Barbara Lynn: A Tale of the Dales and Fells.

by Emily J. Jenkinson

He acknowledged that he had done Lucy a great wrong—wrong at the beginning and wrong afterwards—and he had made up his mind to atone for it as far as he could. He would write to her to-night—a clean confession of all that he had done amiss, before he disappeared into the wilderness for—how long? Perhaps to find a grave there.

Just now, as he sat smoking at the store-house door, looking into the forest, he seemed to see Lucy clearly. She was walking demurely down the woodland path in her best buckled shoes, which she only wore on Sundays. She appeared to be happy. Her face was as childish in its outlines, her skin as white as milk and red as roses, her eyes were as blue as when he had first kissed her. He fell into a reverie, dreading to hear a strange bird cry lest it should dispel the illusion.

The afternoon quickly passed and evening came. He stood and watched the sunset flare over the tree-tops in red and yellow—the red of blood and the yellow of gold, two colours that have striped and stained each other since ever gold was desired by the eyes of men, and blood willingly paid for it.

Joel went nearer to the forest and looked at the threshold leading to the long trail—a great doorway of primeval trees, beyond which he could see a grey-green road leading—whither? Through a hundred miles of forest! He thought what a land of trees this was to which he had come. The weight of luscious growth must give the world a tilt, he had heard a man say, like a market basket over-full at one end. One day he had climbed a hill in the neighbourhood, and seen below him a vast expanse of green boughs, green to the horizon. Somewhere beyond them, bare and blue, were the treasure mountains that he hoped to reach.

Swamp and river, he had been warned, many a swamp and blackly-flowing river, hiding from the wholesome light of the sun under the over-arching boughs, would try to bar his path to fortune. The leaves were chiming overhead—a pleasant sound to casual ears. But he had heard that it drove men crazy. Though it were as unhallowed and insistent as the voices which haunted those Persian adventurers who were turned to stone in their endeavours to find the speaking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water—a tale which Timothy Hadwin had told him long ago—yet such was his present determination it would not have held him back. The hope of fabulous things allured Joel as it had allured the men of old.

He went into the store to write his letter to Lucy.

As he sat, pen in hand, the lovely phantom which he had seen walking in the forest with her best buckled shoes on, fled, and she assumed a solidity that disconcerted him, now he was prepared to communicate directly with her. His ready assurance vanished. What right had he to send her a letter now, after so long a silence? She was human, not faery: conjuring with a human heart had risks.

He sat for a time pondering over the past, his eyes darkened with regrets and timid with new fears. Many changes might have taken place in the dale since he bade it farewell. A letter took months to come. His letter, if he wrote now, would not reach her till the summer was in full blow. Perhaps the great-grandmother was dead—swept away by the breath of the past winter. Lucy might be dead! Death as often took the young as the old. The silence gripped him like a nightmare. He wanted to break the suspense. So intense were his feelings, that he felt he could roll up the space which divided them, roll it up like a scroll, and see her face to face. But he could not get his hands on the impalpable, restless curtain, that shut them off from each other.

If he had been able to roll it up, he could only have seen that which would have robbed him of his energy and hope, for Lucy was in the midst of preparations for her marriage with Peter Fleming.

While he was thus pondering upon the best way to begin his letter, his eyes wandered round the store. Two flaring lamps lit it up, and added the smell of rancid oil to the strange odour of tan, hides, furs, and woods with which it was redolent. He looked at the shelves of blankets, the canoe paddles, the canisters of shot, all things alien to his experience. He felt himself to be adrift in the Unknown, going he knew not whither. He craved for a familiar sound or sight. He wanted Lucy as he had never wanted her before. He began to write and tell her so.