her
sudden agitation, which she hoped he had not perceived. Of course she
could answer, and answer the right thing; and it was poor and despicable
of her to shrink from hearing any speech, as if she had not power to put
an end to it with her high maidenly dignity.
“Margaret,” said he, taking her by surprise, and getting sudden
possession of her hand, so that she was forced to stand still and
listen, despising herself for the fluttering at her heart all the time;
“Margaret, I wish you did not like Helstone so much—did not seem so
perfectly calm and happy here. I have been hoping for these three months
past to find you regretting London—and London friends, a little—enough
to make you listen more kindly” (for she was quietly, but firmly,
striving to extricate her hand from his grasp) “to one who has not much
to offer, it is true—nothing but prospects in the future—but who does
love you, Margaret, almost in spite of himself. Margaret, have I
startled you too much? Speak!” For he saw her lips quivering almost as
if she were going to cry. She made a strong effort to be calm; she would
not speak till she had succeeded in mastering her voice, and then she
said:
“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I
have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go
on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been
doing. I cannot answer you as you want me to do, and yet I should feel
so sorry if I vexed you.”
“Margaret,” said he, looking into her eyes, which met his with their
open, straight look, expressive of the utmost good faith and reluctance
to give pain, “Do you”—he was going to say—“love any one else?” But it
seemed as if this question would be an insult to the pure serenity of
those eyes. “Forgive me! I have been too abrupt. I am punished. Only let
me hope. Give me the poor comfort of telling me you have never seen any
one whom you could——” Again a pause. He could not end his sentence.
Margaret reproached herself acutely as the cause of his distress.
“Ah! if you had but never got this fancy into your head! It was such a
pleasure to think of you as a friend.”
“But I may hope, may I not, Margaret, that some time you will think of