A Romance of Wastdale

by A. E. W. Mason

But his thoughts ran ever in the same channel. Each familiar object that he passed recalled his friend, and the remembrance of that night in the Alps hung like a black cloud about his heart. He tried to thrust it aside, but the more earnestly he tried, the more persistently it chained his attention, until in the end it seemed to shadow forth something sinister, something almost of menace. For some distance he followed the bed of the valley and then struck upwards to the right, on to the slopes of Scafell Pike. After a while he stopped to light his pipe, and, turning, saw over against him the track mounting in sharp zigzags towards the summit of the Styhead Pass. It was as clearly defined on the hill-side as a pencilled line on paper, and his eyes followed its direction mechanically until it bent over the edge of the Pass and disappeared from view. Then equally mechanically he began to picture in his mind its subsequent course. He had traced it past the tarn and half the way to Borrowdale, when of a sudden a smile dawned through the gloom on his face, "The path to Keswick!" he thought. He traced it consciously after that; he saw it broaden out into a road, and his imagination set a dainty figure in a white dress and a sailor hat at the end of it.

Gordon had met Kate Nugent for the first time some three years before at Hawke's home in London, and from the outset of their acquaintance she had commenced to dominate his thoughts, not so much on account of her beauty as from a certain distinctness of personality which appealed to him at that time with a very peculiar force. For she came to him at a somewhat critical period in his life.

Left an orphan while yet a child, David had spent his boyhood alone in the north of Scotland. His guardian--an uncle with a seat in Parliament and an estate near Ravenglass--he never saw; his tutor--an unpractical scholar of the old-fashioned type--he neglected, in order to follow the marsh-lamps of his own dreamy and somewhat morbid imagination. And so dividing his time between the study of the more exuberant poets and solitary rides along the bleak sea-coast, he mapped out the world for himself upon a purely fanciful plan. He first came into contact with actual life on his migration to Oxford. He was brought face to face with new facts and new experiences, which, strive as he might, he could not fit in with his theories. And, besides, he seemed to see all around him men actuated by the interests of truth toiling noisily at the overthrow of creeds and erecting nothing in their place. As a consequence, his false idealism crumbled beneath him, he lost his self-reliance, and felt hemmed in by a confused tangle of truth and falsehood which there was no clue to help him to unravel. The step between an intellectual scepticism and personal cynicism is an easy one for most men to take. Gordon strode over the intervening gaps unconsciously the moment he ceased to trust himself, since his own sensations had, of necessity, been the one standard by which he judged.

His meeting with Kate Nugent, however, changed the whole tenor of his mind. She appeared to him the one real thing that he had found in his journey through a world of shadows. He pictured her standing out white and clear from a background of shifting haze, and his very self-distrust diminished since he referred his thoughts and actions to his conception of her as to a touchstone for the testing of them.

After their engagement, she became almost his religion. He re-fashioned a second world in her image, faith coming to him like a child born from the joining of their hearts. His ambitions, so long dulled to inaction, sprang into new vigour and he followed their lead with a confident patience. There was, in fact, an element of quaint extravagance in his devotion, such as one finds mirrored in the love-poems of the seventeenth century.

Hence it came about that as he walked home in the fall of the afternoon, matching the sunset with the colour of his thoughts, the sight of the white Inn walls, prominent in a dark clump of firs, recalled to him not only the fact of Hawke's proximity, but his desire to put an end to their estrangement. The desire grew as he dwelled upon it, until he began to feel an absolute repulsion from the prospect of starting along this new stage of his life at enmity with an old comrade.

He determined to make the overture, and continuing his way onwards to the Inn, inquired for Mr. Hawke. He was out, they told him. He had waited until the postman came at twelve, and had then set out for the fells. Gordon rummaged in his pockets and unearthed a card. He scribbled on it a request that Hawke would visit him during the evening, and turned back to the farm-house in a glow of satisfaction. A wild fancy shot through him that Hawke and himself had been designedly brought together into the seclusion of the valley. He laughed it aside for the moment.

But it returned to him afterwards with overwhelming conviction.

[CHAPTER II]

Austen Hawke strolled down from Yewbarrow an hour later. He was a man of a tall figure, spare of limb and lithe of movement, with a keen, narrow face, which fitted itself into one's memory. Inside his sitting-room it was already dark, and he rang for lights and stretched himself complacently in an arm-chair before the fire. The mistress of the Inn answered the bell and informed him, with intervals between the words as she scratched off the heads of refractory matches, that a gentleman had called to see him during the afternoon. Hawke swung round towards her, a look of annoyance showing in his face. He hastily ran over in his mind the names of his friends.