A CHANGE.
WILLIAM HAWORTH’S hurt looked no trifle, but he did not mind it In the veins of a young fellow in good training, and living in such wild free air, on good country fare, it is not blood but ichor that circulates, and wounds heal in no time.
It seemed to him that the beautiful girl who haunted his thoughts rather kept out of his way — that is, he could never see her except in the presence of old Martha now, or of Mall Darrell. He fancied that she had grown thoughtful.
Certain it was, when he was by she was silent. She was grave. She did not, he thought, even look at him, except when, driven to despair, he spoke to her. Then she spoke gently and pleasantly as ever.
Once only he caught her smiling at some joke he addressed to Mrs. Gillyflower — she smiled at the roses she was arranging in a glass for the dresser — and William felt prouder and happier for half the day.
What could this be? There was no affectation in the matter — there was no appearance of being offended; only you would have fancied that she was under orders to avoid a tête-à-tête, and to act with a little more reserve. I need hardly say, however, that there was no one to impose any such conditions.
William tortured himself to find reasons for it Perhaps the cause was in the rapturous audacity of his talk. She had thought it over, perhaps, and formed resolutions in counsel with herself.
The Squire affected to be careless, sometimes; and was often angry, and always miserable.
He had reviewed his theory of her being an escaped nun. He had another theory now, romantic also. Was ever wight more desperately in love?
She is expecting a letter or a message, and she is meditating her farewell; and she has made up her mind that there shall be no entanglement, even of sentiment “How cold and selfish they are!” he said, in his anger. What made it worse still was that he sometimes heard the old sounds of merriment from the kitchen — the laughter and the singing — and this cruel girl was clearly the origin and spring of all the gayety.
Some girls have affected this estrangement to pique a lover and make themselves more precious, or even from the mysterious pleasure that some find in an unexplained and smouldering quarrel — the pain and the submission of a suffering lover, his wanderings in the dark, and his pleadings for light.
But William Haworth did not suspect his Euphan of this. He felt that in that character, in some respects so volatile, there was a vein of common sense, decision, and dignity, where the deeper feelings were concerned, quite incompatible with any such shabby trifling.
In this mood, amid these conjectures, William Haworth took his gun, and spent the day in a lonely march over Dardale Moss.
The sun was touching the distant rim of the horizon, as William Haworth, with the butt of his gun over his shoulder, approached the scattered wood near Haworth Hall.
Far away, but still a bold feature in the landscape, are visible the towering fells of Golden Friars. Looking towards them, as you stand under the group of birch-trees, with your back to the sombre moor, the landscape has a wild and melancholy charm of its own, especially in certain lights.
Take sunset, for instance — as it now is — when, red with the mists that gather over that dark expanse, the sun seems sinking inch by inch into its black level, and throws your shadow long before you, touching every weed and thistle and long blade of grass with its fiery light, and with a softer tint lighting up the trees in the foreground.
Before you stands the old gray-fronted house of Haworth, its small windows now glimmering all over with the reflected flame of the west. About it, with an air of shelter and comfort, stand huge old trees. It is by no means a “palatial residence,” as county historians often term ancient family houses. It is a homely old house, shingle-roofed and strongly built; and 200 years hence may find it looking westward over the moss, with little or no change.
A little in the rear, and crowning an abrupt eminence of very modest pretensions, rise the ruins of Haworth Castle. In this land of raid and rapine, no less than seven such buildings are said to have belonged to the family of Haworth.
In the foreground near the margin of the moss, a little to the right, stands one of those mysterious relics that carry us back to cyclopean times. On a level, no doubt once surrounded by a forest of oak — the indications rather than the relics of which remain in the fragments of dwarf oak-wood which are to be found in that region — stands a druidic ring of huge stores. Two are prostrate, and two missing — blasted, perhaps, and carted away in fragments to contribute to some neighbouring building. It is, however, on the whole, an imposing and very perfect monument of this rude and mysterious architecture. Within and about this silent and venerable circle — whose origin, when the first stone of that ruinous castle was laid, was a secret as irrecoverably lost as it now is — grow a few hawthorn and elder trees. I suppose it figures in books of topography and antiquarian works. These objects, partially screened by the irregular wood I have described, make the scene picturesque and interesting.
No place is more solitary than this. In Sydney Smith’s phrase, “You must here send twelve miles, and over the fells too, for a lemon.” Golden Friars is the metropolis of this stem and somewhat savage region, and, thus placed within the circle of dependency, I may treat this relation as a chronicle of Golden Friars.
It was here, in moonlight, on that stormy night, not yet a fortnight since, that William had first come within the circle of a strange enchantment — when, like a spirit in the solitude, that beautiful girl stood before him. By the same path, as nearly as he could make it out, he now approached these tall time-furrowed stones.
Traversing a thick screen of hawthorn and wild birch, on a sudden this solemn circle stood full in view.
Not among these rude columns, but some twenty yards nearer to the spot where he then stood, on a slight elevation, full in the level light of the red sun, two figures were fixed in attitudes that betokened an engrossing dialogue.
William’s step was stayed. He gazed on them, breathless. One was Euphan Curraple — the other was a wonderful stranger.