From Morecambe Bay I turned inland towards the borders of Yorkshire, and passing to the east of Kirby Lonsdale, that I might avoid the line of Forster’s march, curved round again towards Grasmere. Here I began to redouble my precautions, seeing that I was come into a country where my face and recent history might be known. For since I had left the coast I had voyaged in no great fear of detection, taking a lift in a carrier’s cart when one chanced to pass my way, and now and again hiring a horse for a stage. The apothecary at Preston, in addition to his other benefactions, had provided me with an inconspicuous suit of clothes, and as I had money in my pockets wherewith to pay my way, I was able to press on unremarked, or at least counted no more than a merchant’s clerk travelling upon his master’s business. From Grasmere, I mounted by the old path across Cold Barrow Fell, which had first led me to Blackladies, and keeping along the ridge crept down into Keswick late upon the seventh day. There was no light in Mrs. Herbert’s lodging as I slipped down the street, and for a second I was seized with a recurrence of my fear that she had left the town. It was only for a second, however. For that conviction which I had first tasted when I rode down Gillerthwaite in the early morning, had been growing stronger and stronger within me, more especially of late. I was possessed by some instinctive foreknowledge that the occasion for which I looked would come; that somehow, somewhere I should be enabled to bring forward my testimony to the clearing of Mr. Herbert from the imputation of disloyalty. It was a thought that more and more I repeated to myself, and each time with a stouter confidence. It may be that these more immediate tasks to which I had set my hand—I mean the rescue of Mr. Curwen and his daughter from the consequence of participation in the rebellion—hindered me from looking very closely into the difficulties of the third and last. It may be, too, that this conviction was in some queer way the particular message which the sea had for me—that I had received the message unconsciously while pondering what it might be. I do not know; I only know that when I repeated it to myself, it sounded like nothing so much as the booming of waves upon a beach.
I slept that night under a familiar boulder on the hillside above Applegarth, and in the early morning I came down to the house, and without much ceremony roused the household. Mary Tyson poked her head out of a window.
“Miss Dorothy?” I cried
“She is asleep.”
“Wake her up and let me in!”
So I was in time. Mary Tyson came down and opened the door; and in a little, as I waited in the hall, I heard Dorothy’s footsteps on the stairs.
“You have escaped!” she cried; “and my father—you bring bad news of him?”
“No; I thank God for it, I bring good news.”
And the blood came into her cheeks with a rush.
I told her briefly how we had escaped from Preston. She listened to the story with shining eyes.
“And all this you have done for—for us?” she said with a singular note of pride in her voice.
“It is little,” I replied, “even if what’s left to do crowns it successfully. But if in that we go astray, why, it is less than nothing.” Thereupon I told her of the plan which I had formed with regard to the Swallow, and of the journey which she and I must take. She listened to me now, however, with an occupied air, and interrupted me before I had come to a close.
“It is you who have done this?” she repeated in the same tone which she had used before.
“I did but keep my promise. It was made to you,” I answered simply.
“I am your debtor for all my life.”
“No,” I cried. “It is the other way about”
“I do not feel the debt,” she said very softly, and then raising a face all rosy: “Ah, but I let you stand here!” she exclaimed. “You shall tell me more of your plan while we breakfast, for I am not sure that I gave a careful ear to it;” and taking me by the arm she led me towards the dining-room. “You have come from Preston in all this haste. My poor child!” She spoke in a quite natural tone of pity, and I doubt not but what my appearance gave a reasonable complexion to her pity. It was the motherliness, however, which tickled me.
“What is it you laugh at?” she asked suddenly, her voice changing at once to an imperious dignity.
“I was thinking,” said I, “that your head, Miss Curwen, only reaches to my chin.”
“If God made me a dwarf,” said she, with a freezing stateliness, “it is very courteous of you to reproach me with it—the most delicate courtesy, upon my word.”
She was in truth ever very sensitive as to her height, and anxious to appear taller than she was; for which anxiety there was no reason whatever, since she was just of the right stature, and an inch more or less would have been the spoiling of her; which opinion I most unfortunately expressed to her, and so made matters worse. For said she—
“Your condescension, Mr. Clavering, is very amiable and consoling;” and with that she left me alone in the room, until such a time as breakfast should be ready. I went out, however, in search of Mary Tyson, and finding her, explained my design, and asked her to put together in a bundle the least quantity of clothes which would suffice for Dorothy until she reached France. Mary fell in with the plan immediately, and began to regret her age and bulk that would hinder her from keeping pace with us. But I cut short her discourse, and bidding her hasten on the breakfast, made shift with a basin of water and a towel to hurriedly repair the disarray of my toilet.
For now every instant of delay began to drag upon my spirits. Once upon the hillside, it would be strange, I thought, if we did not contrive to come undetected to Ravenglass. We had to cross two valleys, it is true, but they were both rugged and bleak, with but few dwellings scattered about them, and those only of the poorer sort, inhabited by men cut off from the world by the barrier of the hills, who from very ignorance could not, if they would, meddle in their neighbours’ affairs. The one danger of the journey that I foresaw lay, as I have said, in the great fall of snow.
But here within the walls of the house it was altogether different. Danger seemed impending about me. Every moment I looked to hear the beat of hoofs upon the road, and a knocking on the door. It was, I assured myself, the most unlikely thing that on this one day the officers should come for Dorothy Curwen, but the assurance brought me little comfort I tasted in anticipation all the remorse which I should feel if the girl should be taken at the very moment of deliverance.
I was the more glad, therefore, when, on coming into the garden, I found Dorothy already dressed for the journey, in a furred waistcoat and a hood quilted and lined with a rose-coloured taffety.
“That is wise,” said I, “for I fear me, Miss Curwen, we shall have it cold before we get to our journey’s end.”
She said never a word, but stood looking at me, and if glances could make one cold, I should have been shivering then.
“But let me be quick,” I continued. “Is it known that you are at Applegarth? Have you ridden far abroad?” And in my anxiety I went over to the window and gazed down the road. Neither did she answer my questions, but, standing by the fireplace, in an even, deliberate voice she began to read me a lecture upon my manners.
“Miss Curwen!” I cried; “do you understand? Every moment you stay here, every word you speak, imperils your liberty.”
She waited patiently until I had done, and continued her lecture at the point where I had interrupted her, as though I had not so much as spoken at all
“This is the purest wilfulness!” I interrupted again, being indeed at my wits’ end to know how I should stop her. I think that I showed too much anxiety, with my bobbings at the window, and exclamations, and that, seeing my alarm, she prolonged her speech out of sheer perversity to punish me the more. At last, however, she came to an end, and we set ourselves to the breakfast in silence. However, I was too hot with indignation to keep that silence wisely.
“The most ill-timed talk that ever I heard,” I muttered.
She laid her knife and fork on the instant, and quietly recommenced. I rose from the table in a rage, and by a lucky chance hit upon the one argument that would close her lips.
“You forget,” said I, “that your father’s safety depends on your escape. If you and I are taken here, how shall he get free?” And in a very few minutes after that I took up the bundle Mary Tyson had made ready, and we crossed the threshold of Applegarth and made our way up Gillerthwaite.
It was still early in the morning, but I pushed on with perhaps greater urgency than suited my companion, since I was anxious that we should lie that night in Eskdale. Dorothy, indeed, walked more slowly than was usual with her, and there seemed to me to be an uncertainty in her gait, at which I was the more surprised, since the wind blew from the east, and we, who were moving eastwards, were completely sheltered from it by the cliffs of Great Gable, towering at the head of the valley. The steeper the ascent became, the greater grew the uncertainty of movement, so that I began to feel anxious lest some sickness should have laid hold upon her. I thought it best, however, to say nothing of my suspicion, but contented myself with glancing at her stealthily now and again. There was no hint of sickness discoverable upon her face, only she pursed her lips something sullenly, as though she was persisting in what she knew to be wrong; and once I thought that her eyes caught one of my troubled glances, and she coloured like one ashamed. At last, just as we had topped the summit of the pass, and were beginning to descend the broad, grassy cliffs between that mountain and the Pillar, she spoke, and it was the first time she had opened her lips since we had left Applegarth.
“It is an apology you need, I suppose,” said she, with a singular aggressiveness, and my anxiety increased. For since I could not see that I had given her any occasion to take that tone, I was inclined to set it down to some bodily suffering.
“An apology?” I asked, with an effort at a careless laugh. “And what makes you fancy I need that?”
“It is so,” she insisted, “else you would not be glowering at me in this ill-humour.”
“Nay,” I answered seriously, “I am in no ill-humour.”
“You are,” she interrupted almost viciously. “You are in the worst ill-humour in the world Well, I do apologize. I should not have kept you waiting at Applegarth.”
And I do not think that I ever heard an apology tendered with a worse grace.
“And now that I have begged your pardon,” she continued, “I will carry my own bundle, thank you;” and she held out her hand for it
“No indeed, and that you will not do,” said I, hotly, “if you beg pardon from now to Doomsday.”
“It is perfectly plain,” said she, “that you mean to pick a quarrel with me.”
Now, that I took to be the most unjust statement that she could make. And—
“Who began it?” I asked. “Who began the quarrel?”
“It is a question,” she replied, with the utmost contempt, “that children ask in a nursery;” and very haughtily she marched in front of me down the hillside.
We had not gone more than a few yards before I stopped, only half stifling the cry which rose to my lips. I plumped down on the grass and fumbled in my pockets. Dorothy paused in her walk, turned, and came back to me.
“What is it?” she cried, and, I must suppose, noting my face, her tone changed in an instant “Lawrence, what is it? What is the paper?”
The paper was that on which Mr. Curwen had sketched the line of our journey. We were come to the curve in our descent into Mosedale from which that line was visible, as plainly marked on the face of the country as on the paper which I held in my hand. On the ridge of the horizon I could see the long back of Muncaster Fell, but it was not that which troubled me. We could keep on the western flank of Muncaster Fell. It was that gap between Scafell and the Screes which leads on to Burnmoor! I looked east and west. This gap that I see, I said to myself, is not the gap which Mr. Curwen meant; there will be another—there will be another! But all the time I knew most surely that this was the gap, and that over it stretched our path. Slantwise across Wastdale, and bearing to the right, Mr. Curwen had said. Well, Wastdale lay at my feet, its fields marked off by their stone walls, like the squares on a chess-board. Yes, that indeed was our way. Why, I could see Burnmoor tarn, of which he had made particular mention, and—and it lay like a pool of ink upon a sheet of white paper. There was the trouble! The wind had blown from the southeast this many a day, and with the wind, the snow; so that while in Gillerthwaite, in Ennerdale, in Newlands, through which I had come to Applegarth, I had seen the snow only upon the hilltops, and had not been troubled with it at all; there on Burnmoor it was massed from end to end. And Burnmoor was five miles across. I looked at Dorothy. Could she traverse it—she that was ailing? Five miles of snow, and the wind sweeping across those five miles like a wave! For there was no doubt but we should have the wind. If I looked upwards towards Scafell, I could see, as it were, the puff of a cannon’s smoke rising up into the air. That was the wind whirling the snow. If I looked downwards into Wastdale, I could see the yew-trees by the church tossing their boughs wildly this way and that. I could hear it rushing and seething in Mosedale bottom. I looked at Dorothy, and my anxiety grew to alarm.
“What is it troubles you?” she said again.
Well, somehow or another this line had to be traversed. I should serve no end by increasing her uffering with an anticipation of the evils before us.
“Nothing,” I answered, thrusting the paper back into my pocket. “I was wondering whether or no I had mistaken our road.” And I rose to my feet.
I could perceive from her face that she knew I was concealing some obstacle from her. She turned abruptly from me, and led the way without a word I followed, noticing, with an ever-increasing dismay, how more and more she wavered as the descent grew steeper. And then all at once I caught sight of something which set me laughing—loudly, extravagantly, as a man will at the sudden coming of a great relief. Dorothy stopped and regarded me, not so much in perplexity, as in the haughtiest displeasure.
“Good lack!” I cried; “nay, don’t stare at me. I cannot but laugh. For I believe it was the beginning of a fever troubled you, and now I know it to be a pair of heels.”
She flushed very red and turned herself to face me, so that I could no longer see more than the tips of her toes.
“I know too the cause of your anger against me. It was a mere consciousness that you should not be wearing them.”
“Oh, what a wiseacre!” says Dorothy, confiding her opinion to the rocks about her. “What a wonderful perceptive wiseacre! how Miss Curwen is honoured with his acquaintance!” All this in a tone of sarcasm, which would have been more effectual had she not stamped her foot upon the ground. For on stamping, the heel slipped upon a loose stone, and had I not been near enough to catch her, the next instant she would have been lying full-length on the ground.
She gave something of a cry as I caught her, and sitting down, panted for a little. We both contemplated the heels. Then I drew out the paper again from my pocket
“It was this I was considering;” and I handed it to her. “Mr. Curwen sketched it for me, and it is the way we have to go.”
I pointed out the gap and the snow upon Burnmoor. She followed the direction of my gaze with a shiver, and again, but this time with equal melancholy, we fell to contemplating the heels.
“I put them on,” she explained, with a touch of penitence, “before you said that about my father.”
“But you could have changed them afterwards,” I rejoined foolishly; and for my pains saw the penitence harden into exasperation.
“Besides, I cannot walk at all without heels,” says she, briskly making a catch at her assurance.
“You cannot walk with them, I know, that’s a sure thing,” I persisted.
She turned to me very quietly—
“In spite of this great knowledge of yours, Mr. Clavering, of which, during the last minute, I have heard so much,” she began deliberately, “there is one lesson you have yet to learn and practise. I have remarked the deficiency not only on this but on many occasions. You lack that instinct of tact and discretion which would inform you of the precise moment when you have said enough——”
How much longer she would have continued in this strain I do not know. For I sprang to my feet.
“If it is to be another lecture,” I cried, “I accept the conclusion before it is reached. I can guess at it. Heels are your only wear, and the taller the better. Sailors should be enjoined by law to wear them, and they alone preserve the rope-dancer from a sure and inevitable death.”
“A wiseacre first,” says she, ticking off my qualities upon her fingers, “and now a humorist! Well there! a salad bowl of all the estimable virtues estimably jumbled. And meanwhile,” she asked innocently, “are we not wasting time?”
I well-nigh gasped at her audacity; for who was to blame, if not she with the heels? However, this time I was sufficiently wise to keep silence, leaving it to experience to reprove her, as it most surely would. In which conviction I was right, for more than once she tripped on the grass as we descended; halfway down she reluctantly allowed me to assist her with a hand, and as we two moved along the side of Mosedale Beck at the entrance into Wastdale, she wrenched her ankle. The pain of the wrench luckily was not severe, and lasted no great while. She was in truth more startled than hurt, for we were treading the narrowest steep path, and at the side the rocks fell clear for about twenty feet to the torrent
Thereupon she gave in and allowed me to go forward to a farmhouse lying at no great distance in Wastdale, and procure for her foot-gear of a more suitable kind. And comical enough it looked when she put it on, but I dared not laugh or so much as give hint of a smile, since I saw that her eyes were on the alert to catch me; for the worthy housewife hearing a story that I made up about a young girl who was travelling in a great haste across Ennerdale to visit a father who lay sick beyond there, which story was altogether a lie, though every word of it was truth, made me a present of a pair of her own boots and would take no money for them.
These Dorothy put on. I slipped those she had been wearing into the pockets of my great-coat, and making a hurried meal off some provisions which Mary Tyson had added to the bundle, we again set out.
I was now still more inclined to push forward at our topmost speed, for it was well past midday, and the tokens of foul weather which I had noted in the morning had become yet more distinct. The clearness had gone from the day, the clouds, woolly and grey, sulked upon the mountain-tops and crept down the sides; the wind had suddenly fallen; there was a certain heaviness in the air, as of the expectation of a storm. We went forward into the valley. When we were halfway to the church, a puff of wind, keen and shrewd, blew for an instant in our faces, and then another and another. But that last breath did not die like the rest; it blew continuously, and gathered violence as it blew.
The yew-trees in the churchyard resumed their tossing; we were so near that I could hear the creaking of their boughs. I looked anxiously towards the gap through which we were to pass to Eskdale. It was still clear of the mist, but where a shrub grew, or a tree reached out a branch on the slope beneath the gap, I saw the wind evident as a beating rain; and even as I looked, the gap filled filled in a second not with these slow, licking mists, but with a column of tempest that drove exultant, triumphing, and now and again in the midst of it I perceived a whirling gleam of white like foam of the sea.
I looked forwards to the church, backwards to the house. The church was the nearer. I took Dorothy by the elbow.
“Run!” I cried.
“I cannot,” she replied, lagging behind.
I pressed her forward.
“You must.”
“These shoes——” she began.
“Devil take the shoes!” cried I; and thereupon, with a perversity which even I would not have attributed to her, she slipped a foot out of a shoe, and stepped deliberately into a puddle.
“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 buttoned 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.