Lawrence Clavering Part 41

"There," says she, defiant but shivering, "I told you they were too wide."

"You did it of a set purpose," said I. I looked towards the gap: it was no longer visible. The storm was tearing across the valley. I picked up Miss Dorothy Curwen in my arms, and ran with her towards the church. I got to the stone wall of the churchyard; a little wicket gave admittance, but the wicket was latched.

"Let me down!" says Dorothy.

"No!" says I, and I pushed against the wicket with my knee. It yielded; a few flakes of snow beat upon my face; I ran through the opening.

The churchyard, like the church, was the tiniest in the world; the walls about it reached breast high, and within the walls the yews were planted close in a square: so that standing within this square, it seemed to me that the storm had lulled. I carried Dorothy to that side of the church which was sheltered from the wind. I tried the door of the church, but it was locked. I set Dorothy down under the wall, slipped off my great-coat, and wrapped it warm about her.

"Look!" said I, shortly.

Just past the angle of the church the snow swirled forwards--down in the valley here it was rather sleet than snow--lashing the fields through which I had run.

"Where are you going?" said Dorothy, as perhaps with some ostentation I b.u.t.toned my coat across my breast.

"To pick up your shoe," said I; and I walked out through the wicket.

"I never met a man of so wicked a perversity," said she from behind me.

CHAPTER XX.

A CONVERSATION IN WASTDALE CHURCH.

When I returned with the shoe, I found Dorothy sitting huddled against the church wall in a very doleful att.i.tude.

"Oh!" she cried remorsefully, as she took the shoe from me, "you are drenched through and through, and it is I that am to blame."

"It matters nothing at all," I replied. "I have been out upon the tops of these ridges, and of nights. It would be strange if I were not inured to a little cold."

"You will take your coat, however."

I had the greatest difficulty in persuading her to keep it; for since I was drenched already, the coat would not dry me, but I should wet the coat. This was the argument I employed to her, though I had another, and a more convincing, to satisfy myself--I mean the sight of her wrapped up in it. It was a big, rough, heavy frieze coat and made a nest for her; she had drawn the collar of it close about her ears, and her face, rosy with warmth and the whipping of the wind as we came across the fields, peeped from the coat, like a moss-rose at the budding.

We sat for a while in silence--for the whistling of the storm was grown so loud, that we had need to shout, and even then the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed up the words out of hearing almost before they had pa.s.sed our lips.

In front of us the tempest roistered about the valley, twisting the sleet and snow this way and that, shrieking about the bases of the hills, whistling along the invisible ridges; now and again, however, there came a momentary lull, and during one of these intervals the clouds broke upon our left and disclosed the peak of Great Gable.

Rising in that way, from the mists that still hid its flanks, the peak seemed so high that you thought it must be slung in mid-air; it stood out black against the grey clouds, barren, impregnable. Dorothy shuddered at the aspect of it.

"You were out upon those heights," she shouted into my ear, "night and day, after you left Applegarth?"

"Yes!" I nodded. Doubtless I should have pointed out that I did not make my bed upon the pinnacles, and that there was all the difference in the world betwixt rain and snow. But, to tell the truth, her anxiety on my account was of that sweetness to me that I could not lightly bring myself to dispense with it. I was debating the matter in my mind, when a tile, loosened by the wind, slid from the roof of the church and smashed upon the ground, a couple of feet from Dorothy. It turned the current of my thoughts effectually. The door of the church I knew to be locked; I crept round to the east end of the building.

There was a great window with the panes set in lead, which reached from the roof to within three feet of the ground. And in that window a second window was made by the lowest of these leaded panes. Inserting my knife, I was able to force up the latch which fastened this second window, and found that, with some squeezing and compression, a body might crawl through the opening. I went back to Dorothy. "It will be safer in the church," said I. I climbed through the window by the side of the altar, and turned to help Dorothy in after me. But as I was in the act of helping her, I heard a clatter on the ground without. She was halfway through the window at the moment, and slipped back with a laugh.

"This time," said she, as she appeared again, and set her hands upon the sill--"this time I did not drop it on purpose." And I helped her in.

The church was barely furnished with perhaps a dozen of rough deal pews, and had not even a vestry, so that the parson's surplice lay neatly folded upon a chair in the chancel. Into one of the pews we entered, and since Dorothy was warm within my coat, I took and wrapped the surplice about my shoulders. So we sat side by side, silent, in the gloom of the church, the whitewashed walls glimmering about us, the sleet whipping the windows and tearing at the door. Somehow the sound of the storm had now become very pleasant to me, since it seemed to shut us off, as upon an island, more securely from the world.

It is strange how a man may walk again and again along a quite familiar path with companions who have grown familiar in his thoughts, and then on some one day, in a twinkling, and for no reason that he can afterwards discern, let him think never so hard, the companions with whom he has fared will lose their familiarity, will become, as it were, transfigured, and the spot to which he has come will take on a magical aspect and a magical light He seems to have come thither for the first time on that day; and let him con over the landmarks to prove the fancy wrong, the fancy will none the less abide with him, solid as truth. He recognizes the spot as in some way intimately concerned with him; it seems to have been waiting for him, and for the conjunction of this one particular hour with him. And the picture which he has of it, thus suddenly revealed, becomes henceforth part and parcel of his being, imperishably treasured within the heart of recollection. So, at all events, it was with me.

A picture of this valley in which we were, of this church in which we sat, sprang up before my eyes, and I viewed it with a curious detachment. It was as though I stood upon the rim of the mountains and looked down into the hollow. I saw the desolate hills ringing it about, made yet more desolate by the blurring snow. I saw the little white church set within its stunted, beaten yews, apart in the mid-centre of the valley. It was, too, as though I saw, by some strange clairvoyancy, through the walls, and beheld the two fugitives securely sheltered, side by side, in the dusk of the pew. And the picture has remained clamped in my memory ever since, so that I have but to close my eyes, and not merely do I see it vividly as I did then, but I experience again that vague sense of a voice crying somewhere out of Nature's heart, "This spot has been waiting for you twain, and for this one hour."

It was a movement which Dorothy made, brought me to myself. For she suddenly clasped her hands together with a shudder.

"You are cold?" I cried.

"No," she replied in a low voice. "I was thinking of that peak we saw and the horror of it by night," and her voice trembled for an instant, "and of your watching from the darkness the lights of Applegarth. We were comfortably in our beds; and it rained that night I remember the patter of the rain against the windows."

"Nay," said I, "there was little harm done. I am no snow-man to be washed away by a capful of rain."

She turned to me very quickly.

"Tell me," she said, in a voice no less quick. "The evening that you went from us--you were talking for a long while at the gate with Mary Tyson, you will remember. I interrupted your talk."

"Yes! I remember," I answered, staring straight in front of me.

"Well," she continued, "I have often wondered," her voice sank yet lower, "whether that going of yours was not a flight--flight from--from us at Applegarth. For, after all, it was something Mary Tyson said to you that made you go."

I turned towards her with a start.

"You know what Mary Tyson said?"

She looked at me in silence, her eyes shining out of the dusk. Then she lowered her head.

"I guessed it," she said in a whisper. "I guessed it then, for I know Mary's care for me. And the next morning when we sent her to warn you that the sheriff was at the door, I read it in her face. I mean," said she, recovering herself hastily, "I read your departure in her face, and I knew it was what she had said to you had driven you out, and not your own necessities."

She paused; I did not answer.

"The knowledge has troubled me sorely," she said, "for you were our guest."

"It made but the one night's difference," I urged, "for on the morrow came the officers."

"Ah! but that was the accident," she answered shrewdly. "They might not have come--they might never have come--and still you would have fled. I have said this much to you," she went on with a change of tone, "because I would have you look on me just as a friend, who trusts you, who has great cause to trust and thank you, and who would count it a very real happiness if she could, in any small way, repay you. I told you when we met on your march that I knew there was some great trouble."

"And the answer I gave to you then, I must give now. I am bound to face that trouble by myself. It was my sin brought it about."

"Ah! but one never knows whence help may come," she replied; and the gentle earnestness with which she spoke so tempted me to unbosom myself, that instinctively I drew away from her. "You think it is just a woman's curiosity which prompts me," she cried, mistaking my movement. "Ah! no. Acquit me of that fault! I am not sure, but it may be that I can help you."

Did she know? I wondered. My thoughts went back to that last meeting near Penrith. I had spoken then of a prison-door which must close between us twain, and she had made an answer which seemed to hint a suspicion of the truth.

"And even if I cannot, the mere telling sometimes helps," she continued, "so long as one tells it to a friend. I mean"--and here she began to speak very slowly, choosing her words, and with a certain difficulty in the utterance--"I mean I was afraid that something Mary might have said checks you. There are things one does not confide to an acquaintance, or, again, to one whom you think to look upon you as ever so much nearer than an acquaintance. But to a friend, yes! A friend is a halfway house between, where one can take one's ease;" and she drew a breath, like one that has come to the end of a dangerous task.

As for me, I sat listening to that word "friend." The walls seemed to retain it, and whisper it again to me after she had ceased, and in the changing tones which she had used. For now Dorothy had spoken it with an earnest insistence, as though anxious--almost over-anxious--I should just accept the phrase as the true definition of what she felt towards me; and now her voice had faltered and stumbled at the word.

It may have been a lack of modesty--I cannot tell--but I think it would have been the falsest modesty in the world had I affected to neglect the manner of the speech, while considering the matter of it.

But be it as it may, the one thought which rose in my mind, engrossing me, distinct, horrible in distinctness, was this: What if that word "friend" cloaked and concealed another--another which, but for those few weeks at Blackladies, I might--who knows!--perhaps have persuaded her to speak? Why then, if that was true, here was I implicating, in distress, the one woman who was chiefest in the front of my thoughts.