“And I, too?” said Bertram, with a pleasant smile. He had a pleasant smile, and he was such a gentleman, neither rough like Raaf, nor over-dainty like Reginald. Lucy was very well content he should come too.
CHAPTER II.
It was a lingering and pleasant walk with many little pauses in it and much conversation. Lucy was herself the cause of some of them, for it was quite necessary that here and there Mr. Bertram should be made to stop, turn round, and look at the view. I will not pretend that those views were any very great things. Bertram, who had seen all the most famous scenes of earth, was not much impressed by that point so dear to the souls of the Wradisbury people, where the church tower came in, or that other where the glimmer of the pond under the trees, reflecting all their red and gold, moved the natives to enthusiasm. It was a pretty, soft, kindly English landscape, like a good and gentle life, very reposeful and pleasant to see, but not dramatic or exciting. It was Ralph, though he was to the manner born, who was, or pretended to be, the most impatient of these tame but agreeable vistas. “It don’t say much, your landscape, Lucy,” he said. “Bertram’s seen everything there is to see. A stagnant pool and a church tower are not so grand to him as to—” Probably he intended to say us, with a little, after all, of the native’s proud depreciation of a scene which, though homely, appeals to himself so much; but he stopped, and wound up with “a little ignoramus like you.”
“I am not so fastidious, I suppose. I think it’s delightful,” said Bertram. “After all the dissipations of fine scenery, there’s nothing like a home landscape. I’ve seen the day when we would have given all we possessed for a glimmer of a church tower, or, still better, a bit of water. In the desert only to think of that would be a good thing.”
“Oh, in the desert,” said Ralph, with a sort of indulgent acknowledgment that in some points home did commend itself to the most impartial mind. But he too stopped and called upon his friend to observe where the copse spread dark into the sunset sky—the best covert within twenty miles—about which also Bertram was very civil, and received the information with great interest. “Plenty of wild duck round the corner of that hill in the marshy part,” said Ralph. “By Jove! we should have a heavy bag when we have it all to ourselves.”
“Capital ground, and great luck to be the first,” said Mr. Bertram. He was certainly a nice man. He seemed to like to linger, to talk of the sunset, to enjoy himself in the fresh but slightly chill air of the October evening. Lucy’s observation of him was minute. A little wonder whether he might be the man—not necessarily her man, but the ideal man—blew like a quiet little breeze through her youthful spirit. It was a breeze which, like the actual breeze of the evening, carried dead leaves with it, the rags of past reputation and visions, for already Lucy had asked herself this question in respect to one or two other men who had not turned out exactly as at first they seemed. To be sure, this one was old—probably forty or so—and therefore was both better and worse than her previous studies; for at such an age he must of course have learnt everything that experience could teach, and on the other hand did not matter much, having attained to antiquity. Still, it certainly gave a greater interest to the walk that he was here.
“After all,” said Ralph, “you gave us no light, Lucy, as to who this widow was.”
“You speak as if she were like old Widow Thrapton in the village,” cried Lucy. “A widow!—she says it’s a term of reproach, as if a woman had tormented her husband to death.”
“But she is a widow, for you said so—and who is she?” said the persistent Ralph.
“He is like the little boy in ‘Helen’s Babies,’” said Lucy, turning to her other companion. “He always wants to see the wheels go round, whatever one may say.”