A Romance of Wastdale.

by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason.

CHAPTER I

"Mrs. Jackson!"

Mrs. Jackson was feeding her ducks at the beck behind the house. But the kitchen door stood open, and she not only heard her name, but recognised the voice which shouted it.

"It's Mr. Gordon," she said to the servant who was with her, and she bustled through the kitchen into the parlour, drying her hands with her ap.r.o.n as she went.

David Gordon stood by the window, looking dreamily out across the fields. He turned as she entered the room, and shook hands with her.

"I have given you a surprise," he laughed.

"You have, indeed, Mr. Gordon. I never expected to see you again at Wastdale Head. You should have written you were coming."

And she proceeded to light the fire.

"I didn't know myself that I was coming until yesterday."

"It is three years since you were here."

"Three years," Gordon repeated slowly. "Yes! I did not realise it until I caught sight of the farm-house again."

"You will be wanting breakfast?"

"The sooner, the better. I have walked from Boot."

"Already?"

"It didn't seem really far;" and a smile broke over his face as he added--

"I heard my marriage bells ringing all the way across Burnmoor."

Mrs. Jackson retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and to ponder over his remark. The result of her reflections was shown in the unusual strength of the tea and in an extra thickness of b.u.t.ter on the toast. She decked the table with an a.s.sortment of jams, and carefully closed the door which opened into the lane, although the April sunlight was pouring through it in a warm flood. It seemed as if Gordon had gained an additional value and herself an additional responsibility. She even took a cushion from the sofa and placed it on his chair, and then waited on him while he breakfasted, nodding and smiling a discreet but inquisitive sympathy.

On Gordon, however, her pantomime was lost. His thoughts no longer chimed to marriage bells. For Wastdale, and this farmhouse in particular, were a.s.sociated in his mind with the recollection of two friends, of whom one was dead in reality, the other dead to him; and always vividly responsive to the impression of the moment, he had stepped back across the interval of the past three years, and now dwelled with a strange sense of loneliness amidst a throng of quickening memories.

The woman, however, got the upper hand in Mrs. Jackson, and she suggested, tentatively--

"Then maybe, Mr. Gordon, you are going to be married?"

"You can omit the 'maybe,'" he laughed.

"Well, I should never have thought it!" she exclaimed.

"Time brings in his revenges," said he.

"The way you three gentlemen used to rail at women! Well, there!"

"But, then, they weren't women. They were Aunt Sallies of our own contriving--mere pasteboard. We were young and we didn't know."

Mrs. Jackson inquired the date and place of the ceremony. At Keswick, she was told, and in a week's time. She floated out garrulous on a tide of sentiment. She hoped that Mr. Gordon's two friends would follow his example and find out their mistake, not noticing the shadow which her words brought to her lodger's face. She dropped the name of Hawke and the shadow deepened.

"I rather fancy," he said abruptly, "that Mr. Hawke found out the mistake at exactly the same time as I did myself."

Mrs. Jackson was a quick woman, and she took his meaning from the inflection of his voice.

"He was your rival!"

"I have not seen much of him lately."

She thought for a moment and said, "Then it's just as well he's staying at the Inn."

Gordon sprang to his feet.

"At the Inn?" he exclaimed.

"Yes," she answered. "He still comes to climb at Wastdale every Easter. But he has always stayed at the Inn, since you and Mr.

Arkwright have stopped away."

Gordon stood drumming with his fingers on the table-cloth. A sudden impulse of a sentimental kind had persuaded him to spend his last week of bachelorhood alone in the familiar privacy of this spot, and he had obeyed it on the instant, thoughtlessly it now appeared to him. He might have foreseen the likelihood of Hawke's presence. After all, however, it could not matter. It would be, perhaps, a little awkward if they met, though, indeed, it need not be even that. Their actual rivalry had ended with the announcement of his engagement two years ago. Hawke could gain no end by sustaining the feud. There was, in truth, no reason why they should not shake hands over the matter. So he argued to himself, desire pointing the argument and stifling certain uneasy reflections as to the tenacity of Hawke's nature.

He sat down to resume his breakfast. The third member of the trio which for years had made the farmhouse the resort during Easter vacations claimed Mrs. Jackson's attention.

"And Mr. Arkwright?" she asked.

"He's dead," Gordon replied after a pause. "He died last year in Switzerland. It was an accident. I was with him at the time."

He spoke with spasmodic jerks and ended with something like a sigh of relief. But if Mrs. Jackson loved marriages, she hankered after violent deaths, and so, while she expressed unbounded pity, she insisted upon details. Gordon submitted reluctantly.

"It happened in the Oberland," he said, and Mrs. Jackson took a chair.

"We were coming down a mountain towards the evening--Arkwright, myself, and a guide. We chanced to be late. The descent was new to us, and knowing that we should not get off the snow before dark we looked out for a spot to camp on. We came to a little plateau of rock just as the night was falling, and determined to remain there. The guide had a bottle of wine left out of our provisions. We had kept it back purposely."

Gordon paused for a moment and then went on again with a certain deliberateness of speech as though the episode fascinated him in the telling of it.

"Arkwright volunteered to draw the cork. The neck of the bottle burst and cut into his arm. It severed the main artery just above the wrist.

I sent the guide down to the valley, but, of course, no help came until the morning. He was dead then."

"And you stayed with him all the time?"

"Yes!" said Gordon, and he rose from the table.

Mrs. Jackson, however, failed to take the hint. She wanted a description of his feelings during that night of watching, and she persisted until she had obtained it.