During the whole of the following week Dare appeared no more at Slumberleigh. Mrs. Alwynn, whose time was much occupied as a rule in commenting on the smallest doings of her neighbors, and in wondering why they left undone certain actions which she herself would have performed in their place, Mrs. Alwynn would infallibly have remarked upon his absence many times during every hour of the day, had not her attention been distracted for the time being by a one-horse fly which she had seen go up the road on the afternoon of the day of Dare"s last visit, the destination of which had filled her soul with anxious conjecture.
She did not ascertain till the following day that it had been ordered for Mrs. Smith, of Greenacre; though, as she told Ruth, she might have known that, as Mr. Smith was going for a holiday with Mrs. Smith, and their pony lame in its feet; that they would have to have a fly, and with that hill up to Greenacre she was surprised one horse was enough.
When the question of the fly had been thus satisfactorily settled, and Mrs. Alwynn had ceased wondering whether the Smiths had gone to Tenby or to Rhyl (she always imagined people went to one or other of these two places), her whole attention reverted to a screen which she was making, the elegance and novelty of which supplied her with a congenial subject of conversation for many days.
"There is something so new in a screen, an entire screen of Christmas cards," Mrs. Alwynn would remark. "Now, Mrs. Thursby"s new screen is all pictures out of the _Graphic_, and those colored Christmas numbers. She has put all her cards in a book. There is something rather _pa.s.sy_ about those alb.u.ms, I think. Now I fancy this screen will look quite out of the common, Ruth; and when it is done, I shall get some of those j.a.panese cranes and stand them on the top. Their claws are made to twist round, you know, and I shall put some monkeys--you know those droll chenille monkeys, Ruth--creeping up the sides to meet the cranes. I don"t honestly think, my dear"--with complacency--"that many people will have anything like it."
Ruth did not hesitate to say that she felt certain very few would.
Mrs. Alwynn was delighted at the interest she took in her new work. Ruth was coming out at last, she told her husband; and she pa.s.sed many happy hours entirely absorbed in the arrangement of the cards upon the panels.
Ruth, thankful that her attention had been providentially distracted from the matter that filled her own thoughts, in a way that surprised and annoyed her, sorted, and snipped, and pasted, and decided weighty questions as to whether a goitred robin on a twig should be placed next to a smiling plum-pudding, dancing a polka with a turkey, or whether a congealed cross, with "Christian greeting" in icicles on it, should separate the two.
To her uncle Ruth told what had happened; and as he slowly wended his way to Vandon on the day fixed for the tenant"s dinner, Mr. Alwynn mused thereon, and I believe, if the truth were known, he was sorry that Dare had been refused. He was a little before his time, and he stopped on the bridge, and looked at the river, as it came churning and sweeping below, fretted out of its usual calm by the mill above. I think that as he leaned over the low stone parapet he made many quiet little reflections besides the involuntary one of himself in the water below. He would have liked (he was conscious that it was selfish, but yet he _would_ have liked) to have Ruth near him always. He would have liked to see this strange son of his old friend in good hands, that would lead him--as it is popularly supposed a woman"s hand sometimes can--in the way of all others in which Mr. Alwynn was anxious that he should walk; a way in which he sometimes feared that Dare had not made any great progress as yet. Mr. Alwynn felt at times, when conversing with him, that Dare"s life could not have been one in which the n.o.bler feelings of his nature had been much brought into play, so crude and unformed were his ideas of principle and responsibility, so slack and easy-going his views of life.
But if Mr. Alwynn felt an occasional twinge of anxiety and misgiving about his young friend, it speedily turned to self-upbraiding for indulging in a cynical, unworthy spirit, which was ever ready to seek out the evil and overlook the good; and he gradually convinced himself that only favorable circ.u.mstances were required for the blossoming forth of those n.o.ble attributes, of which the faintest indications on Dare"s part were speedily magnified by the powerful lens of Mr. Alwynn"s charity to an extent which would have filled Dare with satisfaction, and would have overwhelmed a more humble nature with shame.
And Ruth would not have him! Mr. Alwynn remembered a certain pa.s.sage in his own youth, a long time ago, when somebody (a very foolish somebody, I think) would not have him either; and it was with that remembrance still in his mind that he met Dare, who had come as far as the lodge gates to meet him, and whose forlorn appearance touched Mr. Alwynn"s heart the moment he saw him.
There was not time for much conversation. To his astonishment Mr. Alwynn found Dare actually nervous about the coming ordeal; and on the way to the Green Dragon, where the dinner was to be given, he rea.s.sured him as best he could, and suggested the kind of answer he should make when his health was drunk.
When, a couple of hours later, all was satisfactorily over, when the last health had been drunk, the last song sung, and Dare was driving Mr.
Alwynn home in the shabby old Vandon dog-cart, both men were at first too much overcome by the fumes of tobacco, in which they had been hidden, to say a word to each other. At last, however, Mr. Alwynn drew a long breath, and said, faintly:
"I trust I may never be so hot again. Drive slowly under these trees, Dare. It is cooling to look at them after sitting behind that steaming volcano of a turkey. How is your head getting on? I saw you went in for punch."
"Was that punch?" said Dare. "Then I take no more punch in the future."
"You spoke capitally, and brought in the right sentiment, that there is no place like home, in first-rate style. You see, you need not have been nervous."
"Ah! but it was you who spoke really well," said Dare, with something of his old eager manner. "You know these people. You know their heart. You understand them. Now, for me, I said what you tell me, and they were pleased, but I can never be with them like you. I understand the words they speak, but themselves I do not understand."
"It will come."
"No," with a rare accession of humility. "I have cared for none of these things till--till I came to hear them spoken of at Slumberleigh by you and--and now at first it is smooth, because I say I will do what I can, but soon they will find out I cannot do much, and then--" He shrugged his shoulders.
They drove on in silence.
"But these things are nothing--nothing," burst out Dare at last, in a tremulous voice, "to the one thing I think of all night, all day--how I love Miss Deyncourt, and how," with a simplicity which touched Mr.
Alwynn, "she does not love me at all."
There is something pathetic in seeing any cheerful, light-hearted animal reduced to silence and depression. To watch a barking, worrying, jovial puppy suddenly desist from parachute expeditions on unsteady legs, and from shaking imaginary rats, and creep, tail close at home, overcome by affliction, into obscurity, is a sad sight. Mr. Alwynn felt much the same kind of pity for Dare as he glanced at him, resignedly blighted, handsomely forlorn, who but a short time ago had taken life as gayly and easily as a boy home for the holidays.
"Sometimes," said Mr. Alwynn, addressing himself to the mill, and the bridge, and the world in general, "young people change their minds. I have known such things happen."
"I shall never change mine."
"Perhaps not; but others might."
"Ah!" and Dare turned sharply towards Mr. Alwynn, scanning his face with sudden eagerness. "You think--you think, possibly--"
"I don"t think anything at all," interposed Mr. Alwynn, rather taken aback at the evident impression his vague words had made, and anxious to qualify them. "I was only speaking generally; but--ahem! there is one point, as we are on the subject, that--"
"Yes, yes?"
"Whether you consider any decision as final or not"--Mr. Alwynn addressed the clouds in the sky--"I think, if you do not wish it to be known that anything has taken place, you had better come and see me occasionally at Slumberleigh. I have missed your visits for the past week. The fact is, Mrs. Alwynn has a way of interesting herself in all her friends. She has a kind heart, and--you--understand--any little difference in their behavior might be observed by her, and might possibly--might possibly"--Mr. Alwynn was at a loss for a word--"be, in short, commented on to others. Suppose now you were to come back with me to tea to-day?"
And Dare went, nothing loath, and arrived at a critical moment in the manufacture of the screen, when all the thickest Christmas cards threatened to resist the influence of paste, and to curl up, to the great anxiety of Mrs. Alwynn.
One of the principle reasons of Dare"s popularity was the way in which he threw his whole heart into whatever he was doing, for the time; never for a long time, certainly, for he rarely bored himself or others by adherence to one set of ideas after its novelty had worn off.
And now, as if nothing else existed in the world, and with a grave manner suggesting repressed suffering and manly resignation, he concentrated his whole mind on Mrs. Alwynn"s recalcitrant cards, and made Ruth grateful to him by his tact in devoting himself to her aunt and the screen.
"Well, I never!" said Mrs. Alwynn, after he was gone. "I never did see any one like Mr. Dare. I declare he has made the church stick, Ruth, and "Blessings on my friend," which turned up at the corners twice when you put it on, and the big middle one of the kittens skating, too! Dear me!
I am pleased. I hope Mrs. Thursby won"t call till it"s finished. But he did not look well, Ruth, did he? Rather pale now, I thought."
"He has had a tiring day," said Ruth.
CHAPTER XIII.
At Slumberleigh you have time to notice the change of the seasons. There is no hurry at Slumberleigh. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter, each in their turn, take quite a year to come and go. Three months ago it was August; now September had arrived. It was actually the time of damsons.
Those damsons which Ruth had seen dangling for at least three years in the cottage orchards were ripe at last. It seemed ages ago since April, when the village was a foaming ma.s.s of damson blossom, and the "plum winter" had set in just when spring really seemed to have arrived for good. It was a well-known thing in Slumberleigh, though Ruth till last April had not been aware of it, that G.o.d Almighty always sent cold weather when the Slumberleigh damsons were in bloom, to harden the fruit. And now the lame, the halt, and the aged of Slumberleigh, all with one consent, mounted on tottering ladders to pick their damsons, or that mysterious fruit, closely akin to the same, called "black Lamas ploums."
There were plum accidents, of course, in plenty. The Lord took Mrs.
Eccles"s own uncle from his half-filled basket to another world, for which, as a "tea and coffee totaller," he was no doubt well prepared.
The too receptive organisms of unsuspecting infancy suffered in their turn. In short, it was a busy season for Mr. and Mrs. Alwynn.
Ruth had plenty of opportunities now for making her long-projected sketch of the ruined house of Arleigh, for the old woman who lived in the lodge close by, and had charge of the place, had "ricked" her back in a damson-tree, and Ruth often went to see her. She had been Ruth"s nurse in her childhood, and having originally come from Slumberleigh, returned there when the Deyncourt children grew up, and lived happily ever after, with the very blind and entirely deaf old husband of her choice, in the gray stone lodge at Arleigh.
It was on her return from one of these almost daily visits that Mrs.
Eccles pounced on Ruth as she pa.s.sed her gate, and under pretence of inquiring after Mrs. Cotton, informed her that she herself was suffering in no slight degree. Ruth, who suddenly remembered that she had been remiss in "dropping in" on Mrs. Eccles of late, dropped in then and there to make up for past delinquencies.
"Is it rheumatism again?" she asked, as Mrs. Eccles seemed inclined to run off at once into a report of the goings on of Widow Jones"s Sally.
"Not that, my dear, so much as a sinking," said Mrs. Eccles, pa.s.sing her hand slowly over what seemed more like a rising than a depression in her ample figure. "But there! I"ve not been myself since the Lord took old Samiwell Price, and that"s the truth."
Samuel Price was the relation who had entered into rest off a ladder, and Ruth looked duly serious.
"I have no doubt it upset you very much," she said.
"Well, miss," returned Mrs. Eccles, with dignity, "it"s not as if I"d had my "ealth before. I"ve had something wrong in the cistern" (Ruth wondered whether she meant system) "these many years. From a gell I suffered in my inside. But lor"! I was born to trouble, baptized in a bucket, and taken with collects at a week old. And how did you say Mrs.
Cotton of the lodge might be, miss, as I hear is but poorly too?"
Ruth replied that she was better.
"She"s no size to keep her in "ealth," said Mrs. Eccles, "and so bent as she does grow, to be sure. Eh, dear, but it"s a good thing to be tall. I always think little folks they"re like them little watches, they"ve no room for their insides. And I wonder now"--Mrs. Eccles was coming to the point that had made her entrap Ruth on her way past--"I wonder now--"