In the Mountains Part 24

_October 3rd._

It was so late last night when I got to that, that I went to bed. Now it is before breakfast, and I'll finish about yesterday.

Uncle Rudolph had taken me up the mountain only to talk of Dolly.

Incredible as it may seem, he has fallen in love. At first sight. At sixty. I am sure a woman can't do that, so that this by itself convinces me he is a man. Three days ago I wrote in this very book that a dean isn't quite my idea of a man. I retract. He is.

Well, while I was shrinking and shivering on my own account, waiting for him to begin digging about among my raw places, he said instead, 'How does she spell it?' and threw my thoughts into complete confusion.

Blankly I gazed at him while I struggled to rearrange them on this new basis. It was such an entirely unexpected question. I did not at this stage dream of what had happened to him. It never would have occurred to me that Dolly would have so immediate an effect, simply by sitting there, simply by producing her dimple at the right moment. Attractive as she is, it is her ways rather than her looks that are so adorable; and what could Uncle Rudolph have seen of her ways in so brief a time? He has simply fallen in love with a smile. And he sixty. And he one's uncle. Amazing Dolly; irresistible apparently, to uncles.

'Do you mean Mrs. Jewks's name?' I asked, when I was able to speak.

'Yes,' said my uncle.

'I haven't seen it written,' I said, restored so far by my relief--for Dolly had saved me--that I had the presence of mind to hedge. I was obliged to hedge. In my mind's eye I saw Mrs. Barnes's face imploring me.

'No doubt,' said my uncle after another silence, 'it is spelt on the same principle as Molyneux.'

'Very likely,' I agreed.

'It sounds as though her late husband's family might originally have been French.'

'It does rather.'

'Possibly Huguenot.'

'Yes.'

'I was much astonished that she should be a widow.'

'_Yet not one widow but two widows...._' ran at this like a refrain in my mind, perhaps because I was sitting so close to a dean. Aloud I said, for by now I had completely recovered, 'Why, Uncle Rudolph? Widows do abound.'

'Alas, yes. But there is something peculiarly virginal about Mrs.

Jewks.'

I admitted that this was so. Part of Dolly's attractiveness is the odd impression she gives of untouchedness, of gay aloofness.

My uncle broke off a stalk of the withered last summer's gra.s.s and began nibbling it. He was lying on his side a little below me, resting on his elbow. His black, neat legs looked quaint stuck through the long yellow gra.s.s. He had taken off his hat, hardy creature, and the wind blew his grey hair this way and that, and sometimes flattened it down in a fringe over his eyes. When this happened he didn't look a bit like anybody good, but he pushed it back each time, smoothing it down again with an abstracted carefulness, his eyes fixed on the valley far below. He wasn't seeing the valley.

'How long has the poor young thing--' he began.

'You will be surprised to hear,' I interrupted him, 'that Mrs. Jewks is forty.'

'Really,' said my uncle, staring round at me. 'Really. That is indeed surprising.' And after a pause he added, 'Surprising and gratifying.'

'Why gratifying, Uncle Rudolph?' I inquired.

'When did she lose her husband?' he asked, taking no notice of my inquiry.

The preliminary to an accurate answer to this question was, of course, Which? But again a vision of Mrs. Barnes's imploring face rose before me, and accordingly, restricting myself to Juchs, I said she had lost him shortly before the war.

'Ah. So he was prevented, poor fellow, from having the honour of dying for England.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Poor fellow. Poor fellow.'

'Yes.'

'Poor fellow. Well, he was spared knowing what he had missed. At least he was spared that. And she--his poor wife--how did she take it?'

'Well, I think.'

'Yes. I can believe it. She wouldn't--I am very sure she wouldn't--intrude her sorrows selfishly on others.'

It was at this point that I became aware my uncle had fallen in love. Up to this, oddly enough, it hadn't dawned on me. Now it did more than dawned, it blazed.

I looked at him with a new and startled interest. 'Uncle Rudolph,' I said impetuously, no longer a distrustful niece talking to an uncle she suspects, but an equal with an equal, a human being with another human being, 'haven't you ever thought of marrying again? It's quite a long time now since Aunt Winifred--'

'Thought?' said my uncle, his voice sounding for the first time simply, ordinarily human, without a trace in it of the fatal pulpit flavour, 'Thought? I'm always thinking of it.'

And except for his ap.r.o.n and gaiters he might have been any ordinary solitary little man eating out his heart for a mate.

'But then why don't you? Surely a deanery of all places wants a wife in it?'

'Of course it does Those strings or rooms--empty, echoing. It shouts for a wife. Shouts, I tell you. At least mine does. But I've never found--I hadn't seen--'

He broke off, biting at the stalk of gra.s.s.

'But I remember you,' I went on eagerly, 'always surrounded by flocks of devoted women. Weren't any of them--?'

'No,' said my uncle shortly. And after a second of silence he said again, and so loud that I jumped, 'No!' And then he went on even more violently, 'They didn't give me a chance. They never let me alone a minute. After Winifred's death they were like flies. Stuck to me--made me sick--great flies crawling--' And he shuddered, and shook himself as though he were shaking off the lot of them.

I looked at him in amazement. 'Why,' I cried, 'you're talking exactly like a man!'

But he, staring at the view without seeing an inch of it, took no heed of me, and I heard him say under his breath as though I hadn't been there at all, 'My G.o.d, I'm so lonely at night!'

That finished it. In that moment I began to love my uncle. At this authentic cry of forlornness I had great difficulty in not bending over and putting my arms round him,--just to comfort him, just to keep him warm. It must be a dreadful thing to be sixty and all alone. You look so grown up. You look as though you must have so many resources, so few needs; and you are accepted as provided for, what with your career accomplished, and your houses and servants and friends and books and all the rest of it--all the empty, meaningless rest of it; for really you are the most miserable of motherless cold babies, conscious that you are motherless, conscious that n.o.body soft and kind and adoring is ever again coming to croon over you and kiss you good-night and be there next morning to smile when you wake up.

'Uncle Rudolph--' I began.

Then I stopped, and bending over took the stalk of gra.s.s he kept on biting out of his hand.

'I can't let you eat any more of that,' I said. 'It's not good for you.'

And having got hold of his hand I kept it.