A Witch of the Hills Volume I Part 15

To have the wish which has been secretly gnawing at the foundations of your heart suddenly brought face to face with you is a startling and confounding experience. I think no convicted ruffian can ever have looked more guiltily ashamed of himself than I, as I felt the hot blood mount to my head, and my brain swim with the first full consciousness of a futile pa.s.sion. Of course, the man before me put the worst construction upon my evident confusion; he repeated in a louder and more bl.u.s.tering tone--

'Why don't you marry her?'

'In the first place,' said I quietly, 'she is scarcely more than a child, Mr. Ellmer.'

'That's not much of a fault, for she won't improve as she loses it.

Besides, you needn't marry her at once.'

'In the second place, I am quite sure she wouldn't have me.'

'Why not? She seems to like you.'

'She does like me, as a beautiful girl may like a grandfather, battered and scarred in war, or a homeless cur which she has picked up and which has grown attached to her. To be frank with you, Mr.

Ellmer, nothing but my ugly face prevents me from becoming a suitor for your daughter; but that obstacle is one which, without any undue self-depreciation, I know to be one which makes happy marriage impossible for me.'

'I don't know,' said Mr. Ellmer, in a tone of generous encouragement; 'good looks don't always carry it off with the women. Look at my wife, now: well, to be sure, she was proud enough of getting me; but, do you think the feeling lasted? No, I might have been a one-eyed hunchback, sir, before we'd been man and wife three months! There's no knowing what those creatures will like, let alone the fact that they never like the same thing more than a week together--barring a miracle.'

And Mr. Ellmer looked at me, with his head a little on one side, as if expecting that the narration of his experience would conclusively affect my views on matrimony. As I said nothing, however, being, indeed, too much involved in a whirlpool of doubts and longings and miserable certainties to have any neatly-turned phrases ready with which to carry on the conversation, he presently cleared his throat and went on again.

'You see,' he said, with an odd a.s.sumption of paternal dignity, which covered some genuine feeling as well as some genuine humbug, 'it isn't often that I can spare the time to take a journey as long as this.

Therefore, when I do, I like to see something for my trouble. Well, and what I mean to see this time is one of two things: either I leave with the knowledge that my daughter is engaged to be married to an honourable gentleman who is able to support her, and willing to be good to her, or I leave with my daughter herself, and I put her in the way of earning her own living on the stage, which is a more honourable position than playing lodgekeeper to any gentleman in the land.'

'And you would take her mother with her, of course?' I said, as easily as I could, with a sudden gloomy misgiving that Babiole, happy as she was among the hills, would s.n.a.t.c.h at the chance of rus.h.i.+ng into the conflicts of the busier life in which she took such an ominous interest.

'Oh, she can do as she likes,' answered Mr. Ellmer with a sudden return, at mention of his wife, to sullen and brutal ferocity of look and tone.

I was horrorstruck at the possibility of my little fairy choosing to leave the shelter of the hillside under the protection of this man, whose caprice of paternal pride and affection might, I thought, at any moment of drunken irritation or disappointment, change to the selfish cruelty with which he had treated his hard-working wife.

'Will you give me till to-morrow morning to think about it, and to speak to Babiole, Mr. Ellmer?' I asked, after a few moments' rapid thought. 'In the meantime we will do our best to make you comfortable, either here or at the cottage. Of course, I cannot prevent your saying what you please to your daughter, but I hope you will, in fairness to me, let me plead my own cause unbia.s.sed by one word from you. The subject is one I know she has never dreamed of, and it will surprise and may even startle her very much. So that I may ask so much of you, and beg you to rely on my discretion.'

Mr. Ellmer seemed pleased with the success of his diplomacy, and he offered me a fat, pink, lazy hand to shake.

'Say no more, sir; between gentlemen that is quite sufficient. And I should like to add, sir, that if everything should turn out as we both desire, you need have no fear of being put upon by your wife's relations, whatever Babiole's mother may say. The votaries of Art, sir, are used to poverty, and need not blush for it. But I should be glad to think that my devotion to it had brought only its dignity, and not its penalties, upon my daughter.'

I shook his hand heartily, almost feeling, for the moment, so deep was his own conviction, that this greasy person with the paper collar--whose language and sentiments, like an untuned musical instrument, could rise and fall to such unexpected heights and depths--was really treating me with a generous condescension for which I ought to be grateful.

I accompanied him to the door, and watched his ponderous figure making its way to the cottage, near the entrance of which I saw his wife waiting for him; then I whistled to Ta-ta, who had followed the stranger for a few steps in order to get a better view of his retreat, and, taking my hat, went down the drive for a walk. It was past five, and the April sun was s.h.i.+ning out a fair good-night to the hills after a day of rain; faint tufts of pale green were showing on the dark foliage of the larch-trees, and the daisies in the soft gra.s.s were beginning to take heart at the death of winter. One could think better in the fresh spring-scented air than between walls of solemn books. As for that, though, my plan of action was already decided on, and contemplation of it, even under the inspiration of the perfume of the firs, and the babble of the water over the stones of the Dee, resulted in no improvement on my first idea. This was no less than to make a formal proposal to Babiole, which she must accept on the clear understanding that it was to form no tie upon her, but which would satisfy her father and allow her to remain still in the safe shelter of this nook among the hills. The girl was only fifteen, much too young for any serious love-ventures of her own, so that I argued that my engagement to her would be merely a most loyal guardians.h.i.+p which would reach its natural end when the handsome young prince should break his way through the enchanted forest and wake her up with the traditional kiss. Hope for myself, I can a.s.suredly say, I had very little; and, if this modesty seems excessive in a man in the very prime of life, who, moreover, had already some sort of a.s.sured place in the esteem of the girl he loved, I can only say that there was a balance against me in the books of the s.e.x which I was paying off to this one member of it, and, therefore, in proportion as I had felt myself to be too good for the rest of those I had met, so I felt that Babiole Ellmer was too good for me. The matter was arranged in my own mind with very little trouble, and I was eager to unfold it to her. I had half expected to find her in the road through the fir-forest, knowing that after the day's rain the little maid must be thirsting for a long draught of the fresh sweet air--but no; I pa.s.sed through it and out into the open country, over the stone bridge of Muick, skirted the Dee and crossed it again by Ballater Bridge into the village, without a glimpse of her.

The sun was getting low behind the hills when I reached the western foot of Craigendarroch, and, without a pause, began to climb between the glistening branches of the budding oak-trees up to the top. I had no distinct purpose in coming so far, and the faint bark of my own dog, which reached my ears as I was ascending the bare and rocky s.p.a.ce which separates the oak-grown lower slope from the fir-crowned summit of the hill, caused me to stop suddenly in surprise and excitement so sharp and so sudden that all the blood in my body seemed to rush to my head, and my heart to continue its action by unwonted, tumultuous leaps.

I pulled myself together, not without some consternation at the phenomenon.

'I came up the hill too fast,' I said to myself, and crept up the slabs of rock that now formed a wet and slippery footway among the firs, with a sensation of horror at the thought of Babiole's trusting her little feet on such a treacherous path.

At the top, a little way beyond the cairn, I came upon her suddenly.

She was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, looking out to the western hills, across the slopes of which were lying dense, cloud-like mists, white against the blackness of the darkening hillsides. The last red rays of the sinking sun threw upon her face a weird unnatural glow, and caused her moist eyes to glisten like strange gems in the sun-lit marble of her still features. The wild sweet sadness of her expression, like that of a gentle animal who has been stricken, and does not know why, brought a lump into my throat, and caused me to halt at some distance from her with a feeling of shy respect.

Ta-ta, who sat by her side, with a sensitively-dilating nose on the young girl's knee, saw me at once, but merely wagged her tail as an apologetic intimation that I must excuse her from attendance on me, as she had weightier business on hand than mere idle frisking about my heels.

But the movement in her companion attracted Babiole's attention; she turned her head, saw me, and started up.

The spell was broken; she was in a moment the sweet smiling Babiole of every day. But I could not so soon get over the shock of the first sight of her face: I had seemed to read vague prophecies in the wide sad eyes. I smiled and held out my hand, but I left it to her to open the conversation.

CHAPTER XIII

'It's very nice up here, isn't it, Mr. Maude?' Babiole said, after a few seconds' search for an opening remark.

'But it's much too late for you to be out here by yourself.'

'Yes. I had forgotten it was so late,' she said humbly, with a sensitive blush at my mild reproof. 'Poor mamma wanted to be quiet, and told me to go out; so I came here.'

She was winding about her the thick plaid she always carried when the weather was cold; and this, when adjusted Highland fas.h.i.+on across the shoulder, made her, in conjunction with the knitted Tam-o'-Shanter cap she wore, a most picturesque and appropriate figure among the dead heather and the fir-trees.

'You look like Helen M'Gregor,' said I, smiling.

She smiled back brightly, but shook her head.

'I haven't courage enough for myself, much less enough to inspire anybody else with,' she said rather sadly.

'Courage is a thing you can't measure until you have to use it. What makes you think you have none, Babiole? I feel sure you have a great deal.'

She began to laugh, in the shyest, sweetest, prettiest way; and, putting her hand on the stout stick I carried, she twisted it round and round in the earth, and looked up in my face affectionately.

'Yes, yes, I know. That is the way you always teach me. You told me I was intelligent and industrious, until I began to be both; and I daresay, if you were to tell me long enough,--in your own kind way, helping me on by your own strong wish,--that I was brave, why I should become so. But I'm not now.'

'Tell me how you know that.'

'Well, to-day I only heard of something that--that would be very hard to bear, and I broke down altogether.'

'What was it?'

No answer.

'Was it something your father said?'

She looked up with a flash of inquiry in her eyes.

'Was it something about your going away from here?'

She answered by a look only; a look that was timid, mournful, affectionate, and that had yet another element; for behind all this tenderness and softness, there danced the restless yearning of an eager young spirit.

'Well, and haven't I heard certain people talking about the interesting things that go on in the world, and hinting that Ballater was a slow and tiresome old place, where nothing ever happened worth mentioning?'

She blushed and hung her head a moment, and then began her defence in a very meek voice.