CHAPTER XI
Wauchope, who hadn't a nerve in his composition, recovered soon after he got into the open air. But in Ransome, without intermission, the magic of that incantation worked.
The symptoms of its working were a frightful haste, anxiety, and fear. He left Wauchope without any explanation, and rode off to his appointment at a dangerous speed and with a furious ringing of his bell. He was afraid that if he were late by five seconds Violet Usher would be gone. It was incredible to him that she should be there. It was incredible that it should have come to this, that he should be flying in haste and anxiety and fear unspeakable to meet her at the elm tree by the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain. The whole adventure was incredible.
Yet there could not be a better place for it than Wandsworth Plain, a three-cornered patch of bare ground, bounded on one side by the river Wandle, and on the other by a row of brown cottages and two little old inns, with steep tiled roofs and naked walls, "The Bell" and "The Crane." They were pure eighteenth century, and they give to Wandsworth Plain its lonely and deserted air as of a little riverside hamlet overlooked by time and the Borough Council. On a Sunday evening in summer they stand as if in perpetual peace, without rivalry, without regret, very bright and clean and simple, one washed yellow and the other chalk-white. The river runs under brown walls, shaded on one side by espalier limes, on the other over-hung with elder bushes in flower. Lower down, on the banks, are willows and alders, and the wild hemlock grows there, lifting up its great white whorls. Beyond the farther wall and the limes there is a vast yard, stacked with timber; beyond the banks a dock; and beyond all, on the great River, unseen, a distance of crowded warehouses and gray wharves.
The elm tree, muffled in green, leans out over the stream as the lightning bowed it long ago, propped by wooden stays, mutilated to the merest torso of a tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and guarded by a wooden railing as in a shrine.
Ransome was ten minutes too early, and it was impossible that she should be there. Yet there she was, in her white dress, leaning up against the wooden railing, as if swept and then left there in her detachment, so inaccessible, so isolated was she, so unaware or so disdainful of the couples, the young devotees of passion, who had made the elm tree their meeting-place. She was there too soon, yet about her there was no air of haste, but rather of brooding and delay. You would have said of her in her stillness that she could afford to wait, she was so certain of her end.
She scarcely stirred from her place to greet Ransome as he came. He leaned up against the railing close beside her.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I tore like mad. Did you think I was never coming?"
She smiled with a curious smile.