There was one drawing of his that she specially cared for, and whose progress she surveyed as she might that of a beloved child of his brain and hers. “Oh, Brignal Banks are wild and fair!” says the lady in Scott’s ballad, and here they were, caught and immortalized forever on one piece of Whatman’s paper, three feet by two. There was hardly any sky in it. The leafy, heavily-berried coverts hung tossing from the cliff, streaming down to the water’s edge, that lay, in brown pools, deep and immutable, like a true man’s heart, at its base. In the immediate foreground was the broken mass of stones that formed the bed of the wayward river that had so many moods, both of grave and gay. There the painter sat, on one of these stones, with the water parted and rippling all round him, in the most precarious of positions, his drawing propped on his knee, uncomfortably, his feet nearly in the stream. The burning sun shone straight down on his head, for there was no foothold for his umbrella in the spot which he had chosen. He never spared himself, or complained of the terrible constriction of the chest, which the constrained attitude of stooping necessarily engendered. Perhaps he did not notice it in the excitement of his work. She sat under his umbrella, on the bank, and watched him.

Morning after morning she sat there, as it were in a bay of opalescent colours; the horizon of her landscape bounded by the pink cliffs and overhanging belts of trees, the foreground quivering with refraction, and golden with the flowering ragwort. She was drunk, but not blind with light, and lulled continually by the hum of the bees at their task and the self-satisfied purl of the stream at her feet, she sat peacefully noting and enjoying the dreamy transitions of a painter’s day.

To herself, she seemed to be fast becoming a “green thought in a green shade”—the fanciful title of Rivers’ picture, adopted from his favourite poet, Marvel—her favourite, too, now. Rivers was for ever associated in her mind with green, the colour of hope; she had banished grey—the colour of despair and Newcastle—from her mind, as it certainly existed not in the landscape before her eyes. Newcastle, under its smoky pall, and Rokeby, in its gorgeous vestiture of many colours, could not surely form a part of the same hemisphere. And the extraordinary thing was, that she had run away to find adventure, and had found peace! She had thought she had need of a world full of men, and now the society of one summed up all interest, all excitement, all hope, all that she had ever dreamed. She had longed for the fuller life of cities; now a lonely grove by the side of the river sufficed her.

Her eyes—she never read, or cared to read—were continually fixed on the stooping figure, in its neutral garb of brown, perched so precariously on a rock in mid-stream. In front of his post was the dell of Brignal, where the river wound round abruptly, and seemed to issue from a darksome hollow, formed by the meeting trees on either bank. Suddenly, her eyes grew eager and then startled—she fancied all was not right. Something was different. The hollow was filled up. A brown wall of water was gathering from that hollow, was advancing, rushing, with a dull, murmurous roar as of distant thunder, straight down between the two banks towards the painter.

She sprang to her feet.

Rivers had told her of the Bore of the Greta—she knew how, after a very slight rainfall such as they had had, the river was used to come down without warning. This was it! And his life was in danger! She screamed frantically to the artist, whose head had for an unconscionable time been bent over his drawing. She screamed as loudly as she could, but her voice came thinly and hoarsely, so he did not hear her.

Then she began to leap from rock to rock to go to him, when she saw him suddenly spring to his feet, take in the whole situation at a glance, and, his drawing held high in the air in one hand, begin to make for the shore.

Then he caught sight of Phœbe Elles, and his course deviated. She had not got very far from the bank, but she was in danger, and he was coming to her. The flood was very nearly on them both. Even in her agony, she noticed his slight pause of hesitation before he tossed the drawing he held recklessly on to the bank without looking after it, and the next moment his protecting arm was round her, and the flood swept partially over them. His other arm was round the bough of a tree that hung over the stream near where she was standing when he reached her. They were both overthrown by the rush of water, which passed over them, and then seemed to subside somewhat. She fainted, for the first time in her life.

CHAPTER VII

She was lying on her bed at the “Heather Bell,” with only a very confused recollection of what had happened, and a bandaged foot that hurt dreadfully. A doctor had been sent for from Barnard Castle, so she was told, who had pronounced it only a slight sprain, but the skin of her leg was abraded from knee to instep, and that was the cause of the pain. She could not remember how it had happened—there was a jagged bough, or a snag, she supposed, of the tree that Rivers had held on to, as the flood rushed past them, and which had caught her, somehow, as she slid down in his arms. She was a little light-headed still, and she kept calling out for the artist like a fretful child, and upbraiding him for refusing to come to her. Jane Anne, who was in and out of her room a great deal, treated these appeals sternly, and ministered to her with stony, condemnatory eyes, but Mrs. Watson’s motherly heart was melted by her distress.