THE POLLARD-TREES.
Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow—
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.
—Lycidas.
Miss Vanborough walked on; she seemed to know the way by some instinct; sometimes she looked at the water, but it gave her a sort of vertigo. Tom looked at Dolly with some admiration as she passed along the bank, with her clear-cut face and stately figure, following the narrow pathway. They came at last to a bend of the river where some boats were lying high and dry in the grass, and where a little boat-house stood upon a sort of jutting-out island among tall trees upspringing suddenly in the waste: tall sycamore, ivy-grown stumps, greens of every autumnal shade, golden leaves dropping in lazy showers on the grass or drifting into the sluggish stream, along which they floated back to Cambridge once more. It was a deserted-looking grove, melancholy and romantic. But few people came there. But there was a ferryman and a black boat-house, and a flat ferry-boat anchored to the shore. Some bird gave a cry and flew past, otherwise the place was still with that peculiar river silence of tall weeds straggling, of trees drooping their green branches, of water lapping on the brink.
'Is this the place you wanted?' said Tom, 'or was it the other boat-house after all?'
Dolly walked on, without answering him. She beckoned to the boatman; and then, as he came towards her, her heart began to beat so that she could scarcely speak or ask the question that she had in her mind to ask. 'Has my brother been here? Where is his letter? Is the Wave safe in your little boat-house?' This was what she would have said, only she could not speak. Some strange fever had possessed her and brought her so far: now her strength and courage suddenly forsook her, and she stopped short, and stood holding to an old rotten post that stood by the river-side.
'Take care,' said Tom; 'that ain't safe. You might fall in, and the river is deep just here.'
She turned such a pale face to him that the young man suddenly began to wonder if there was more in it all than he had imagined.
'It's perfectly safe I mean,' he said. 'Why, you don't mean to say——'
He turned red; he wished with all his heart that he had never brought her there—that he could jump into the river—that he had stayed to dine in Hall. To his unspeakable relief unexpected help appeared.