'Ha! 'cause if so be she's a stirring, thrifty lass, I don't care how soon you do.'
'If I could, I don't know if Hildred would,' I stammered, more astonished than ever, for I had always thought that I should have to make a home of my own, before I could ask Hildred to marry me.
My father nodded gravely once or twice when he heard her name. 'I thought as much,' he muttered, more to himself than to me, 'She'll do.' And as we reached home he stopped to say, 'Then you can bring your wife home here whensoever it suits yourself. I'm agreeable, lad, without any more waste of words.'
Without any more words with him, but a great many with myself. My wife—Hildred! That soft, sparkling little creature, that no trouble ought to come near—such was my thought then—or sorrow touch. Would she let me try to take care of her? Would she come to the grey old gate-house some day in her butterfly brightness and beauty, and fold her wings there, and be my own? Little Hildred, whom my mother used to love and pet in the old days. It seemed strange that we were longing for her now to fill my mother's place. But would she come?
That was the one question. I wearied myself with finding answers to it. Hildred herself, I was sure, little knew all that she was to me. No one had found it out, I believed, except my father, with that odd silent watchfulness of his. Not even Cuthbert—I almost wished he had, that I might have talked to him about it; but he never guessed my one secret, and somehow I could not make up my mind to tell him.
No, I must ask Hildred herself first; and now there would be many long days to live through before I even saw her again. For on the morrow I had to go away to see my dear old master, Caleb Morton, and it might be a fortnight before I could get back to Wyncliffe. Granny and Cuthbert and Matt Clifford were all standing round when I said good-bye to Hildred. It was a great pity that my father had waited to speak, until my last day at home. I had been reckoning on my journey beforehand, but now I should only count the days until I could come back.
It was two years since I had seen Master Caleb. A very dark day it had been for Wyncliffe when he gave up the school, and went to be master to a much larger one a long way off. But it was such a piece of good fortune as he had long deserved, and his friends could only rejoice for him even while they mourned over losing him.
His new home was in a busy sea-port town, as different as possible from quiet Wyncliffe. Instead of trees, they had the crowded masts of the shipping in the harbour to look at. Huge bales of merchandise piled up along the quays; sailors of all countries and tongues thronging the streets and waterside; vessels continually gliding into port or gliding out again on their paths over the sea. This, in exchange for the harvest fields and the blue hills at home. The smell of salt and tar on the sea-breeze, instead of the breath of flowering lime-trees. And the queer-sounding languages shouted by foreign voices, were very different from the distant cries of field labourers, and the cawing of the rooks, round Wyncliffe schoolhouse. Only, to make up for all, there was the solemn beauty and wonder of the sea. Words cannot utter it, or, once seen, memory lose hold of its vastness.
It mattered little to Master Caleb and his wife where their lot was cast. They carried their own sunshine with them, and would have been happy anywhere; still, they were faithful in heart to their first home, and had been longing, Mistress Morton told me, for the sight of a Wyncliffe face.
I was to have stayed with them for ten days. I was three months away from home. On what was to have been the last day of my stay, Master Caleb and I were overtaken in a thunder-storm, as we were driving home from a distance along the coast. I never quite knew how it happened. The horse took fright at the lightning. It was a dark evening, and Master Caleb, not much skilled in driving, had the reins. We went over the rocks together, horse and gig and all. Master Caleb escaped, fortunately, with a few bruises, and I broke my leg.