Miss Middleton, if you look on at cricket, in comes a safe man for ten runs. He may get more, and he never gets less; and you should hear the old farmers talk of him in the booth. That's just my feeling."
Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy's feeling for Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak from his heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the dinner-table, and she landed him with regret, as at a holiday over. Before they parted, he offered to swim across the lake in his clothes, or dive to the bed for anything she pleased to throw, declaring solemnly that it should not he lost.
She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch beside the night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound, independent of the shifting black and grey of the flood underneath.
A step was at her heels.
"I see you have been petting my scapegrace."
"Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a lecture. He's a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying."
She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide.
She had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes, according to his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by fixing her mind on Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the recess of the cavern.
"I must have him away from here very soon," said Vernon. "Here he's quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can't guess at his ideas of the boy's future, but the chance of passing for the navy won't bear trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made for the navy, it's Crossjay."
The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.
"And Willoughby laughed?" he said. "There are sea-port crammers who stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack off the boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I would rather have had him under me up to the last three months, and have made sure of some roots to what is knocked into his head.
But he's ruined here. And I am going. So I shall not trouble him for many weeks longer. Dr. Middleton is well?"
"My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in the library."
Vernon came out with a chuckle.
"They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy.
"Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look."
"I know the look."
"Have you walked far to-day?"
"Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet 8 is too much for me at times, and I had to walk off my temper."
She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with a temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.
"All those hours were required?"
"Not quite so long."
"You are training for your Alpine tour."
"It's doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave the Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell."
"Willoughby knows that you leave him?"
"As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a party below. He sees a speck or two in the valley."
"He has not spoken of it."
"He would attribute it to changes . . ."
Vernon did not conclude the sentence.
She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck a cowslip.
"I saw daffodils lower down the park," she said. "One or two; they're nearly over."
"We are well off for wild flowers here," he answered.
"Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford."
"He will not want me."
"You are devoted to him."
"I can't pretend that."
"Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee ... If any occur, why should they drive you away?"
"Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a kind of nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or musketeer; if I'm worth anything, London's the field for me. But that's what I have to try."
"Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will say you are worth too much for that."
"Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them."
"They are wasted, he says."
"Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do not clearly understand."
"You have not an evil opinion of the world?" said Miss Middleton, sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to take a drop of poison.
He replied: "One might as well have an evil opinion of a river: here it's muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at rest. We have to treat it with common sense."
"Love it?"
"In the sense of serving it."
"Not think it beautiful?"
"Part of it is, part of it the reverse."
"Papa would quote the 'mulier formosa'".
"Except that 'fish' is too good for the black extremity. 'Woman' is excellent for the upper."