Diana Part 12

MR. KNOWLTON'S FISH.

Doubtless they were ready, those two, for the brook and the afternoon.

The young officer came at half-past three; not in regimentals this time, but in an easy grey undress and straw hat. He came in a waggon, and he brought his fishing-rod and carried a basket. Diana had been ready ever since three. They lost no time; they went out into the meadow and struck the brook.

Now the brook, during its pa.s.sage through the valley field, was remarkable for nothing but a rare infirmity of purpose, which would never let it keep one course for many rods together. It twisted and curled about, making many little meadow promontories on one side and the other; hurrying along with a soft, sweet gurgle that sounded fresh, even under the heat of the summer sun. It was a hot afternoon, as Mrs.

Starling had said; and the two excursionists were fain to take it gently and to make as straight a course across the fields as keeping on one side of the brook left possible. They could not cross it. The stream was not large, yet quite too broad for a jump; and not deep, yet deep enough to cover its stony bed and leave no crossing stones. So sometimes along the border of the brook, where a fringe of long gra.s.s had been left by the mowers' scythes, rank and tangled; sometimes striking across from bend to bend over the meadow, where no kindly trees stood to shade them, the two went--on a hunt, as Mr. Knowlton said, after pretty things.

After a mile or more of this walking, the scenery changed. Mown fields, hot and fragrant, were left behind; almost suddenly they entered the hills, where the brook issued from them; and then they began a slower tracking of its course back among the rocks and woods of a dell which soon grew close and wild. The sides of the dell became higher; the bed of the stream more steep and rough; the canopy of trees closed in overhead, and showed the blue through only in broken patches. The clothing of the hill-sides was elegant and exquisite; oaks, and firs, and hemlocks, with slender birches and maples, lining the ravine; and under them a free growth of ferns, and fresh beds of moss, and lovely lichens covered the rocks and dressed the ground. The stream rattled along at the bottom; foaming over the stones and leaping down the rocks; making the still, deep pools where the fish love to lie; and in its way executing a succession of cascades and tiny waterfalls that wanted no picturesque element except magnitude. And a good imagination can supply that.

And how went the afternoon? How goes it with those who have just received a new sense, or found a sudden doubling of that which they had before? Nay, it was a new sense, a new power of perception, able to discern what had eluded all their previous lives. The brook in the meadow had been to Diana's vision until now merely running water; whence had come those delicious amber hues where it rolled over the stones, and the deep olive shadows where the water was deeper? She had never seen them before. Now they were pointed out and seen to be rich and clear, a sort of dilution of sunlight, with a suggestion of sunlight's other riches of possibility. The rank unmown gra.s.s that fringed the stream, Diana had never seen it but as what the scythe had missed; now she was made to notice what an elegant fringe it was, and how the same sunlight glanced upon its curving stems and blades, and set off the deep brown stream. Diana's own eyes began to be quickened, and her tongue loosed. The lovely outline of the hills that encircled the valley had never looked just so rare and lovely as this afternoon when she pointed them out to her companion, and he scanned them and nodded in full a.s.sent. But when they got into the ravine, it was Diana's turn. Mosses, and old trees, and sharp turns of the gorge, and fords, where it was necessary to cross the brook and recross on stepping stones just lifting them above the water, here black enough,--Diana knew all these things, and with secret delight unfolded the knowledge of them to her companion as they went along. And still the bits of blue sky overhead had never seemed so unearthly blue; the drapery of oak and hemlock boughs had never been so graceful and bright; there was a presence in the old gorge that afternoon, which went with them and cleared their eyes from vapour and their minds from everything, it seemed, but a susceptibility to beauty and delight in its influence. Perhaps the young officer would have said that this presence was embodied in the unconscious eyes and fair calm brow which went beside him; I think he saw them more distinctly than anything else. Diana did not know it. Somehow she very rarely looked her companion in the face; and yet she knew very well how his face looked, too; so well, perhaps, that she did not need to refresh her memory. So they wandered on; and the fords were pleasant places, where she had to be helped over the stones. Not that Diana needed such help; her foot was fearless and true; she never had had help there before: was that what made it so pleasant? Certainly it did seem to her that it was a prettier way of going up the brook than alone and unaided.

"I am not getting much fish at this rate," said young Knowlton at length with a light laugh.

"No," said Diana. "Why don't you stop and try here? Here looks like a good place. Right in that still, deep spot, I dare say there are trout.

"What will you do in the meantime, if I stop and fish? It will be very stupid for you."

"For me? O no. I shall sit here and look on. It will not be stupid. I will keep still, never fear."

"I don't want you to keep still; that would be very stupid for me."

"You can't talk while you are fishing; it would scare the trout, you know."

"I don't believe it."

"I have always heard so."

"I don't believe it will pay," said Knowlton as he fitted his rod--"if I am to purchase trout at the expense of all that."

All what? Diana wondered.

"Suppose we talk very softly--in whispers," he went on, laughing. "Do you suppose the trout are so observant as to mind it? If you sit here,--on this mossy stone, close by me, can't I enjoy two things at once?"

Diana made no objection to this arrangement. She took the place indicated, full of a breathless kind of pleasure which she did not stop to a.n.a.lyze; and watched in silence the progress of the fishing. In silence, for after Mr. Knowlton's arrangement had been carried into effect, he too subsided into stillness; whether engrossed with the business of his line, or satisfied, or with thoughts otherwise engaged, did not appear. But as presently and again a large trout, speckled and beautiful, was swung up out of the pool below, the two faces were turned towards each other, and the two pairs of eyes met with a smile of so much sympathy, that I rather think the temporary absence of words lost nothing to the growth of the understanding between them.

The place where they sat was lovely. Just there the bank was high, overhanging the brook. A projecting rock, brown and green and grey, with lichen and mosses of various kinds, held besides a delicate young silver birch, the roots of which found their way to nourishment somehow through fissures in the rock. Here sat Knowlton, with Diana beside him on a stone, just a little behind; while he sat on the brink to cast, or rather drop, his line into the little pool below where the trout were lurking. The opposite side of the stream was but a few yards off, thick with a lovely growth of young wood, with one great hemlock not far above towering up towards the sky. The view in that direction went up a vista of the ravine, so wood-fringed on both sides, with the stream leaping and tumbling down a steep rocky bed. Overhead the narrow line of blue sky.

"Four!" whispered Diana, as another spotted trout came up from the pool.

"I wonder how many there are down there?" said Knowlton as he unhooked the fish. "It makes me hungry."

"Catching the trout?" said Diana softly.

He nodded. "Here comes another. I wish we could make a fire somewhere hereabouts and cook them."

"Is that a good way?"

"The best in the world," he said, adjusting his fly, and then looking with a smile at her. "There is no way that fish taste so good. I used to do that, you see, in the hills round about the Academy; and I know all about it."

"We could make a fire," said Diana; "but we have no gridiron here."

"I had no gridiron there. Couldn't have carried a gridiron in my pocket if I had had one. Here's another"--

"You had not a gridiron, of course."

"Nor a pocket either."

"But did you eat the trout all alone? without bread, I mean, or anything?"

"No; we took bread and salt, and pepper and b.u.t.ter, and a few such things. There were generally a lot of us; or if only two or three we could manage that. The b.u.t.ter was the worst thing to accomplish--Here's another!"

"Such beauties!" said Diana. "Well, Mr. Knowlton, if you get _too_ hungry, we'll cook you one at home, you know."

"Will you?" said he. "I wish we had salt and bread here! I should like to show you how wood cookery goes, though. But I'll tell you! we'll get Mrs. Starling to let us have it out in the meadow--that won't be bad."

Diana thought of her mother's utter astonishment and disapprobation at such a proposal; and there was silence again for a few minutes, while the line hung motionless over the pool, and Diana's eyes watched it movelessly, and the liquid sweetness of the water's talk with the stones was heard,--as one hears things when the senses are strung to double keenness. Diana heard it, at least, and listened to something in it she had never perceived before; something not only sweet and liquid and musical, but in some odd sense admonitory. What did it say? Diana hardly questioned, but yet she heard,--"My peace never changes. My song never dies. Listen, or not listen, it is all the same. You may be in twenty moods in a year. In my depth of content I flow on for ever."

A slight rustling of leaves, a slight crackling of stems or branches, brought the eyes of both watchers in another direction; and before they could hear a footfall, they saw, above them on the course of the brook, a figure of a man coming towards them, and Diana knew it was the minister. Swiftly and lightly he came swinging himself along, bounding over obstacles, with a sure foot and a strong hand; till presently he stood beside them. Just then Mr. Knowlton's line was swung up with another trout. Diana introduced the gentlemen to each other.

"Fishing?" said the minister.

"We have got all there are in this place, I'm thinking," said Knowlton, shutting up his rod.

"You _had_ not, two minutes ago," said the other. "What do you judge from? It doesn't do to be so easily discouraged as that."

"Discouraged?" said Knowlton. "Not exactly. Let us see. Four, five, six--seven--eight. Eight, out of this little one pool, Mr. Masters. Do you think there are any more?"

"I always get all I can out of a thing," said the minister. And his very cheery tone, as well as his very quiet manner, seemed to say he was in the habit of getting a good deal out of everything.

"I don't know about that," answered the young officer in another tone.

"Doesn't always pay. To stay too long at one pool of a brook, for instance. The brook has other pools, I suppose."

"I suppose it has," said the minister, with a manner which would have puzzled any but one that knew him, to tell whether he were in jest or earnest. "I suppose it has. But you may not find them. Or by the time you do, you may have lost your bait. Or you may be tired of fishing. Or it may be time to go home."

"I am never tired," said Knowlton, springing up; "and I have got a guide that will not let me miss my way."

"You are fortunate," said the other. "And I will not occupy your time.

Good afternoon! I shall hope to see more of you."

With a warm grasp of the young officer's hand, and lifting his hat to Diana, the minister went on his way. Diana looked after him, wondering why he had not shaken hands with her too. It was something she was a little sorry to miss.

"Who is that?" Knowlton asked.

"Mr. Masters? He's our minister."

"What sort of a chap is he? Not like all the rest of them?"