“And don’t be incredulous,” said Effie’s eyes.
She turned to Anne. “We’ll go down to the Inn at once,” she said, “and you shall catch the train this afternoon.”
A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded Sam. It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that Effie understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously doubted, her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where she was concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything.
Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. “Why, mother, how young you look!” he cried when she came downstairs to the trap.
“It’s just as well,” said Anne, meeting Effie’s eye over his shoulder.
Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face behind the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more ardently for them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked them to be sorry for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed her.
They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days, but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of a bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being till they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it, now dumb before its wonder.
Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen of the Marbeck Inn.
They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at an hotel without paying for it—and abrogated them. In the autumn they had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and affected all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good listeners were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, dropping from heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling this attentive audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that strayed as wide afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged the flocks they ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the legends of John Peel and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to make these dalesmen happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, rambling narrative—a long chain strung with pearls of racy episode—or an hour of Effie at the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by knowing no ballads, but having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the latest music-hall songs stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in the smoke room, they were knowing wags, in the kitchen they were themselves, talking shop, and therefore interesting. Effie and Sam preferred them in the kitchen, telling their slowly-moving tales, to seeing them in their smoke-room mood, imitating badly a thing not worth the imitating. But, in either room, they helped them to be happy.
Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water of its gathering ground was frozen hard.