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Walter Herries died in April 1880.

For the last five years of his life he was unaware of all that was happening in the world and perfectly happy. His daughter Elizabeth nursed him with infinite kindness and care and he was an infant in her hands. The Fortress, during those years, was a very quiet place. Benjamin, Elizabeth’s son, managed the estate, which was not now large in extent—two farms and a cottage or two in Lower Ireby were the full extent of it.

He managed it, that is to say, when he was there. For much of that period he was away; he visited the East, was said to have left his young mark on Shanghai and to have invaded the sanctities of Indian temples, to have assisted pirates in the South Seas and to have been knifed within an inch of his life in Sarawak: it was whispered even that he had five Chinese wives, numberless Asiatic concubines. He returned, however, looking very much as he went—brown, stubby, solid, cheerful and without a conscience. ‘I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me’ was said, by all his friends and relations, to be his daily song.

He did, however, care for his mother, and after his third return in ‘79 swore that he would settle down and become the Cumberland squire. He loved Cumberland with passion and he had a good head on his shoulders, so that, for a while, he was successful. Everyone liked him; for a brief time it seemed that he might be the most popular man in Cumberland. But soon stories were everywhere. He could not, it appeared, see a woman without kissing her, could not tell the truth (was it possible that his acquaintances had no humour?), had no social sense at all, so that he invited farmers’ wives to meet Mrs. Osmaston and took a shepherd with him to supper at Uldale. He was also, it was said, an atheist and openly defended Bradlaugh. He visited London frequently and never returned thence without a scandal hanging to his tail. It was said that the lowest ground in that city was his ground, that he drank, gambled, spent a fortune over horses and cheeked his relations. How many of these stories came from Hill Street, from old Lady Herries and her son Ellis, who both hated him, no one could say, but certain it was that he was himself responsible for many of them because he never denied anything and never admitted anything, cherished no grudges, accused no one and told anyone who asked him that yes, it must be true if everyone said so; he had no morals, he supposed; he would like to have some; they must be useful things, but he simply didn’t know where they were to be found.

On the other hand everyone was forced to admit that, as he grew older, he did not look dissipated. His colour was of the healthiest, his body of the toughest, his eyes bright and glowing. When he bathed in the Lake or a mountain stream in the summer with young Osmaston or Timothy Bellairs or Robert Forster it could be seen that his limbs were brown and supple as though he lived for ever in the open air. He was never drunk now as many of his neighbours were; smutty stories never appealed to him in the least, and if girls were the worse for his friendliness nobody knew of it for a fact. It was said that he walked vast distances over the hills and alone. Nobody ever saw him out of spirits or out of temper. He was generous to a fault. With all this nobody really knew him and nobody trusted him. ‘He’s a rascal,’ said the Herries in London, in Bournemouth, in Harrogate, in Manchester, in Carlisle, ‘and he’ll come to no good.’ In fact they longed, many of them, that he should come to no good as quickly as possible.

His only friends among his relations were Aunt Jane at Uldale, Adam Paris and his daughter Vanessa, Barney Newmark, and Rose Ormerod at Harrogate, who always said she’d marry him to-morrow if he asked her.

His one saving grace, they all said, was that he loved his mother—loved her, they added, quite selfishly because he left her whenever he pleased and for months she had not a line from him. It was not hard, they added, for him to love his mother, for she was the sweetest and gentlest of ladies and gave him everything that he wanted.

It was also added that he possessed that strange and mysterious quality known as ‘charm’—which meant that when you were with him you could not help but like him and that, as soon as his back was turned, you wondered whether he had meant a word that he said.

He happened to be at home when his grandfather died. Walter was sleeping late on a spring afternoon, and his room was bathed in sunshine. Wrapped in a padded crimson dressing-gown, his long white hair falling over his face as he slept, he seemed a bundle of clothes topped by a wig. Then he looked up, blinked at the sunlight, called for his son Uhland, saw him come slowly tap-tapping with his stick across the floor to him, grinned joyfully at the long-expected sight, and died—or, if you prefer it, went from the room, leaning on his son’s arm, happy as he had not been for many a day.

That night, when the old man had been decently laid out on the four-poster in the room upstairs, Elizabeth and her son sat in the little parlour off the hall and talked. The evening was very warm and a window was open. The trees faintly rustled; there came the occasional late fluting of a bird; the scent of early spring flowers, dim and cool with the night, hung about the room.

Benjamin sat opposite his mother, his legs stretched wide, and thought how beautiful she still was, how dearly he loved her, how selfish and restless he was, how quiet and unselfish was she! Elizabeth’s beauty had always been shy, delicately coloured, fragile. She was a Herries only in her strength of will and a certain opposition to new ideas. She had never cared for ideas but always for persons—and then for very few persons. As she looked across at her son she thought: ‘He is all that I have left. I know that he loves me and I know that I have no power over him.’ Then she raised her hand ever so slightly as though she were touching someone who bent above her chair. John Herries, her husband, had been dead for more than twenty years to everyone but herself. It was not sentiment nor vague superstition nor longing that made her aware that he was always alive at her side. It was plain fact—and as it was her own concern, her own experience, it was of no importance that others should say that this was absurd, or weak, or against facts. She worried no one else about the matter, not even her son.

Benjamin loved her so dearly that evening, thought she looked so lovely in her full black dress, felt so intensely how lonely she would be, that he was ready to do anything for her—except sacrifice anything that threatened his liberty. Everything threatened his liberty.

‘So your long service is over, Mother. How wonderful you were to him! Everyone marvelled at it. I’m terribly proud of you.’

She looked at him, smiled (and with perhaps a touch of affectionate irony):

‘And now, Benjie, I suppose you’ll go away again?’

‘Oh no, Mother. Of course not! Leave you now!’

‘Well, perhaps not just now—but soon. Jane is coming to stay later. And Vanessa. Vanessa is coming to-morrow for a week.’

He looked up sharply.

‘Vanessa!’

‘Yes. You didn’t know that she was here this evening? It was quite by chance. She had ridden over to Uldale. She had stayed the night with the Grigsbys. She came up to ask how everyone was. I told her the news, and like the darling she is she said that she would come to-morrow. Adam is away at Kendal, so it suits very well.’

‘Oh, I’m glad!’ He drummed his heels into the carpet.

‘You know, of course, that she loves you?’

‘And I love her.’

Elizabeth smiled. ‘You say that very easily, Benjie.’

‘Well, you know how it is.’ He got up and stood in front of the fireplace. ‘We’ve loved one another all our lives. Whatever else happens she always comes first. There’s no one in the world to put beside her. But she’s too fine for me to marry her. You know she is. No one knows it better than you do.’

He came and sat at her feet, his hand resting on her knee.

‘How too fine?’

‘You know what everyone says of me; that I’m no good, that I spoil everything I touch—a rascal, a vagabond, all the rest. And it’s true, I suppose. I’m no man to marry anyone.’

She stroked his hair gently.

‘Is it true what they say?’

‘You know me better than anyone else, Mother—or rather you and Vanessa do. I don’t think about myself. I take myself as I am. But I know that I can’t stick—to anyone or anything. It grows worse as I’m older. I want to do a thing—and I do it!’

‘Is there any harm in that—if you don’t do bad things?’

‘But perhaps I do—things that you’d call bad. I can’t tell. I don’t think that I know the difference between right and wrong. Or rather my ideas of right and wrong are different from other people’s. I’m too interested in everything to stop and think. I think when it’s too late.’

He laughed and looked up into her face.

‘I’m a bad lot—but I love you and Vanessa with all my heart.’

‘Yes—but not enough to do things for us?’

‘Anything you like. Tell me to fetch you something from Pekin now and I’ll go and get it. But I can’t be tied, I can’t be told what to do, I can’t be preached at by anybody.’

‘Perhaps,’ Elizabeth said quietly, ‘if you married Vanessa that would steady you.’

He shook his head vehemently.

‘Vanessa is so good and so fine. She isn’t strait-laced. She’s wise and tolerant, but she’s high-minded. She believes in God, you know, Mother.’

‘And don’t you?’

‘You know that I don’t. Not as she does. Not as she does. I may be wrong. I dare say I am. But I must be honest. I don’t see things that way. I’m ignorant. I don’t know any more than the next fellow and I want the next fellow to believe as he sees, but I must be allowed to see for myself. I can’t see God anywhere. The things that people believe are fine for them but nonsense to me. To me as I am now. I’ve got all my life in front of me and everything to learn. God may be proved to me yet. I hope He will be.’

‘Proved!’ Elizabeth laid her cheek for a moment against his. ‘God can’t be proved, Benjie. He must be felt.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. That may come to me one day. Meanwhile—a heathen and a vagabond can’t marry Vanessa.’

She thought for a little and then said: ‘Have you talked of these things to Vanessa?’

‘No. I don’t want to hurt her.’

‘I don’t think you would hurt her. She’s very wise and very tolerant. She doesn’t want everyone’s experience to be hers. Her father isn’t religious in her way, but she understands him perfectly. So she may you.’

‘Oh, she understands me, as much as she knows of me. But I know things about myself that I’d be ashamed for her to know. I’m not ashamed of myself, Mother. I’d like to be different—settled, noble, unselfish. Or would I? I can’t tell. I’m not proud of myself, but I’m not ashamed of myself either. I’m simply what I am. All the same I don’t see why I should burden someone else with the care of me. That at least I can do. Save others from troubling about me.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But if someone loves you they want to trouble. They can’t help but trouble.’

He flung his arms around her and kissed her.

‘Funny I should be your son. The luck’s all with me.’

Next day Vanessa came. She was now nearly twenty-one years of age. Her beauty had a quality of surprise in it. She was tall and slender. Her face was young for her age, much younger than her carriage, which was mature and controlled. She moved with such grace that you thought, as you watched her, that she was fully assured. Then when you saw her eyes and mouth, her perpetual gaiety, the sudden change of mood, the constant excitement, her stirred animation, you felt that life had not yet touched her. She was like her father in sweetness of expression but unlike him in her alertness, so that she seemed to miss nothing that went on around her. She was immensely kind, but could be sharp and irritated by slowness and stupidity and most of all by any pomposity or show of self-conceit. That is, except in the case of those whom she loved, when she simply could not criticise. For example, she loved Timothy Bellairs at Uldale and he was a trifle pompous.

Her hair was very dark but her colouring rather pale, unless she were excited by something. She blushed very easily, which exasperated her. When she moved she was like a queen, but often when she talked or joined with others in a game or a sport she was childish and impetuous. She was intensely loyal, obstinate, forgiving, so warm-hearted that her father often feared for her, but of late she had been learning many things about human nature. She was no fool where people were concerned.

Her mother had died in the autumn of ‘77 and since then she had lived with her father and Will on Cat Bells. They had been always devoted friends, she and her father, but now, after losing both his mother and his wife, Adam seemed to turn to Vanessa with an urgency that had something almost desperate about it. He remained always humorous, kindly, a little cynical, half in his fairy stories (he tried his hand at a number of things—books for boys, biographies of Nelson and Walter Raleigh, even two novels, but they were all fairy stories), half in the wild, loose, stormy Cumberland life that was in his blood and bones. Everyone liked him, nobody knew him. Many people laughed at him in an easy generous fashion. Vanessa alone understood him. She understood him because she had (although as yet she did not realise it) very much of her grandmother’s character. Adam, of course, knew that. He saw his mother in his daughter again and again: her kindness, generosity, sudden flashes of temper and irritation and a constant exasperation at belonging to the Herries family.

‘We don’t belong, my dear,’ he said one day.

‘We belong enough,’ she answered in a flash of prophetic perception, ‘to have to fight them for the rest of our lives.’

Another thing. He knew that Vanessa loved Benjamin. It made Adam unhappy whenever he thought of it. He was himself fond of Benjie, but oh! he did not want him to marry Vanessa! Margaret’s last words had been: ‘Adam, you mustn’t let Vanessa marry Benjamin,’ and he had answered: ‘She must be free.’

But oh no! oh no! he did not want her to marry Benjamin! They never discussed it. That was their one silence.

Walter was buried in Ireby churchyard and, ironically, not far from the grave of Jennifer Herries, into which he once so long ago had terrified her. At the funeral, besides Elizabeth, Benjie and Vanessa, there were Adam, Veronica and her husband, Timothy and his wife, and dear Aunt Jane. Also a few neighbours.

It was a cold windy day, one of those days when you realise how true it is that Cumberland is composed only of cloud and stone: lovely iridescent stone with green and rosy shadows but rising in pillars of smoke to meet the cloud, and the cloud coming down to settle like blocks and boulders of stone on the soil until, with the wind in your ears, you do not know which is stone and which is cloud. The little church tugged at the wind like a cloud striving to be free, and the clouds rolled in the sky as though some giant hurled rocks at his enemy.

They all stood, blown about, in the little churchyard, and poor old Walter, a capital example of the waste of energy that hatred involves, was dropped into the ground.

That same evening Vanessa and Elizabeth had a talk. Elizabeth had done all she could with the house. Her taste had never been aesthetic and she had dressed the cold bare bones of the place with heavy, very heavy, material. The big bleak rooms she had filled with large sofas, heavy carpets, big chairs, all in the manner of their period, which, if it was not a very beautiful manner, was comfortable.

She had crowds of things partly because everyone she knew did the same, partly because she hoped thus to escape the stoniness, the melancholy, the ghostliness of the place. She could not escape it. The rooms that were empty and shut up—the rooms in the two towers for instance—were heavy with ghosts. Not only she knew it. Everyone in the countryside knew it. Voices and steps were heard. Pale faces looked from behind windows, dogs barked and parrots screeched. The Fortress, in fact, was not to surrender to a confusion of cornucopias, steel and brass fire-irons, japanned coal-boxes, tables covered with bead-work, satin walnut chairs, and wax flowers under glass shades. Nevertheless in the few rooms that she herself inhabited her presence warmed and comforted. There were fires, Cumberland servants who adored her, flowers and books.

But Vanessa, in spite of the flowers, shivered. She had her father’s taste, her grandmother’s passion for order and arrangement. How, thought Vanessa, can Elizabeth, who is so beautiful, endure this hideous place? She did not realise that Elizabeth could endure anywhere so long as John, her husband, was with her.

Benjamin had gone that evening to see a farmer in Braithwaite. He would not be back until the following afternoon, so the two women had the house to themselves. They sat close together over a roaring fire and tried not to listen to the wind, which found the Fortress the happiest hunting-ground it knew. Although Elizabeth was sixty-five and Vanessa only twenty-one they understood one another very well. They believed very much in the same things and they both loved the same man.

That evening, in fact, was a crisis for Vanessa, and in the course of it she set her feet resolutely along the path that was to lead her so very far.

‘What are you going to do, Elizabeth, now?’ Vanessa asked.

‘Do, my dear? Why, go on as before.’

‘Won’t this house be very lonely for you?’

‘I am used to it, you know. I’m an old woman now and like a quiet life.’

‘Benjamin will be with you. That’s one good thing.’

‘Oh no, he won’t!’ Elizabeth smiled. ‘He’ll come and go as he’s always done.’

‘Oh, but he must,’ Vanessa answered vigorously. ‘He can’t leave you all alone here. He has plenty to do, loves the country. He has wandered enough.’

‘You know that he has not,’ Elizabeth answered. ‘He will never have wandered enough. He might settle down if you married him. Otherwise, never.’

She had spoken quietly but, as both women knew, it was a challenge of the deepest import.

There was a long silence, then Vanessa said slowly:

‘Benjie has not asked me to marry him.’

‘No. That is because he is afraid—afraid of himself. He loves you more than anyone in the world and does not want to make you unhappy.’

‘Yes,’ Vanessa said at last. ‘He might make me unhappy, but I would not mind, I think.’ After a pause she went on: ‘You see, Elizabeth, I have Benjie in my blood. I have always had. I’m quite shameless about it—to myself, I mean. What is the use of being otherwise? I would rather be miserable with Benjie than happy with anyone else. And perhaps I should not be miserable. I understand him very well.’

She waited, but Elizabeth said nothing.

‘We are very alike in some ways. I want my liberty quite as much as he does his. My great-grandmother was a gipsy, my great-grandfather a vagabond, my father illegitimate. And Benjie——’ She broke off.

‘Thinks he is a vagabond too,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘because of his father. You needn’t fear, Vanessa darling, to talk about it. Here we are in the house that is filled with it. Sometimes I wake in my bed and hear the tap of Uhland’s stick on the floor. I was impetuous, too, once, my dear. I ran away and married John. I had courage for anything in those days; but I know now that every impetuous step, every blow in anger, can mean tragedy for the next generation. There is no end to the consequences. They are never done.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t what we do,’ said Vanessa, ‘but something in ourselves. A strain that won’t let us alone. You know, Elizabeth, that when I go over and stay with Veronica there’s so much Herries stolidness and convention that I feel, I’m sure, just as Judith did when she ran away to Paris. That’s where I understand Benjie. And sometimes when I’m with Timothy, although I’m very fond of him, I could whip him. I could really. He won’t see things and is proud of not seeing them. He believes in Gladstone but has never heard of Rossetti.’

‘Rossetti, dear?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘Yes—well, never mind. He writes poetry and paints.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard the name——’

‘I expect you have. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that I would understand if Benjie wanted to go away by himself. I think it’s silly of married people always to be together.’

‘And then there’s religion,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Benjie declares that he doesn’t believe in God, foolish boy.’

‘Many people say they don’t believe in God,’ Vanessa answered, speaking as though she were sixty and Elizabeth twenty. ‘I don’t think father does, not as I do. But if you love someone those things settle themselves. I could never be as Timothy and Violet are, keeping the children in awe of them, never allowing them an idea of their own. Why, they have to come to the dining-room and bow, poor little things, after every meal! And Tim’s only three, but I know he’s going to be an artist. He’s always drawing things. And when I spoke of it to his father the other day he was as shocked as if I’d said Tim was going to be an actor.’

‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that wouldn’t be a nice thing for little Tim to grow up into.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Vanessa. ‘There are the Bancrofts anyway. They have luncheon with the Prince of Wales.’

‘Come here, dear, and give me a kiss,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’d rather have you for a daughter than anyone in the world.’

Then came the last day of April, the day before Vanessa returned to Cat Bells. After dinner that night there was a large full moon. The air was warm and the moonlight filled all the garden with silver dust so that one seemed to walk on white powdery surf, now rising on a wave of quicksilver, then passing into an ebb of luminous grey. The hills were thin like silver tissue. Benjie, governed as ever by his mood, by the food that he had eaten, the wine that he had drunk, thinking Vanessa perfect in her dark dress that below the narrow waist broke out into bows and frills and trimmings, swearing that no neck and arms in all the world were so lovely as hers, seemed to see her as though this were for the first time, a new Vanessa to whom he had but just been introduced, so that under his breath he must murmur: ‘This is the loveliest in all the world. All my life I have been waiting for this.’

At first she would not go out with him, as though something warned her. She stood by the fire, laughing, talking about anything, nothing. She had had a letter from Rose Ormerod, who was having a gay time in London.

‘No, but you must listen to this, Benjie.’

‘I don’t want to listen. I don’t like her. I can’t think why she is your friend.’

‘But she likes you! In this letter she says: “If you see Benjie give him my love, my love, mind.” And she means it.’

‘Oh, she gives everyone her love—far too many people.’

‘She has been having a beautiful visit. Lady Herries gave a dinner-party. Very sticky, she says. And she went to the Haymarket Theatre and saw Money. A silly old play, she says, but Marion Terry was lovely as Clara Douglas, and Mr. Bancroft was Sir Frederick, and Mrs. Bancroft Lady Franklyn, and——’

‘What do I care who they were? This is the last night of April. To-morrow is the first of May. It is as warm as summer—silly to have a fire—and the moon is the largest——’

‘Oh yes, and she went to Mr. Alma-Tadema’s studio to see the pictures he’s sending to the Academy, and one is called “Fredegonda,” and it shows an angry Queen looking out of window at her husband——’

‘Please, Vanessa.’

She looked at him and saw that he was unhappy. She nodded.

‘All right. I’ll come out.’

She went upstairs to fetch a shawl. Benjie, while he waited, wondered what he was going to do. This was the moment that for years he had determined to avoid. He must not marry Vanessa. He must not marry anyone. At the thought of marriage something within him warned him. But Vanessa—Vanessa ... He shivered. Outside in the garden it was warmer than in the firelit room. That house was always cold, do what you would with it. Vanessa—Vanessa ... Why had he been such a fool as to stay? He had an impulse to go round to the stable, fetch his horse and ride off. Ride off anywhere—not seeing her again until she was safely married to someone else. But would that end it? All his life, however far away he had been, he had been tied to her, tied by her goodness, her beauty, her love for himself—and by all that was best in him. His best? A very poor thing. He had never thought so humbly of himself as at that moment when she came towards him, saying: ‘I’m ready. How lovely the moonlight is!’

They walked into the garden arm in arm. Originally Walter Herries had planned a series of garden-walks and a succession of little waterfalls, dropping stage after stage into a lily-covered pond. Now there were the sad ruins of these things, tangled shrubberies, little winding and melancholy paths, the doubtful splash of water and a weedy pool. Over the ruins the moon rode throwing its silver in a conceited largesse, penetrating the uttermost tangle of the trees.

‘I have just finished a very amusing book,’ said Vanessa, who felt as though the moon were scornfully wishing her a disastrous destiny, like the old witches her great-grandfather had known.

‘What is it called?’ asked Benjamin, wondering for how long he could resist to kiss Vanessa.

‘Travels with a Donkey.’

‘What a silly name!’ The muscle of his arm suddenly jumped at the touch of Vanessa’s hand. ‘Who wrote it?’

‘His name is Stevenson. I have never heard of him before, have you?’

‘No. Never.’

‘He writes well.’ Vanessa almost whispered as they stepped into a pool of moonlight. ‘Very precious, as though he’d licked every word on his tongue first before he stuck it down. Oh, look at the moon insulting Blencathra. There! Stand here! You can just see it between the trees.’

Benjie took her in his arms and kissed her with a ferocity that Ouida—a novel by whom Vanessa had recently been enjoying—describes somewhere ‘as the lovely tiger’s grandeur and the abandoned wildness of the jungle.’ Benjie had never kissed Vanessa before save almost as a brother. This was the first time in her life that Vanessa had ever been passionately kissed. She found it entrancing. They stayed for a long while without moving. The shawl fell from Vanessa’s shoulders, but she felt no cold. The pressure of Benjie’s strong hand on her shoulder was surely the thing that since the day of her birth she had longed for. Her hand touched Benjie’s hair as though he were her child. He kissed her eyes, which was another thing that no one had ever done to her before. They separated. He bent down and picked up her shawl.

‘This is something,’ he said breathlessly, ‘that I have been longing to do for years. And now we’ll talk if you don’t mind.’

They walked hand in hand.

‘I am going away to-morrow morning and will not see you again until someone has married you.’

‘I can wait,’ she answered confidently. ‘I will marry you any time.’

‘You are not like the modern maiden, are you, Vanessa? If their young man proposes to them they faint with astonishment although they have planned nothing else all their lives.’

‘No. Why should I be astonished? I always knew that we would be married one day.’

‘We are not going to be married,’ Benjie answered, taking his hand from hers and walking by himself. ‘I ought not to have kissed you. After to-night we shall not be alone together again until you are safe. I love you as truly as any man ever loved anyone, and that is why we are not going to be married.’

Vanessa laughed and took his hand again.

‘I am not a child, Benjie. I know that you are afraid of marriage—and perhaps you would be right if it were anyone else, but we are different. We know one another so well. I shall never marry anyone else.’

‘Now listen.’ He put his arm around her and drew her close to him. ‘You must not try to shake me, Vanessa. Really you must not. You say you know me, but it isn’t true. You don’t know me. Everyone is right about me. I’m no good by any standards but my own. I should make you terribly unhappy, and that I won’t do. No, I will not. I will not. Other women—well, that’s their affair. But you—you’ve got to have a wonderful life, be a Queen, have everyone worship you, adore you, have splendid children, a husband whom everyone looks up to ...’

She interrupted him, laughing.

‘But I don’t want that kind of husband! I don’t want to be a Queen! I don’t want to be admired. I want to be free quite as much as you do. You talk as though it were my ambition to be head of the Herries family, live in Hill Street and give parties like old Lady Herries. Of course I enjoy parties and it will be fun to go to London one day, but without you I don’t want anything!’

‘Oh Lord! How can I get you to understand? Don’t you see, Vanessa, that I’m no good? Really no good. One day I’m this, another day I’m that. If I see a pretty woman I want to kiss her. If I want to gamble I gamble. I’m no sooner in a place than I want to go somewhere else. My mother and yourself are the only two people I love. I have hurt my mother many times already, but you I won’t hurt——’

‘But, Benjie,’ she broke in, ‘I don’t think you could hurt me! I should understand whatever you did.’

‘You don’t know.’ He spoke angrily, breaking again away from her. ‘You don’t know anything about life, Vanessa. You don’t know the things I’ve done, the company I’ve kept. If I could say to you, “Vanessa, I’ve sown my wild oats and now I’m going to settle down, go to church on Sunday, read Tennyson with you in the evening——”’

‘But, Benjie, how absurd you are! I don’t want to read Tennyson, and if you don’t wish to go to church you needn’t! Father never goes to church. And as to the rest, what you have done is no business of mine. I’m sure I’m no saint myself. I know that Timothy and Violet think me often disgraceful and are afraid that I shall harm the children. Look at Grandmother! She wasn’t a saint although she was one of the finest women who ever lived and one of the bravest. And her father! He’s a kind of legend for lawlessness and roguery. I think we should suit one another very well. And as to the relations and all they say about you—what do they matter? A stuffy lot! That’s what they are!’

He shook his head. ‘That’s not the point, Vanessa. You may say what you like, but you are good and I’m not—that is by all that anyone means by good. You talk of Judith’s father. I expect he was a fine fellow. I often think of him and wish I’d known him. I like that man. I could have been his friend, I know. But the truth is he made everyone unhappy who trusted him. And so shall I. I can’t help it. It’s something inside me. And I won’t make you unhappy. I love you too much. It would be the one sin for me. I don’t care about the rest, but that I’ll avoid, so help me God!’

They had walked down to the weeded pool which lay now, like a foolish white face, dirtied and soiled, at their feet.

Vanessa spoke, but more gravely because she was feeling that her whole future life was to depend on the next ten minutes. What did she see? The man as he was? Perhaps.... But herself in relation to all that he might be? She did not yet know life enough for that.

‘Benjie, listen. I am not asking you against your will to marry me. I don’t want you to marry me. We have been friends all our lives and we can go on as we are. But if you want to marry somebody, then it had better be me. I’m sure you will never meet anyone again who knows you so well.’ She put her hand again in his. ‘Do you remember that time—Grandmother’s hundredth birthday—the day she died?’

‘Yes, of course I remember.’

‘We went for a walk, and I told you that I would never marry anyone but you and that I would wait as long as you liked. I was only a child then. I’m a woman now. But it is the same. It hasn’t changed. I don’t see how it can. No one can ever be to either of us what we are to one another. As to risks, life’s made for them. I’m not afraid.’

She felt his hand tremble as it clutched hers.

‘Listen, Vanessa. You must listen. If I don’t make you understand now you never will. You say you are not afraid of life, but that is because you don’t know. How can you? You have been sheltered always. Your father worships you as he ought to. Everyone loves you. You have never been treated unkindly, never had to put up with slights, never made an enemy. You hear people say: “Oh, Benjamin Herries, he’s a bad lot, he’s a rascal!” But they are only words. You’ve never seen me do the things, say the things that they mean. I am at my best—a poor best but still my best—when I’m with you because I love you and I’m not a bad fellow if I’m in a good temper, not bored, able to get away when I want to. We’ve seen one another at long intervals. We’ve loved to be together and they have been grand times because we were free. But to live with me—that’s another thing. I’m no man’s good company for long. I’ve got old Rogue Herries’ devil in me, I think. Sometimes I fancy I’m the old Rogue himself come again. And if that’s nonsense—and I’m sure I don’t know what’s nonsense and what isn’t in this ridiculous world—at least I’m like him in that I’m my own worst enemy, can see what’s right to do and never do it, curse my best friend and all the rest. Oh, mind you, I’m not pitying myself or even condemning myself. I’m not bad as men go. I enjoy every minute of the day unless I’ve got the toothache or lose money at cards or some woman won’t look at me. And even those things are interesting. But I’m not the man for you. You’re as far above me as that moon is above this silly-faced pond and, do me justice, I’ve always known it.’

He had spoken swiftly, the words pouring out, his face serious, mature, almost grim, as though he were resolving that this once in his life at least the honest truth should come from him.

‘All that you have said, Benjie, I know,’ Vanessa answered. ‘I may be a fool as you say, protected from harm and all the rest. But Father has never treated me as a child. We’ve been companions for years and talked freely about everything. When I stay with Veronica and Robert Forster’s drunk, as he is sometimes, I can see some of the things marriage can be. You may be nasty when you’re drunk, but not half as nasty as Robert is. Of course I know that marriage isn’t all fun. It isn’t for anybody. Only I think that you and I would be often happy together if we were married because we know one another so well. We’d be unhappy too, but I don’t always want to be happy. That would be dull. When we fought we’d know that we still loved one another. If you left me I’d know that you would come back.’

‘No, I might not,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I might never come back. Loving you as much as I do now, I might still say: “No, I can’t stand this.” And I’d be off—and perhaps never return.’

‘Oh, Benjie, would you?’

They were standing now by the gate that led into the road. The road stretched in front of them, and beyond it the country fell to the valley like a sheet of shadowed snow.

‘Oh, would you?’ She was thinking. She turned, as though she had resolved a problem, and looked up at him, smiling. ‘Then I’d be a grass widow. They say that they have a glorious life.’

Both laughing, they walked out into the road and at once were encompassed by a field of dazzling stars above them, sparkling and dancing as though they knew that to-morrow was the first of May and the beginning of a new summer world.

‘You know, Vanessa,’ Benjie said, looking over to Skiddaw, ‘that I have an odd fancy. It isn’t really mine. Some old shepherd told me some tale once. There’s Skiddaw Forest where—where my father died. Of course it’s often in my thoughts. When you stand below Skiddaw House and look over to Skiddaw you can see sometimes, just before the hill rises, a dark patch that looks like the opening of a cave. It is only a trick of light. There’s no cave there, but when I was a boy I often walked there and I used to fancy that it was the opening to a great subterranean hall, a gigantic place, you know, that ran right under the mountain. I told myself tales about it. I fancied that all the men who had loved this place returned there, had great feasts there, jolly splendid affairs, with singing and drinking, everything that was fine. All of them grand comrades, whoever they were, farmers and shepherds, huntsmen, squires and parsons—any man to whom this piece of country is the best in the world. Perhaps on a night like this there they all are singing and laughing, happy as grigs—old Rogue Herries and my grandfather, my father and my uncle, John Peel and Wordsworth and Southey, little Hartley, “auld Will” Ritson of Wasdale, James Jackson of Whitehaven, Ewan Clark, John Rooke, thousands on thousands more—I used to fancy on a still day that I could hear them laughing and singing. A great hall, you know, Vanessa, where they could wrestle and run, ride their horses, shout their songs, tell their stories.... That’s where I’d like to be, Vanessa. I could do without women there. I wouldn’t want to roam the world. I’d need no other company——’ He broke off. ‘Yes, I’d want you, I think. Wherever I was, whatever I’d be doing.’

They turned up the road and stopped at a little water-trough where from a rudely carved dolphin’s head water trickled into a small basin. The thin drip of the water was the only sound.

‘Why don’t you say,’ he murmured, ‘“Benjie, you’re a bad lot. We’ll meet no more”? It would be better for you.’

‘I can’t say that,’ she answered, leaning close to him, ‘because I love you.’

The pause that followed marked both their lives. It had a sanctity, an intimacy that went beyond all their experience. They kissed again, but quietly now, gently, meeting in complete oneness.

At last he said:

‘Be kind to me, Vanessa. I’ve tried to do the best. Maybe I’ll change. Mother said that loving you might do it for me. Give me a chance.’

He waited, then went on.

‘My darling—let us be engaged, here and now, for two years. This is the last day of April 1880. In April 1882 I’ll come to you and ask you if you are still of the same mind. If you are—if I can trust myself—we’ll be married. If, before then, you think otherwise you shall tell me. And in the two years we will tell nobody, not a word to a soul. I shall be twenty-seven then, and if I’m no good at that age I shall never be any good. Give me that chance.’

Vanessa looked in front of her, then at last turned on him, smiling.

‘Yes, if that’s what you’d like, Benjie.’

‘Not a word to anyone.’

She waited again.

‘I have always told Father everything——’

‘No. Even your father. I’m on probation. If he knew he might not understand.’

‘Very well. Here’s my hand on it.’

They held hands, looking one another in the eyes.

‘It’s a poor bargain for you,’ he said. ‘Mind, if ever you want to be free of me you have only to tell me——’

‘I shall never want to be free,’ Vanessa said proudly.

‘All the men under Skiddaw heard you say that,’ he answered. ‘And they think me a poor lot for asking you.’

‘Ah, they don’t know you as I do,’ she answered.

As they walked up to the house she held her head high, feeling the proudest woman in England.

And Benjie, for once in his life, was humble.