Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

He stopped, overcome by the recollection of that through which they had passed. She, for her part, was inclined to ask him to go on, but remembered that this, all this was very irregular. What would her father say? And Miss Peacock? Yet, if this was irregular, so was the adventure itself. She would never forget his face of horror, the appeal in his eyes, his poignant anxiety. No, it was impossible to act as if nothing had happened between them, impossible to be stiff and to talk at arm’s length about prunes and prisms with a person who had all but taken her life—and who was so very penitent. And then it was all so interesting, so out of the common, so like the things that happened in books, like that dreadful fall from the Cobb at Lyme in “Persuasion.” And he was not ordinary, not like other people. He looked at snowdrops!

But she must not linger now. Later, when she was alone in her room, she could piece it together and make a whole of it, and think of it, and compass the full wonder of the adventure. But she must go now. She told him so, the primness in her tone reflecting her thoughts. “Will you kindly give me the basket?”

“I am going to carry it,” he said. “You must not go alone. Indeed you must not, Miss Griffin. You may feel it more by and by. You may—go off suddenly.”

“Oh,” she replied, smiling, “I shall not go off, as you call it, now.”

“I will only come as far as the mill,” humbly. “Please let me do that.”

She could not say no, it could hardly be expected of her; and she turned with him. “I shall never forgive myself,” he repeated. “Never! Never! I shall dream of the moment when I lost sight of you in the smoke and thought that I had killed you. It was horrible! Horrible! It will come back to me often.”

He thought so much of it that he was moving away without his gun, leaving it lying on the ground. It was she who reminded him. “Are you not going to take your gun?” she asked.

He went back for it, covered afresh with confusion. What a stupid fellow she must think him! She waited while he fetched it, and as she waited she had a new and not unpleasant sensation. Never before had she been on these terms with a man. The men whom she had known had always taken the upper hand with her. Her father, Arthur even, had either played with her or condescended to her. In her experience it was the woman’s part to be ordered and directed, to give way and to be silent. But here the parts were reversed. This man—she had seen how he looked at her, how he humbled himself before her! And he was—interesting. As he came back to her carrying the gun, she eyed him with attention. She took note of him.

He was not handsome, as Arthur was. He had not Arthur’s sparkle, his brilliance, his gay appeal, the carriage of the head that challenged men and won women. But he was not ugly, he was brown and clean and straight, and he looked strong. He bent to her as if he had been a knight and she his lady, and his eyes, grey and thoughtful—she had seen how they looked at her.

Now, she had never given much thought to any man’s eyes before, and that she did so now, and criticised and formed an opinion of them, implied a change of attitude, a change in her relations and the man’s; and instinctively she acknowledged this by the lead she took. “It seems so strange,” she said half-playfully—when had she ever rallied a man before?—“that you should think of such things as you do. Snowdrops, I mean. I thought you were a banker, Mr. Ovington.”