Chapter Eighteen.
Red Sunrise.
“O happy world!” thought Pelleas, “all me seems
Are happy—I the happiest of them all.”
On that same hot summer night, when Ruth and Rupert were first making each other miserable, and then finding out separately that they were very miserable themselves, Cheriton, with hope and joy in his heart, was speeding home to Oakby. With hope and joy, for Ruth had made up for her cold farewell, by making some little excuse for writing to him, and asking him to get her a picture of the Arms of the Colleges, a commission which, it is needless to say, he found time to execute.
This pleasure had helped him through his hard work, for he was excitable enough to have felt the last few weeks of effort and suspense a severe strain, and had not brought quite his usual health and strength to bear on them; for he had caught a bad cold with the race in the rain at Black Tarn, and had never given himself a chance of getting rid of it. However, it was all over now, he thought, his mind was relieved, and the prospect of home with its leisure and its occupations had never seemed so delightful to him. For his love for Ruth did not shut out the thought of all other affections, it rather cast a radiance over them, and made him more conscious of their sweetness.
It was a lovely summer morning, as the train came in to Ashrigg station, the wide landscape showed clear and fresh against the cloudless sky, the peculiar northern sharpness was in the air. It was sweet to Cherry’s senses, and finding no conveyance so early at Ashrigg, he set off to walk home across the dewy fields, Buffer, enchanted at his release from durance vile, trotting and barking at his heels.
By various short cuts the walk was under three miles, and Cheriton soon found himself at the house, where he had time to get some breakfast, and to feel somewhat disappointed that no one was at home to hear his good news, for he felt too tired to go and seek for congratulations at the Vicarage, where Nettie was staying, or where he would have been at least equally certain of them, to the Lodge to which the old family nurse had migrated.
So he contented himself with greeting all the dogs, and with the delightful consciousness that he had no need to exert himself, till Lord Milford’s telegram arrived, and the thought of so quickly greeting Ruth, and of finding her belonging as it were to his own party, and thus making a thousand opportunities for paying her attention, roused him from his fit of languor and fatigue, and he eagerly made his preparations, and started off in the middle of the bright June day, on his further travels.
The midsummer weather in that northern country had still much of the freshness and the delicacy of the spring. The trees were in their first bright green, the bluebells lingered in the woods, the birds sang songs of hopefulness to him. Milford was in a softer, more richly-wooded landscape than Oakby, and the gardens were splendid with early roses and flowering shrubs, the park still here and there white with hawthorn.