The Tree of Knowledge: A Novel

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

It was not a face which attracted Claud. He was an admirer of beauty, and preferred it with a certain admixture of consciousness, he liked a woman's eyes to meet his with a full knowledge of the fact that they were of opposite sexes. He had a weakness for pretty figures, cased in dresses which were a miracle of cut; though of course the wearer must be more than an ornamental clothes-peg: he was too intelligent to admire a nonentity.

Miss Allonby's dress was not badly cut, neither was it put on without some idea of the way clothes should be worn; but it was shabby, and had evidently never been costly. Her gloves, too, fitted her, and were the right sort of glove, but they were old and much soiled. Her shoes gave evidence that her foot was not too large for her height, and her hands, as Claud mentally noted, were size six and a quarter. Her face wore an expression which can only be described as preoccupied. Of course it was natural that on this particular day she should be thinking only of her brother; but her new acquaintance had penetration enough to know that there was more than a temporary anxiety in her eyes. Had he met her on any other day, under any other circumstances, it would have been the same; he was merely a passing event—something which was in no sense part of the life she was leading. She seemed to convey in some indescribable fashion the fact that he was not of the slightest importance to her, and the idea inspired a wholly unreasonable sensation of irritation.

An unmarried doctor once somewhat coarsely engaged to point out all the portraits of unmarried women in a photographic album, on the theory that the countenance of all those who are single wears an expression of unsatisfied longing. Wyn Allonby's face would hardly have come under this heading. Hers was not a happy nor a perfectly contented look, but neither could it be said in any sense to express longing. It was the look of one who has much serious work to do, the doing of which involves anxiety, but also brings interest and pleasure—a brave, thoughtful, preoccupied look, more suggestive of a middle-aged man of science than a young girl.

Claud found something indirectly unflattering in such an expression; he liked to have the female mind entirely at his disposal, pro tem. Her age, too, puzzled him; it was necessarily provoking to such an adept to find himself unable to decide this point within five years. She might be twenty-one, and looking older, or she might be twenty-five, and looking younger, or she might claim any one of the three intermediate dates.

When he had told her all that there was to tell, he relapsed into silent speculation on these important points, now inclining to think that a life of hardship had made her prematurely self-possessed, now that her peculiarly unconscious temperament gave an air of fictitious youth. He would have liked to ask her some questions, or, rather, deftly to extract from her a few details as to who she was and what were her circumstances. But Miss Allonby gave him no opening. She was silent without being shy, which is certainly undue presumption in a woman.

Her first words seemed to be extorted from her almost by force.

They had left Stanton far behind. The distance from thence to Edge Combe was said to be about five miles; but these miles were not horizontal, but perpendicular, which somehow tended to increase their length considerably. They had climbed gradually but continuously for some time between tall hedges, up a lane remarkable only for its monotony; thence they had emerged, not without gratitude, into the Philmouth Road. This was a wide highway, somewhat indefinite as to its edges, which were fringed irregularly with hart's-tongue and other ferns, or clumped with low brambles bearing abundant promise of a future blackberry harvest. On either side a row of ragged and onesided pine-trees, stooping as if perpetually cringing before the stinging blows of the wild sou'-westers, which had so tortured them from their youth up that they habitually leaned one way, like children whose minds are warped from their natural bent by undue influence in one direction.

Behind these trees the sky was beginning to flame with sunset, making their uncouth forms stand out weirdly dark in the still air.

For a short way they drove quietly along this road, then turned down a precipitous lane to the left, and wound along till a white gate was reached. Mr. Dickens from Scotland Yard jumped down and opened the gate; and as the carriage went slowly through, and turned a corner, the effect was like a transformation scene, and a cry of wondering admiration broke from the silent girl.

They stood on the very edge and summit of a descent so steep as to be almost a precipice. Below them lay the fairy valley, half-hidden in a pearly mist, with a vivid stretch of deep-blue sea as its horizon. Well in evidence lay Poole Farm, directly beneath them, a sluggish wreath of smoke curling lazily up from its great chimney. The road curved to and fro down the abrupt hillside like a white folded ribbon, here visible, there lost behind a belt of ash trees.