Chapter IX On the Moor
As he rode towards home an hour or two later, Harry felt as if all the stains upon life had been washed away, just as the wind and rain had scoured the heavens of their dark load of cloud. The sun, now declining towards the west, shone in a sky of clean blue; the wind was dropping every minute, but was still fresh as he cantered across the moor. He rode with his head up, singing blithely, and drinking in through all his senses the sparkling glory of a world set free from the tyranny of storm and gloom.
He had thought out nothing to a definite conclusion, and yet the perplexities which had surrounded him as he started out on his ride seemed to have disappeared. The war, which had affected him so little, now lay in the background of his mind as a real and a very big thing, and it seemed to him fixed and certain that somehow and at some time it would profoundly affect his life; but at present he had nothing to do but to await what should be coming to him. His place at Royd must also undergo a change, and that, too, would come, in its time, as it would come. Whatever should happen, he was ready for it, and his mind was free and happy, but also strangely expectant. He was in the current of some power outside himself, but in complete harmony with it, and at the same time in free possession of himself, just as he had lately exulted in his youth and strength as his body had been borne on the motion of the mighty waters. Ever since that night of still and unearthly beauty, when the vision had come to him of a living power in nature for a sign of which he had yearned, he had thought of himself as controlled by strong yet gentle and beneficent forces, which, if he yielded himself to them, would lead him along paths that he would best fulfil himself in treading. The feeling was stronger at some times than others. It had never been so obscured as it had been a few hours earlier, but now, in the sun and the wind, it was very strong. He felt himself calmed and uplifted in spirit, as if by a tangible communion with the guiding influences. They seemed to be telling him, or to have told him, that his shadowed mood need never have been; that they had something in store for him, some experience, some happening, which would give him renewed faith in their guidance. There was a sense almost of being indulged, by an assurance out of the common run.
But his mood was as far as possible from being analytical, as he rode on singing and calling to his dogs, which sprang round him rejoicing as he did in the exhilaration of quick motion and the strength and poise of muscle and sinew. His mind had cleared, and he was free to give himself up to the joy of living, all the more keenly for the whisper that had come to him of something new and exciting in preparation for him.
The boy, the horse and the dogs—they had had the fine, fresh world to themselves throughout the afternoon, except for the strong birds of the sea and the little birds of the gorsy common. No buildings lay upon the path that Harry had taken to the shore, nor very near it, for he had ridden through the wood by a narrow ride, little used, and across the open ground had kept out of the way of trodden paths. There were sheep on this wide stretch of upland, and a shepherd might occasionally have been seen there. Otherwise it was little frequented; a human figure on it would arouse curiosity.
A human figure came into view as Harry had traversed the greater part of the open space, and the woods of Royd were a mile or so in front of him. It was the figure of a woman, and was immediately between him and the point towards which he was riding. He knew all the people who lived in the scattered cottages and farms between Royd and the sea; there were not many of them, and none just here. He wondered who it could be going in that direction, and what she was doing so far away from human habitation.
As he rode on, he saw that it was a girl, and a stranger, which was somewhat surprising, as the nearest place to which strangers came was miles away. He had left off singing, but one of the dogs barked, and the girl turned round, evidently startled and perhaps a little alarmed. He was near enough now to see her face. She was very young, hardly more than a child, for her hair was not knotted up under her hat, but tied behind with a big bow. She was tall and slim. The wind took her skirts as she stood there, and revealed the supple grace of her young figure, firmly but lightly poised against it. She was dressed in a coat and skirt of brown tweed, with a hat of soft straw firmly pinned on to her graceful head. So much Harry took in before he came near enough to see her face.
Her features were fine and true, and she had a delicate skin, its colour freshened by the wind. Her eyes were dark, with a starry radiance in them; her lips were slightly parted as she looked at him approaching. She was beautiful, with the beauty half of a child, half of a woman.
Harry reined in his horse as he came up to her, and for an appreciable instant they looked into one another’s eyes without speaking. Then the girl said: “I have lost my way. I don’t know where I’m going to,” and laughed and blushed at the same time.
Harry laughed, too, and slipped down off his horse. “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “I’ll show you the way, if you tell me.”
She was staying with her father, she said, at a cottage on the edge of the woods; she had come out when the rain had ceased to walk towards the sea, but it was farther than she had thought, and when she had turned back to see the unbroken line of the woods before her there was nothing to tell her which point to make for.
The woman with whom she was lodging was the widow of a man who had worked in the Royd woods; he had died the year before and she had been given a pension and allowed to remain on in her cottage. It was in a group of three or four, about a mile from the Castle and a mile and a half from the village, which formed the nearest approach to an outlying hamlet that was to be found on the Royd lands. It was rather surprising that anybody should take lodgings there, though with the deep woods behind it and the moor in front, and the sea within view, many people might have chosen it to make holiday in, if it had come within their knowledge.
“Oh, Mrs. Ivimey,” said Harry, pointing. “That’s a mile and more away over there. I’m afraid you can’t have much sense of direction.”
They both laughed at that. It seemed the most natural thing for them to talk and laugh together. The secluded life that Harry had lived had brought some shyness into the way he addressed himself to strangers, though his natural manner was free and open. But this girl, walking freely over the windy moor, seemed to be in some way allied to those living influences of nature with which his contact was so real. And the spirit of youth informed all her looks and her ways and met the answering youth in him. There was no room for shyness in speaking to her, and as he neither felt nor showed it, her response was frank, too. “I’m a Londoner,” she said. “You couldn’t expect me to find my way about here, where the paths wind about anyhow, and everything is the same.”
He was walking beside her now in the direction he had pointed out. He had made no offer to accompany her and she made no comment upon his doing so. It seemed that they must have a great deal to say to one another and that the best way was to walk together until some of it at least should have been said.
“Everything the same!” exclaimed Harry. “Why, every inch of it is different! I have never been to London, but the streets of a town must be much more alike than this is.”
They laughed again at that, and the girl threw a glance at him, walking by her side, while Circe, held by his strong brown hand, curveted on the close turf and the dogs ranged here and there, a little subdued from their bounding energy, but still keenly interested in all that lay about them. The raindrops sparkled still upon gorse and grass and bramble, larks sang in the clear spaces of the sky, and the dying wind brought a salty thymy fragrance with it. The blood in the veins thrilled to the sweet glad freshness of it all, and youth called to youth as they trod the springy turf together.
There was such a lot to be explained. Everything that was said opened up endless more things to be said. He told her that he had lived all his life at Royd; she told him that she had seldom been away from London. But, whereas he showed himself quite content with the unusual limitations of his life, she spoke of hers with regret. “I’ve always wanted the country,” she said; “I’ve never been so happy as I have been here, for the last two days. Even the storm this morning, I didn’t mind. It was something big and grand, and I knew the sun would shine and it would all be lovely again.”
They talked on and on. They had made friends, as children make friends, liking each other, and pouring themselves out in endless little confidences.
“My name is Harry Brent. I live at Royd Castle with my mother and grandmother.”
“Oh yes, of course; you’re Sir Harry Brent. Mrs. Ivimey has talked about you.
“My name is Viola Bastian. My father called me that out of a beautiful poem. He is an artist, but nobody buys his pictures, so he paints scenery at a theatre. We are very poor.”
It didn’t seem odd to Harry that this beautiful girl, whose speech was refined and whose clothes were such as a sister or cousin of his own might have worn, should be the daughter of a scene painter, who was also very poor. Nor did he blench in the least at a further statement, which explained, at least, the clothes. “I have to work and help father. He didn’t want me to go on the stage, and I should have hated it, too. I am with a dressmaker in Dover Street—Nadine. She makes things chiefly for quite young girls. I have to show them off. It is hard work in the season, but I get a good long holiday, and if father can get away too, and we have enough money, we go into the country for part of it. That is why we are here now.”
It was all very interesting, as anything she might have told him about herself would have been interesting. He knew nothing of states of life other than those which were immediately around him; he accepted everything she told him as quite natural to her, though he thought it a pity that she should have to work so hard and could not live in the country, as he did, since she loved it. She was what he saw and heard her to be, and what she did and where she lived was quite unimportant, except as she might feel them to be important.
But how did she come to be what she was under such conditions of parentage and environment? If it did not occur to Harry in his all-embracing ignorance to ask himself that question, it might very well have been asked by others with more experience of life than his. She was as frank in her address as he was, showed no sense of the social difference between them in any mauvaise honte or explanatory questions. It must have made itself plain to a listener that she was indeed a rare flower of unsullied girlhood, as innocent in essence as Harry himself, who had been kept from contact with the world outside his castle of romance, since she had lived at its crowded centre and remained unspotted by it.
They had not half finished their confidences by the time they came within sight of the cottage at which she was staying—or, rather, of the smoke from its chimney, which rose from behind a corner of the wood jutting out into the moor. Perhaps it was some acquired sophistication that caused her to stop there and to prepare to say good-bye, out of sight of the cottage itself and whoever might see them from it. But, whatever it was, Harry felt the same disinclination to being looked upon by eyes that might have been questioning or curious. She was for him alone—one of his cherished innocent secrets—all the more to be kept to himself because it was like no other secret that he had ever had before. A secret must be shared by some one, or it is no secret, but only a deception. Harry’s secret had been between him and nature, or between him and an imaginary Harry who owed all initiative to the real Harry. But this was his and hers, and hers as much as his. She could keep it a warm nestling secret, or destroy it by a word. Which would she do?
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her slender girl’s hand, and looking him straight in the eyes, as she had looked at him when first they had met. He took her hand, and the touch of it thrilled him. It was soft and firm and cool, like no hand that he had ever had in his, though he had taken the hands of other girls not noticeably different in shape or size from this one.
There was the hint of a question in her look. Was it to be good-bye?
Harry had no such thought. “There is a lot I want to talk to you about,” he said. “Tomorrow afternoon—no, I don’t want to wait till the afternoon—tomorrow morning I will come; quite early.”
Her eyes softened, and she smiled. “Very well,” she said, and waited for him to tell her where and when he would come.
They were to meet on the outskirts of the wood. He would show her a ferny pool in the very heart of it, which he thought nobody but himself knew of. “It will be very hot to-morrow,” he said, throwing a weatherwise eye at the heavens. “We shall be cool and quiet there.”
Suddenly he felt shy of her, mounted his horse, and cantered away, his dogs following him. Then he felt uneasy at the thought that she might have found him rudely abrupt, and when he had gone a few hundred yards he turned to look back. She was still standing where he had left her, and waved her hand to him.
He had the impulse to turn and ride back to her, but cantered on, with a flame of joy shooting up in his heart. When he looked back again, she had gone.