“Oh, may I really?” she cried. “I assure you I shall be quite happy sitting—beside you,” she was going to say, but corrected it into “with my book!” Though where the literature was to come from that was to keep her quiet was more than she knew. Excepting the Shelley, Taine’s “Historie de l’Esthétique Anglaise” was quite the lightest work on Rivers’ mantelpiece, and she had had, of course, no books among her luggage.
“Very well, then, we will look upon that as settled,” he said, shortly, and held out his hand again to say good-night.
“I will come in in the evenings, if you will let me, when it really is melancholy in that big meeting-room, but during the day——”
“During the day I am generally out, so you will be able to have the room entirely to yourself,” he rejoined, in his own disconcerting manner, and the candle he was holding seemed to her to light up a little flicker of something like amusement in his eyes.
“Yes, I know,” she said, desperately, “at that place in the woods where I first met you. Has the foxglove grown again? I wanted to ask you. I shall come and see for myself some day.”
She spoke with an assumed archness, with all the while a fearful stricture about the heart, lest she was alienating him by her boldness as of the schoolgirl she believed him to believe her to be. Her candlestick, which she had now taken from his hand, trembled in her own.
“Do!” he replied, civilly, in a tone absolutely devoid of all enthusiasm. Jane Anne crossed the hall as they loosed their hands. “And now, good-night!”
Mrs. Elles waited a whole day before she profited by the artist’s invitation to visit him at the place where he worked. She was rewarded for her discretion, for, at dinner that very evening, he asked her coolly why she had not been? So, the day after, she walked over to Brignal and stayed full fifteen minutes at his side. She managed to be so little of a nuisance that, next day, she was emboldened to take over her drawing materials at the artist’s own suggestion, and began a series of minute and painstaking sketches of the vegetation of the immediate foreground, to be used by him afterwards as memoranda. He had admitted that it would be useful to him.
Then it became a settled thing that she should walk over every day after twelve o’clock, and take him his letters and the papers which were left at the “Heather Bell” by the postman from Barnard Castle quite an hour after his departure. Thus the compromising fact of her own total dearth of correspondence escaped his attention, if, indeed, he should take cognizance of such a detail.
She marvelled at his extraordinary power of detachment. Did matters merely mundane ever impress him? Did anything, humanly speaking, ever put him out, except in so far as it interfered with his work? Was he literally, as he used to say himself, only a registering machine of effects and views, pledged to render an actual transcript of Nature, seen, as is the condition of all art, through a temperament, but a temperament merely receptive, limpid, clear, and untroubled by the waves of passionate human yearnings and desires? There was actually something of what Browning calls the “terrible composure” of Nature about him, she thought, a patient, broad-minded, magnificent way of regarding things entailed by a continual contemplation of her vastness, her implacabilities, her unconscious cruelties and brutalities. She never could forget Rivers’ behaviour in a thunderstorm that overtook them one Sunday afternoon by Scargill Tower. Out came the sketch book, quick as the lightning that seemed to flicker in its horribly malicious way down by the stone wall that edged the road they were walking along.