'Mamma,' she said, throwing it open, 'here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to Margaret about tea.'
CHAPTER XLVIII
After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that night towards the farmhouse where he had established himself, he entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was quite mistaken. Rose's maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of the situation delighted her ingenuous youth. 'I am free—he is free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we do—then——'
In the thrill of that then lay, of course, the whole attraction of the position.
So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.
How Rose got through Agnes's cross-questioning on the matter history sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr. Flaxman's journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.
But she took everything naïvely as it came, and as she was told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.
Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine's sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the vicar's wife. She prowled nervously round Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar afterwards that 'no one could tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.'
On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he entered the Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of their farewells.