The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

The years passed away. Melrose's hair turned from black to gray; Thyrza married a tradesman in Carlisle and presented him with a large family; the Dixons, as cook and manservant, gradually fitted themselves more and more closely to the queer conditions of life in the Tower, and grew old in the service of a master whose eccentricities became to them, in process of time, things to be endured without comment, like disagreeable facts of climate. In Dixon, his Methodist books, his Bible, and his weekly chapel maintained those forces of his character which were—and always continued to be—independent of Melrose; and Melrose knew his own interests well enough not to interfere with an obstinate man's religion. While Tyson, after five years, passed on triumphantly to a lucrative agency in the Dukeries, having won a reputation for tact and patience in the impossible service of a mad master, which would carry him through life. Melrose, being Melrose, found it hopeless to replace him satisfactorily; and, as he continued to buy land greedily year after year, the neglected condition of his immense estate became an ever-increasing scandal to the county.

Meanwhile, for some years after the departure of Netta, Lady Tatham was obliged for reason of health to spend the winters on the Riviera, and she and her boy were only at Duddon for the summer months. Intercourse between her and her cousin Edmund Melrose was never renewed, and her son grew up in practical ignorance of the relationship. When, however, the lad was nearing the end of his Eton school days Duddon became once more the permanent home, summer and winter, of mother and son, and young Lord Tatham, curly-haired, good-humoured, and good-hearted, became thenceforward the favourite and princeling of the countryside. On the east and north, the Duddon estates marched with Melrose's property. Occasions of friction constantly arose, but the determination on each side to have no more communication with the other than was absolutely necessary generally composed any nascent dispute; so long at least as Lady Tatham and a very diplomatic agent were in charge.

But at the age of twenty-four, Harry Tatham succeeded to the sole management of his estates, and his mother soon realized that her son was not likely to treat their miserly neighbour with the same patience as herself.

And with the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and enduring in the Cumbria county itself. Those were times of crisis for English agriculture. Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns, began now to turn toward the great Canadian spaces beyond the western sea. Only the mountains still rose changeless and eternal, at least to human sense; "ambitious for the hallowing" of moon and sun; keeping their old secrets, and their perpetual youth.

And after twenty years Threlfall Tower became the scene of another drama, whereof what has been told so far is but the prologue.

III

It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was sketching in St. John's Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid mass of Blencathra.

So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and earth, that Lydia's work went but slowly. She was a professional artist, to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very industrious and methodical views of her business. But she was, before everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form, that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers. Lydia's conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular evening it did little or nothing to check the sheer sensuous dreaming that had crept over her.

The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted, breathed in pleasure.

She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its thrusting edges still caught the sunset, but otherwise steeped in purple shades already prophesying night; while the other, separated from the first by a gap, yet grouping with it, ran slanting away to the northwest, offering to the eyes only a series of lovely foreshortened planes, rising from the valley, one behind the other, sweeping upward and backward to the central peak of Skiddaw, and ablaze with light from base to summit.