A Witch of the Hills Volume I Part 13

Next day I was alone in the drawing-room, the ladies having given up possession of the Hall and returned to the cottage, when I heard footsteps at the open door and a voice--

'May I come in, Mr. Maude?'

'Certainly.'

I was busy putting up two paintings of Norwegian scenery in place of the portraits of Lady Helen, which were on the ground against the wall. On seeing my occupation, Babiole uttered a short cry of surprise and dismay. I said nothing, but put my head on one side to see if one of my new pictures was hung straight. At last she spoke--

'Oh, Mr. Maude!' was all she said, in a tone of timid reproach.

'Well.'

'You're not going to take her down after all this time?'

'You see I have taken her down.'

'Oh, why?' It was not curiosity; it was entreaty.

'Don't you think she's been up there long enough?'

'If you were the woman and she were the man you wouldn't say that.'

'What should I say?'

'You would say, "He's been up there so long that, whatever he's done, he may as well stay there now."'

'That would be rather contemptuous tolerance, wouldn't it?'

'But the picture wouldn't know that; and if the original should ever grow sorry for all the harm she--he had done, it would be something to know that the picture still hung there just the same.'

The story must have leaked out, then--the first part through Fabian, probably, and the rest through the divorce court columns of the daily papers. I said nothing in answer to the girl's pleadings, but I restored the portraits to their old places with the excuse that the landscapes would look better in the dining-room.

Our studies began again that very afternoon. Babiole had forgotten nothing, though work had, of course, grown slack during the hot days of the summer. She had had another and rather absorbing love affair, too, the details of which I extracted with the accompaniment of more blushes than in the old days.

'We shall have you getting married and flying away from us altogether, I suppose, now, before we know where we are.'

'No,' she protested stoutly, 'I'm not going to marry; I am going to devote myself to art.'

Upon this I made her fetch her sketch-book, after promising 'not to tell mamma,' who might well be forgiven for a prejudice against any more members of her family sacrificing themselves to this Juggernaut.

The sketches were all of fir and larch-tree, hillside and rippling stony Dee; some were in pencil, some in water-colour; there was love in every line of each of the little pictures, and there was something more.

'Why, Babiole, you're going to be a great artist, I believe,' I cried, as I noticed the vigour of the outlines, the imaginative charm of the treatment of her favourite corners of rock and forest.

'Oh no, not that,' she said deprecatingly. 'If I can be only a little one I shall be satisfied. I should never dare to draw the big hills.

When I get on those hills along the Gairn and see the peaks rising the one behind the other all round me, I feel almost as if I ought to fall on my knees only to look at them; it is only when we have crept down into some cleft full of trees, where I can peep at them from round a corner, that I feel I can take out my paper and my paint-box without disrespect.'

'But you can be a great artist without painting great things. You may paint Snowdon so that it is nothing better than a drawing-master's copy, and you may paint a handful of wild flowers so that it may shame acres of cla.s.sical pot-boilers hung on the line at the Royal Academy.'

Babiole was thoughtfully silent for some minutes after this, while I turned over the rest of her drawings.

'Drawing-master's copy!' she repeated slowly at last. 'Then a drawing-master is a man who doesn't draw very well, or who isn't very particular how he teaches what he knows?'

'Yes, without being very severe I think we may say that.'

'That is not like your teaching, Mr. Maude.'

'What do you mean?'

'Why, all these months that you've been away I've had a lot of time to think, and I see what a different thing you have made of life to me by teaching me to understand things. Last year I thought of nothing when I was out on the hills with Ta-ta but childish things--stories and things like that. And now all the while I think of the things that are going on in the great world, the pictures that are being painted, the books that are being written.'

'And the dresses that are being worn?' I suggested playfully, not at all sure that the change she was so proud of was entirely for the better.

'Well, yes, I think I should like to know that too,' she admitted, with a blush.

'And you want to attribute all that to my teaching?'

'Yes, Mr. Maude,' she answered, laughing; 'you must bear the blame of it all.'

'Well, look here; I've re-visited the world since you have, and, believe me, you are much better outside. It's a horrid, over-crowded, noisy place, and, as for the artists in whom you are so much interested, you must worship them from afar if you want to worship them at all. Painters, actors, writers, and the rest--the successful ones are sn.o.bs, the unsuccessful--sponges. And as for the dresses, my child, there was never a frock sent out of Bond Street so pretty, so tasteful, or so becoming as the one you have on.'

But Babiole glanced down at her blue serge gown rather disdainfully, and there shone in her eyes, as brightly as ever, that vague hunger of a woman's first youth for emotions and pleasures, which every morning's sunshine seemed to promise her, and whose names she did not know.

'Ah,' she said gaily, 'but everybody doesn't speak like that. I shall wait until your friends come in the summer, and see what they tell me about it.'

My face clouded, and, with the pretty affectionateness with which she now always treated me, she a.s.sured me that she did not really want any advice but mine, and that, as long as I was good enough to teach her, she was content to read the lessons of the busy world through my eyes.

Meanwhile, however, I was myself, through those same eyes of mine, learning a far more dangerous lesson, and one, unluckily, which I could never hope to impart to any woman. I had no one but myself to thank for my folly, into which I had coolly walked with my eyes open.

But the temptation to direct that fair young mind had been too strong for me, and, having once indulged in the pleasure, the few months away had but increased my craving to taste it again. This second winter we worked even harder than the first. Babiole, with her expanding mind, and the pa.s.sionate excitement she began to throw into every pursuit, became daily a more fascinating pupil. She would slide down from her chair on to a footstool at my side when discussion grew warm between us concerning an interesting chapter we had been reading. She would put her hand on my shoulder with affectionate persuasion if I disagreed with her, or tap my fingers impatiently to hurry my expression of opinion. How could she know that the ugly grave man, with furrows in his scarred face, and already whitening hair, was young and hot-blooded too, with pa.s.sions far stronger than hers, and all the stronger from being iron-bound?

Sometimes I felt tempted to let her know that I was twenty years younger than she, growing up in the belief of her childhood on that matter, innocently thought. But it could make no difference, in the only way in which I cared for it to make a difference, and it might render her constrained with me. After all, it was my comparative youth which enabled me to enter into her feelings, as no dry-as-dust professor of fifty could have done, and it was upon that sympathy that the bond between us was founded. In the happiness this companionship brought to me, I thought I had lulled keener feelings to sleep, when, as spring came back, and I was beginning again to dread the return of the long days, an event happened which made havoc of the most cherished sentiments of all three of us.

The first intimation of this revolution was given by Ferguson, who informed me at luncheon, with a solemnly indignant face, that a 'varra disreputable-looking person' had been pestering him with inquiries for Mr. Maude, and, after having the door shut in his face had taken himself off, so Ferguson feared, in the direction of the cottage, to bother the ladies. My butler's dislike of Mrs. Ellmer had broken down under her constant a.s.sistance to Janet.

'I saw that Jim was aboot the stable, sir, so I have nae doot he helped the gentleman awa' safe eno',' added Ferguson grimly.

I thought no more of the incident, which the butler had reported simply because up among the hills the sight of an unknown face is an event.

But at four o'clock Babiole did not appear; I sat waiting, looking through the pages of Green's _Short History of the English People_, on which we were then engaged, for twenty minutes; and then, almost alarmed at such an unusual occurrence, I was getting up to go and make inquiries at the cottage when I heard her well-known footstep through the open hall-door. Even before she came in I knew that something had happened, for instead of running in all eager, laughing apology, as was her way on the rare occasions when she was a few minutes late, I heard her cross the hall very slowly and hesitate at the door.

'Come in, come in, Babiole; what's the matter?' I cried out impatiently.

She came in then quickly, and held out her hand to me as she wished me good-afternoon. But there was no smile on her face, and the light seemed to have gone out of her eyes.

'What is it, child? Something has happened,' said I, as I drew her down into her usual chair.

She shook her head, and tried to laugh, but suddenly broke down, and, bursting into tears, leaned her face against her hands and sobbed bitterly.

I was horribly distressed. I tried some vague words of consolation for the unknown evil, and laid my hand lightly on one heaving shoulder, only to withdraw it as if seared by the touch. Then I sat down quietly and waited, while Ta-ta, more daring, set up a kindly howl of sympathetic lamentation, which happily caused a diversion.

'I ought to be ashamed of myself,' she said, sitting upright, and drying her eyes. 'I don't know what you must think of me, Mr. Maude.'