At Love's Cost. Charles Garvice
river. I met him in London and got permission from him. Do you know to whom this water belongs?"
"To Mr. Heron, of Herondale," she replied.
"I beg Mr. Heron's pardon," said Stafford. "Of course I'll put up my rod at once; and I will take the first opportunity of apologising for my crime; for poaching is a crime, isn't it?"
"Yes," she assented, laconically.
"Can you tell me where he lives—where his house is?"
She raised her whip again and pointed to an opening on the left of the valley, an opening lined on either side by a wild growth of magnificent firs.
"It is up there. You cannot see it from here," she said. As she spoke, she took her chin from her hand and sat upright, gathered up her reins, and, with another of the faint inclinations of her head, by way of adieu, rode on up the valley.
Stafford stood with his cap in his hand looking after her for a moment, in a brown study; and, still watching the back of the slight figure that sat the big horse with the grace of an Indian maiden, he began to take down his rod, and, having packed it in his case and fastened his basket, he followed her along the broken bank of the stream. Presently, when she had gone some little distance, he heard the dogs start barking again, the crack of her whip rang like a pistol-shot, and her bell-like voice echoed amongst the hills, joined with the troubled baaing of the sheep. Stafford stopped and watched her: there was evidently something wrong; for the dogs had become excited, the sheep were running wildly; but the girl's exquisite voice was as clear and calm as ever, and the big horse cantered over the broken ground, taking a big boulder now and again with lilting jump, as if he were going by his own volition and was well up in all the points of the game. After a time the dogs got the sheep into a heap, and the young girl rode round them; but something still seemed to be wrong, for she got down, and, leaving the horse quite free, made her way into the flock.
At that moment Stafford saw a sheep and a lamb break from the mob and make for the stream; the sheep jumped to a boulder with the agility of a goat, the lamb attempted to follow, but missed the boulder and fell into the stream. The water was wild here and the pools deep; and as the lamb was swept down toward Stafford he saw that it was struggling in an ineffectual way, and that it looked like a case of drowning.
Of course he went for it at once, and wading in made a grab at it; he got hold of it easily enough, but the lamb—a good sized one—struggled, and in the effort to retain his hold Stafford's feet slipped and he went headfirst into a deep pool. He was submerged for a second only, and when he came up he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had still got the lamb; and gripping the struggling thing tightly in his arms, he made for the opposite bank. And looking up, saw the girl standing waiting for him, her face alive, alight, dancing with delight and amusement! The laughter shone in her eyes like dazzling sunlight and quivered on the firm but delicate lips. But it was only for a moment; before Stafford had fully taken it in and had responded to it with one of his own short laughs, her face was grave and calm again. "Thank you." she said, with a gravity matching her face, and very much as one is thanked for passing the salt. "It would have drowned if you had not been there. It is lame and couldn't swim. I saw, from the top of the hill, that it was lame, and I was afraid something would happen to it."
As she spoke, she took the lamb, which was bleating like mad, laid it on the ground and holding it still, firmly but gently, with her knee, examined it with all the confidence and coolness of a vet.
"You'll make yourself most frightfully wet," said Stafford.
She glanced up at him with only faint surprise.
"You are a Londoner," she said, "or you would know that here, in these parts, we are so often more wet than dry that it makes no matter. Yes, I thought so; there was a thorn in its foot. May I trouble you to hold him a minute?"
Stafford held the lamb, which was tolerably quiet now; and she slowly took off her gauntlets, produced a little leather wallet from the saddle—the horse coming at her call as if he were a dog—took out a serviceable pair of tweezers, and, with professional neatness, extracted an extremely ugly thorn. Stafford stood and watched her; the collie and the fox-terrier upright on their haunches watching her also; the collie gave an approving bark as, with a pat she liberated the lamb, which went bleating on its way to join its distracted mother, the fox-terrier leapt round her with yaps of excited admiration; and there was admiration in Stafford's eyes also. The whole thing had been done with a calm, almost savage grace and self-possession, and she seemed to be absolutely unconscious of his presence, and only remembered it when the lamb and its mother had joined the flock.
"Thank you again," she said. "It was very kind of you. I am afraid you are wet."
As Stafford had gone completely under the water, this was a fact he could not deny, but he said with a laugh:
"Though I am a Londoner, in a sense, I don't mind a wetting—in a good cause; and I shall be dry, or as good as dry, before I get to the inn. You must have eyes like a hawk to have seen, from the top of the hill, that that lamb was lame," he added, rather with the desire to keep her than to express his admiration for her sight.
"I have good eyes," she said, indifferently. "One has to have. But I saw that the lamb was lame from the way it kept beside its mother and the fuss she made over it: and I knew, too, by Donald's bark, that something was wrong. I am sorry you are wet. Will you—" She glanced towards the opening in the hills, paused, and for the first time seemed slightly embarrassed; Stafford fancied that a faint touch of colour came to the clear pallor of the lovely young face. She did not finish the sentence, but with another "Thank you," and "I should not have liked to have lost the lamb," went towards her horse.
Stafford advanced to put her in the saddle; but, with a little shake of the head and a "Don't trouble," she sprang into her place and rode off.
Stafford looked after her, as he had done before; then he said, "Well,
I'm d——d!"
He felt for his pouch, filled his pipe and lit it, and in doing so his eyes fell upon the little wallet from which she had taken her tweezers. He picked it up and quickly shouted to her; but the dogs were barking with furious delight, she was cracking her whip, and she had ridden too far for her to hear him through the noise. It would have been sheer folly to have run after her; so, with a shrug of his shoulders, Stafford put the little wallet in his pocket, waded the stream and, after a moment or two of consideration, made for the inn by the nearest way, to wit, across the hill.
The girl rode along the strip of level moorland beside the river until she came to a narrow and not particularly well—kept road which led through the opening of the hills towards which she had motioned her whip. Once or twice a smile crossed her face, and once she laughed as she thought of the comical picture which the young man had made as he struggled to dry land with the wet lamb in his arms; and the smile and her laugh made her face seem strangely girlish, because it was usually so calm, so gravely self-reliant. Some girls would have been quick to detect the romantic side of the incident, and would have dwelt with a certain sense of satisfaction upon the fact that the young man was tall and handsome and distinguished looking. But this girl had scarcely noticed it; at any rate, it had not affected her in any way. She had too much to do; there was too much upon her well-formed and graceful shoulders to permit her to indulge in romance: Diana herself was not more free from sentiment than this young girl who rode her horse just like a Mexican, who was vet enough to perform a surgical operation on a lamb, and who knew how many bushels of wheat should run to an acre, and the best dressing for permanent pastures. It did occur to her that she might, at any rate after he had rescued the lamb, have given him permission to go on fishing; but she was not very sorry for having failed to do so, for after all, he had been poaching, and, as she had said, poaching was in her eyes a crime.
She went down the road at a swift trot, and presently it was blocked by a pair of wrought-iron gates, so exquisite in their antique conscientiousness that many a mushroom peer would have given almost their weight in gold to place them at the beginning of his newly made park; but no one came to open them, they were closed by a heavily padlocked chain, and the lodge beside them was empty and dilapidated; and the girl rode beside the