“Scott’s Rokeby!” she said to herself. Scott was not one of her modern gods, but still the names—famous and familiar to everyone—“Brignal Banks” and Greta Bridge—had a certain old-world magic of their own. So, acting on the inspiration of the moment, she took a ticket for Barnard Castle, and at twelve o’clock found herself in the market-place of the sleepy little town on the Tees, in front of a char-à-banc full of tourists just starting for Rokeby, four miles off. She took a seat.
Once arrived there, she declined to make the tour of the famous Park with a guide and a noisy party of barbarians, with fern-leaves artlessly stuck behind their ears, but, leaving her bag in charge of the obliging porter at the gates, whom the more effectually to cajole she took off her spectacles for a second, started on a voyage of discovery in the opposite direction, across the bridge, following the course of the Greta, along a cart track in a wood, to the east. She did not in the least know where this path would lead her; she only knew that she was extremely happy. She felt just as she imagined the young journeyman heroes in the tales of Grimm must have felt when they walked, knapsack in hand, to seek their fortunes. She walked with an assured step, she sang to herself, she listened to the jubilant song of the mounting larks that came from the fields on the other side of the river, she enjoyed the country as only a town-bred person can; she actually experienced the joy of life she had read about so often. “I have not seen enough of nature!” she said to herself, as one says of a friend who lives a long way off, and whom one has somehow neglected. Tags of poetry, scraps of philosophy, queer mythological ideas, born of her miscellaneous reading, about the Earth Mother and the Earth Spirit, passed through her mind. What a terribly artificial life it was that she had been leading! Nature was the real thing after all!
And meantime, at home in smoky, sophisticated Newcastle, Mortimer and Mrs. Poynder and Charles would be sitting down to the substantial midday meal that their souls loved, and that she had carefully ordered for them before she left, as a valedictory service. She pictured the complacent three, pent up in the hideous, stuffy dining-room (Mortimer’s taste—she was only permitted jurisdiction over the drawing-room), with all the windows fast closed down in accordance with that innate dislike of fresh air inherent in some persons, and a blazing fire for the crown of discomfort.
She, whose spiritual needs were being so thoroughly satisfied, for once, was not in the least materially hungry, and, if she became so, would eat roots like other heroines before her. There must be plenty of things edible in this luxuriance of undergrowth in which she was wandering, where all possible forms of vegetable life seemed literally crushing one another out in their mutual excess and exuberance. There were great, flame-coloured fungi glistering from the boles of enormous beech trees whose leaves grew so closely that, although the hot July sun, she knew, was beating outside on their thick panoply, she yet was able to walk at ease in their cool penumbra. Beds of magnificent nettles, and the broad, green discs of what the children call “fairy tables” filled all the hollows of the dells. Here and there, tall-stemmed, pale lilac campanulas rose and lightened the gloom through which the sunbeams pierced in vivid streaks, like golden spears probing the dimness. The low bank of red sandstone that formed the background to the grove showed at intervals like a rosy wall, but on the opposite side the character of the country had changed; there were no more meadows; she was hemmed in; the granite cliff rose sheer, clothed with trees that found but a scanty purchase in the rocky clefts to which they seemed to cling frantically with hoary roots upturned, detached almost, the relative positions of roots and boughs nearly reversed. The call of the wood-pigeons that nested in these coverts—she sentimentally called them doves—came to her across the river that flowed along beside her, red like wine, over shiny stones and deep, rocky crevices that modified the sound of its ripples into a thousand musical varieties.
She was in an ecstasy. To herself she murmured, softly, Rossetti’s lines about the “Banks in Willow Wood”:
“With woodspurge wan, with bloodwort burning red”—
and was in a mood to utter invocations to the “spotted snakes, with double tongue,” that must be lurking in those dark beds of hoary nettles. She was a well-read woman, and had her poets at her fingers’ ends, for use, not ornament, since she so frequently quoted them. She walked on, imagining that she heard the interesting rustle of wild animals that her footsteps affrighted, and presently, out of pure caprice, left the path and began to clamber up the bank, in the vague aspiration after blackberries in July.
The dell began to widen out, and the river, which up to that time had flowed in a more or less massive and self-contained flood, began to spread and lose itself in shallows. The noise of many counter-ripples, of the suction of large masses of water pouring into crevices and over many different levels, grew very loud. She stood, as it were, at the end of a funnel, looking towards a sunlit clearing where the trees grew more thinly and more interspersedly, and the cliffs stood away on either side.
She stopped and stood still, and pushed her spectacles, which she had been wearing very laxly, a little further up her forehead.
“This is like a glimpse of Paradise,” she thought, looking towards the golden space in front of her, “coming as it does, just after this long, cool dark grove that I have been walking in for more than half an hour! That was a kind of Purgatorio. This is a painter’s paradise, I might say, and there is the painter!”