Missing, Mrs. Humphry Ward [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

of authority. She stood, recovering breath and looking at the young people with clear and penetrating eyes, suddenly observant.

The Sarratts could only say that they had not come across any other moss-gatherer on the road.

The strange lady sighed--but with a half humorous, half philosophical lifting of the eyebrows.

'It was very stupid of me to miss her--but you really can't come to grief on these fells in broad daylight. However, if you do meet her--a lady with a sailor hat, and a blue jersey--will you tell her that I've gone on to Ambleside?'

Sarratt politely assured her that they would look out for her companion. He had never yet seen a grey-haired Englishwoman, of that age, carry so heavy a load, and he liked both her pluck and her voice. She reminded him of the French peasant women in whose farms he often lodged behind the lines. She meanwhile was scrutinising him--the badge on his cap, and the two buttons on his khaki sleeve.

'I think I know who you are,' she said, with a sudden smile. 'Aren't you Mr. and Mrs. Sarratt? Sir William Farrell told me about you.' Then she turned to the boy--'Go on, Jim. I'll come soon.'

A conversation followed on the mountain path, in which their new acquaintance gave her name as Miss Hester Martin, living in a cottage on the outskirts of Ambleside, a cousin and old friend of Sir William Farrell; an old friend indeed, it seemed, of all the local residents; absorbed in war-work of different kinds, and somewhere near sixty years of age; but evidently neither too old nor too busy to have lost the natural interest of a kindly spinster in a bride and bridegroom, especially when the bridegroom was in khaki, and under orders for the front. She promised, at once, to come and see Mrs. Sarratt, and George, beholding in her a possible motherly friend for Nelly when he should be far away, insisted that she should fix a day for her call before his departure. Nelly added her smiles to his. Then, with a pleasant nod, Miss Martin left them, refusing all their offers to help her with her load. '"My strength is as the strength of ten,"' she said with a flash of fun in her eyes--'But I won't go on with the quotation. Good-bye.'

George and Nelly went on towards a spot above a wood in front of them to which she had directed them, as a good point to rest and lunch. She, meanwhile, pursued her way towards Ambleside, her thoughts much more occupied with the young couple than with her lost companion. The little thing was a beauty, certainly. Easy to see what had attracted William Farrell! An uncommon type--and a very artistic type; none of your milk-maids. She supposed before long William would be proposing to draw her--hm!--with the husband away? It was to be hoped some watch-dog would be left. William was a good fellow--no real malice in him--had never _meant_ to injure anybody, that she knew of--but--

Miss Martin's cogitations however went no farther in exploring that 'but.' She was really very fond of her cousin William, who bore an amount of discipline from her that no one else dared to apply to the owner of Carton. Tragic, that he couldn't fight! That would have brought out all there was in him.


CHAPTER IV

'Glorious!'

Nelly Sarratt stood lost in the beauty of the spectacle commanded by Sir William Farrell's cottage. It was placed in a by-road on the western side of Loughrigg, that smallest of real mountains, beloved of poets and wanderers. The ground dropped sharply below it to a small lake or tarn, its green banks fringed with wood, while on the further side the purple crag and noble head of Wetherlam rose out of sunlit mist,--thereby indefinitely heightened--into a pearl and azure sky. To the north also, a splendid wilderness of fells, near and far; with the Pikes and Bowfell leading the host. White mists--radiant mists--perpetually changing, made a magic interweaving of fell with fell, of mountain with sky. Every tint of blue and purple, of amethyst and sapphire lay melted in the chalice carved out by the lake and its guardian mountains. Every line of that chalice was harmonious as though each mountain and valley filled its place consciously, in a living order; and in the grandeur of the whole there was no terror, no hint of a world hostile and inaccessible to man, as in the Alps and the Rockies.

'These mountains are one's friends,' said Farrell, smiling as he stood beside Nelly, pointing out the various peaks by name. 'If you know them only a little, you can trust yourself to them, at any hour of the day or night. Whereas, in the Alps, I always feel myself "a worm and no man"!'

'I have never been abroad,' said Nelly shyly.

For once he found an _ingenue_ attractive.

'Then you have it to come--when the world is sane again. But some things you will have missed for ever. For instance, you will never see Rheims--as it was. I have spent months at Rheims in old days, drawing and photographing. I must show you my things. They have a tragic value now.'

And taking out a portfolio from a rack near him, he opened it and put it on a stand before her.

Nelly, who had in her the real instincts of the artist, turned over some very masterly drawings, in mingled delight and despair.

'If I could only do something like that!' she said, pointing to a study of some of the famous windows at Rheims, with vague forms of saint and king emerging from a conflagration of colour, kindled by the afternoon sun, and dyeing the pavement below.

'Ah, that took me some time. It was difficult. But here are some fragments you'll like--just bits from the facade and the monuments.'

The strength of the handling excited her. She looked at them in silence; remembering with disgust all the pretty sentimental work she had been used to copy. She began to envisage what this commonly practised art may be; what a master can do with it. Standards leaped up. Alp on Alp appeared. When George was gone she would _work_, yes, she would work hard--to surprise him when he came back.

Sir William meanwhile was increasingly taken with his guest. She was shy, very diffident, very young; but in the few things she said, he discerned--or fancied--the stirrings of a real taste--real intelligence. And she was prettier and more fetching than ever--with her small dark head, and her lovely mouth. He would like to draw the free sensuous line of it, the beautiful moulding of the chin. What a prize for the young man! Was he aware of his own good fortune? Was he adequate?

'I say, how jolly!' said Sarratt, coming up to look. 'My wife, Sir William--I think she told you--has got a turn for this kind of thing. These will give her ideas.'

And while he looked at the drawings, he slipped a hand into his wife's arm, smiling down upon her, and commenting on the sketches. There was nothing in what he said. He only 'knew what he liked,' and an unfriendly bystander would have been amused by his constant assumption that Nelly's sketches were as good as anybody's. Entirely modest for himself, he was inclined to be conceited for her, she checking him, with rather flushed cheeks. But Farrell liked him all the better, both for the ignorance and the pride. The two young people standing there together, so evidently absorbed in each other, yet on the brink of no ordinary parting, touched the romantic note in him. He was very sorry for them--especially for the bride--and eagerly, impulsively wished to befriend them.

In the background, the stout lady whom the Sarratts had met on Loughrigg Terrace, Miss Hester Martin, was talking to Miss Farrell, while Bridget Cookson was carrying on conversation with a tall officer who carried his arm in a sling, and was apparently yet another convalescent officer from the Carton hospital, whom Cicely Farrell had brought over in her motor to tea at her brother's cottage. His name seemed to be Captain Marsworth, and he was doing his best with Bridget; but there were great gaps in their conversation, and Bridget resentfully thought him dull. Also she perceived--for she had extremely quick eyes in such matters--that Captain Marsworth, while talking to her, seemed to be really watching Miss Farrell, and she at once jumped to the conclusion that there was something 'up' between him and Miss Farrell.

Cicely Farrell certainly took no notice of him. She was sitting perched on the high end of a sofa smoking a cigarette and dangling her feet, which were encased, as before, in high-heeled shoes and immaculate gaiters. She was dressed in white serge with a cap and jersey of the brightest possible green. Her very open bodice showed a string of fine pearls and she wore pearl ear-rings. Seen in the same room with Nelly Sarratt she could hardly be guessed at less than twenty-eight. She was the mature woman in full possession of every feminine weapon, experienced, subtle, conscious, a little hard, a little malicious. Nelly Sarratt beside her looked a child. Miss Farrell had glanced at her with curiosity, but had not addressed many words to her. She had concluded at once that it was a type that did not interest her. It interested William of course, because he was professionally on the look out for beauty. But that was his affair. Miss Farrell had no use for anything so unfledged and immature. And as for the sister, Miss Cookson, she had no points of attraction whatever. The young man, the husband, was well enough--apparently a gentleman; but Miss Farrell felt that she would have forgotten his existence when the tea-party was over. So she had fallen back on conversation with her cousin. That Cousin Hester--dear, shapeless, Puritanical thing!--disapproved of her, her dress, her smoking, her ways, and her opinions, Cicely well knew--but that only gave zest to their meetings, which were not very frequent.

Meanwhile Bridget, in lieu of conversation and while tea was still preparing, was making mental notes of the cottage. It consisted apparently of two sitting-rooms, and a studio--in which they were to have tea--with two or three bedrooms above. It had been developed out of a Westmorland farm, but developed beyond recognition. The spacious rooms panelled in plain oak, were furnished sparely, with few things, but those of the most beautiful and costly kind. Old Persian rugs and carpets, a few Renaissance mirrors, a few priceless 'pots,' a picture or two, hangings and coverings of a dim purple--the whole, made by these various items and objects, expressed a taste perhaps originally florid, but tamed by long and fastidious practice of the arts of decoration.

In the study where tea had been laid, Nelly could not restrain her wonder and delight. On one wall hung ten of the most miraculous Turners--drawings from his best period, each of them irreplaceably famous. Another wall showed a group of Boningtons--a third a similar gathering of Whistlers. Sir William, charmed with the bride's pleasure, took down drawing after drawing, carried them to the light for her, and discoursed upon them.

'Would you like that to copy?'--he said, putting a Turner into her lap--a marvel of blue mountain peaks, and winding river, and aerial distance.

'Oh, I shouldn't dare--I should be afraid!' said Nelly, hardly liking to take the treasure in her own hands. 'Aren't they--aren't they worth immense sums?'

Sir William laughed.

'Well, of course, they're valuable--everybody wants them. But if you would ever like that one to copy, you