“I must have that!” he murmured. “By Jove!”
He actually stopped, and stood still on the white road among the falling thunderbolts, as it seemed to her. She stopped too and opened her puny umbrella, trying to ward off some of the heavy rain-drops from the leaves of the sketch book. It never even seemed to occur to the artist that she might be afraid, or wet. She was not afraid, such was the contagion of his courage, but she was wet through. The rain splashed on his paper in spite of her efforts, and blended together colours that the artist hastily cast on, into shapes unexpected by him, but still a memorandum of the breathing light and steam of mist over there by Cotherstone, where the storm that oppressed them now was passing off, had been secured. It was quite worth her while; she had the satisfaction of knowing that Rivers could not think her a coward. He did not tell her so, but took her pluck and superiority to feminine weakness as a matter of course.
She was driven to try and please him by the achievement of new virtues, entirely foreign to her nature. She laughed, sometimes, when she thought of herself, the leader of what there was of advanced literary thought in Newcastle—the lady who could discuss the higher ethics, and expound the morbidities of Amiel and Meredith to a select cultured circle,—being forced to recommend herself to the man she loved by a display of mere physical courage, and even manual dexterity. Yes, she found she could really please Rivers best by attending to his bridge for him.
This was a rough arrangement of stepping stones, which the painter had made for himself before he came there, by manipulating the loose boulders of the river bed a little. It constituted a short cut from the inn to his sketching place, and saved him a mile’s walk at least. He had taken good care to give the stream play between the rough piers of his bridge as it were, leaving enormous gaps and chasms, but still the river resented being interfered with, and altered the position of the stones and washed them away sometimes in the night, of malice prepense, as Mrs. Elles declared. She found plenty to do every day in replacing the stones that had been dislodged and adding new ones, and worked away merrily, thinking of Cincinnatus and his plough, and of the picture Dante began to paint for Beatrice, in this connection.
“The very first time the river comes down,” Rivers prophesied, “all our work will have to be done over again. There will be no bridge left!”
She could, of course, have shown herself a great deal more agile without her spectacles, which hampered her continually, but she had made a point of never removing them in sight of her fellow creatures, and only ventured to push them up over her brows when she was alone with only cows and squirrels for witnesses. She clung to them, as a saint might hug his cross or an anchorite his hair-shirt. They symbolized the purity of her intentions, they were her armour of honourable woman and loyal wife to Mortimer; her ticket-of-leave indeed, when she thought of him and all that he implied. She put the odious and tiresome things on every morning, as a knight endures his panoply or buckles on his shield of proof, and honourably continued to wander about in a cold, blue, local atmosphere of her own, aware only through her other senses of the glow of yellow light and hope that lay outside, besieging the frigid unreceptive discs of her self-imposed barrier in vain.
“It is hateful, but it just saves the situation,” she would say to herself. “And it makes me free. I can say what I like and do what I like, so long as I don’t look what I like!” But, indeed, there were times when that last item of forbearance seemed the hardest item of all.
Yes, the odd and distressing thing was that, in consequence of her wearing them, she had never really seen Rivers’ face, and, worse than that even, he had never seen hers. He betrayed no curiosity, no desire at all to see it, and his indifference affronted her vanity not a little. There must be something left out of a man, she argued, who could take pleasure in the society of such an example of unsexed, negative womanhood as she presented. For she was sure that he did take pleasure in her society, now, in an odd, misogynistical way—that he was glad when he saw her come stumbling and tottering across the bridge of slippery stones to him of a morning, sometimes even staying herself by one hand on the moist slabs of moss-grown rock that lay in her passage, the other holding high and dry her budget of letters and news. His voice, as he bade her good morning, sometimes even without looking up—he was so occupied—testified to a certain pleasurable anticipation of her company, or at least she thought so.
“Oh, only your bridge-maker!” she used to say to him as she came up, frankly accepting the position. “I have put three new stones in to-day.”
“He doesn’t treat me as if I were a woman at all!” she said to herself bitterly, “and I believe I am less of a woman than I was. I am more manly; I think less of my looks and more of my muscles. I never even knew I had any, till I came here!” She sighed. “Yes, I see I must cultivate this aspect of me, and keep the eternal feminine relentlessly down. It would frighten him, or at any rate disturb him. Would it? Ah, I dare not try. I must stay as I am, absolutely non-committal!”