“Oh, so do I,” cried Ally, from the bottom of her heart.
“And I,” said Wat; “any one may have my share.”
“That is just how things are—always contrary, as Martha says. I should have rather enjoyed it. I should have liked to see everything. Cousin Alicia might have put on her icy face as much as she liked, she would not have frozen me. But we can’t change places now at the last moment, and the fly will have to be paid for if it waits. Come, Ally, come! for sooner or later you know you must go.”
Anne and her mother stood and watched the reluctant pair as they drove away with a mingled sense of envy and relief. The fly from the village was not a triumphal chariot; the old gray horse had a dilapidated aspect; the day was damp and rainy.
“We may be afloat before you come back,” said Anne, waving her hand.
And then they left the door and the house out of sight, and departed into the unknown. Into the unknown! If it had been to Russia it could not have been further away, nor could the habits and customs of a foreign country have been more alarming to the young adventurers. They were so much overawed that they said little to each other. Ally drew back into the corner of the carriage, Walter looked out of the opposite window. They were in a moment separated by half a world, though the same rug was tucked round both their knees. The boy looked out with an eagerness which he could scarcely conceal for something tangible, something of which his mind was full. The girl drew back into a vague delightful world of dreams in which there was nothing definite. Who was it that had said to her something about driving up unthinking to a door within which you might meet your fate. Who was it? she asked herself, and yet she remembered very well who it was; and as she drove along there rose before her a whole panorama of shifting, changing pictures. She was standing again by the muddy, turbid river, and hearing, as in a dream, the first words of wooing, the suggested devotion, the under-current of an inference which made her the chief interest, the center of the world: which is such a thing as may well startle any girl into attention. And then the scenery changed, and the new world opened, and other, vaguer figures, yet more wonderful, appeared about her, some of them with that same look in their eyes. How did Ally know what might be waiting for her in that home of romance, that wonderful house of Penton, with which all the visions of her life had been connected? Sometimes when one is not thinking one drives up to a door and finds inside one’s fate. What does that mean—one’s fate? Young Rochford had given her to understand that he had found his when he arrived at Penton Hook, and the words had vaguely seized upon Ally’s imagination, filling her with a curious thrill of sensation. His fate! She did not think of this with compunction or regret, as one who more thoroughly recognized what was meant might have done. It moved her rather to an excited, half-awed sense of power in herself which she did not understand before, than to any sympathy for him. She thought in the keen consciousness of awakening, of herself, and not of him. It was wrong; it was a guilty sort of selfishness: but she could not help it. His words, which had first opened her eyes—his looks, which perhaps a little earlier had lighted a spark of perception, had been like the sounding of the réveillé—like the rising of a morning star. She was not to blame for it; she had done nothing which could connect her with his fate, as he called it. It was a summons to her to behold and recognize her own position, the wonderful, mysterious position, which a woman—a girl—seemed to be born to, which she had been thrust into without any doing of hers.
When the fancy is first touched, the thoughts that follow are sweet—sweeter perhaps than anything that can succeed—in their perfectly indefinite exhilaration and vague sense of a personal beatitude that scarcely anything else can bring. This does not always mean love, which is a different effect. Ally knew nothing about love; she only felt in all her being the new and wonderful power of awakening motion in others, of which nobody had ever told her, and which she had never dreamed of as appertaining to herself. She had read of it as being possessed by others—by the beautiful maidens of romance, by ladies moving in those dazzling spheres of society which were altogether beyond the reach and even the desires of a little country girl. But Ally knew very well that she was not a great beauty, nor so clever and gifted as those heroines were who in novels and romances brought all the world to their feet. She entertained no delusions on this subject. She was not beautiful at all, nor clever at all. She was only Ally: and yet she had it in her power to bring that look into another’s eyes. It was more strange, more thrilling, sweet, confusing than words could say.
As for Walter, his imaginations were far more definite. They were very definite indeed, distant as every anticipation was. He looked out to see one figure, one face, which he could not look out upon calmly, with a spectator by his side, which he longed yet feared to behold in the daylight, in the midst of a world awake and observant, with Ally looking on. He expected nothing but to be questioned on the subject—to be asked what he was looking for, why he leaned out of the window, what there was to see. When it dawned upon him that Ally meant to ask no questions, that she had the air of taking no notice, he became suspicious and uneasy, thinking that she must mean something by her silence, that there was more in it than met the eye. By nature she would have asked him a hundred questions. She would have looked, too, wondering what he could possibly expect to see on the road or in the village that could be interesting. Walter said to himself that some report must have reached home of those expeditions of his to Crockford’s cottage, and that Ally must have been told to watch, not to excite his suspicions by questioning, to be on the alert for whatever might happen. He turned his back to her and blocked up the window with his head and shoulders as they drove past Crockford’s. And there, indeed, was the face he longed to see looking out from the cottage window, staring at him maliciously, with a smile which was not a smile of recognition, defying him, as it seemed, to own the acquaintance. A great panic was in Walter’s heart. To betray this secret, to make it visible to the eyes of the world—i. e., to the old rector, who, as ill-luck would have it, was strolling past at the moment, taking his afternoon walk, and of Ally watching him from her corner—was terrible to the young man. And to expose himself to be questioned—to be asked who she was (which he did not know), and where he had met her, and a hundred other details; perhaps to be solemnly warned that he must see her no more! All these reflections flashed through Walter’s spirit. She was evidently in the mind to take no notice of him, to own no acquaintance: and there were so many temptations on his side to do the same, to make his eyes do all his salutations, to avoid giving any satisfaction to the spies about. But his instincts as a gentleman were too much for Walter. He leaned a little further out of the window and took off his hat. How could he pass the place where she was, and look at her and make no sign? It was impossible! Walter took off his hat with a heroism scarcely to be surpassed on the perilous breach. It might be ruin; it might mean discovery, betrayal; he might be sent away, banished from his gates of paradise; but, whatever happened, he could not be disrespectful to her.
She did not return the salutation, but she opened the window and looked out after the carriage, putting out into the damp air what Walter within himself called her beautiful head. It was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful head, but it had various elements of beauty—dark eyes full of light; a crop of soft brown silky hair, clustering in curly short luxuriance; a complexion pale and clear, but lightly touched with color; and a mouth which was really a wonder of a mouth beside the ordinary developments of that universally defective feature. She looked after him with mockery in her eyes, which only attracted the foolish boy the more, and made him half frantic to spring from his place in the sight of the village and put himself at her feet. It would have cost her nothing to give him a smile, a wave of her hand; and there was no telling what it might cost him to have taken off his hat to her; but she was immovable. He gazed, as long as he could see anything, out of the carriage window. At least, if he had sacrificed himself he should get the good of it, and look, and look, as long as eyes could see.
“How d’ye do?—how d’ye do?’ cried the rector, waving his hand toward the carriage. Perhaps he thought that the salutation was for him, the old bat. Walter drew in his head again, and looked with keen suspicion at his sister in her corner, who raised her eyes, which seemed heavy (could she have been asleep?), with a dreamy sort of smile, totally unlike the smile of a spy maturing her observations, and asked,