And he asked me one or two questions about these Yorkshire friends, which fortunately I could answer without making any mention of Nellie.
I walked back to my College deep in thought. For, clearly, I must not play with the situation any longer. I must arrive at a final decision. I must pull myself together and refuse to drift. Once and for all I must know my own mind. But to do so I must see Nellie Braithwaite first.
CHAPTER XXIX.
A warm drizzling mist, shot with silver light where the April sun vainly tried to break through, covered the hedgeless fields, dark plough and green pasture, and the great fen lands, as I drove out the twenty miles from Cambridge to Westrea. I had hired a gig from the livery stable, driven by a superannuated post-boy, a withered scrap of a creature, toothless and—rather to my relief—silent, save for professional clickings and chirrupings addressed to his horse. The gig bobbed and curtsied over the rutted cross-country roads at a bare six miles an hour. We passed but few villages, a few scattered cottages, a few farm-carts—these mostly drawn by oxen, to me an unusual sight. The country was bare, featureless, sparsely inhabited, and sad. Once or twice the mist, lifting, disclosed vast reed-beds and expanses of still blue-brown water, off which, with strange plaintive cries and a mighty whirring and beating of wings, great flocks of wild fowl rose.
As we neared our destination the landscape assumed a more cheerful character, being diversified by low hills, fine timber trees, and patches of wood; more prosperous, too, with neater cottages, a better type both of farm and farming, and clean running brooks in place of stagnant fen.
Directed by the rubicund and jovial host of a wayside inn, we turned off the main road, through a field gate, and drove some quarter of a mile down an avenue of fine oaks to a comely red-brick house set in the hollow—tile-roofed and gabled, with stacks of high twisted chimneys, the whole dating, as I judged, from the latter part of the seventeenth century. In front of it a garden the box-edged borders bright with spring flowers, brick walls—against which fruit trees were trained—on either hand, stretched down to the stream, here artificially widened into a sort of moat, its banks supported by masonry. Even now, through the drizzling rain, the place seemed to tell of ample, if homely, comfort and prosperity.
Crossing the stream by a hump-backed brick bridge, the gig drew up, amid flutter of pigeons and barking of dogs, before a square porch, where Braithwaite met me with extended hand.
‘Well—so here you are,’ he said. ‘And welcome to Westrea—no man more so; though the skies might have treated you in kindlier fashion, we must own.’
Then, as I clambered down and tipped my ancient driver, he lifted out my carpet bag and called to Nellie. And I, looking once again into her beautiful face, knew, beyond all question of doubt, that the words asking the Master’s niece, Alice Dynevor, to be my bride would never be spoken. No—whether hopeless or not as to the final issue, here my heart was anchored; so that, failing the beloved woman who stood before me, I must go mateless to the end of my days.
Nellie’s greeting was very quiet. Yet I fancied my coming gave her pleasure, for her cheek flushed and the old witch-smile played about her lips. Still, I use the word ‘woman’ advisedly. For, even in the dim light of the porch, I was conscious of a change in her—of something lost, yet something gained and added; of a greater poise, a greater dignity, for hers was—may I not say is, and that how thankfully?—one of those natures which experience and trial serve to mature and enrich rather than to break.—Would there were more of such; for are they not the salt of the earth, the divinely given leaven which, unto strength, courage, righteousness, leavens the whole lump? Ah! what a wife for my dear, weak, wayward, noble boy, Hartover!—Or, he being free no longer, what a wife for⸺