CHAPTER XXIII.

ON THE FELL SIDE.

THE autumn this year at the Lakes was one of the finest that had been known for many seasons. The winds were still, the rain forgot to fall; but the ground was not parched nor vegetation withered, for each evening the sunset mists crept up from lake and river to hang in soft clouds and wreaths about the hill sides and along the low-lying meadows, returning to the earth the sweet freshness which they had taken from it. Through the day the skies were cloudless, opalescent, brilliant, like the skies of a new creation; the granite rocks and rugged mountain tops stood out in the clear air bold in outline and with purple shadows firm and deep; the fells were full of colour and the woods rich in autumnal tints; altogether it was an ideal time for the Lake-land, and the country was at its best.

Though the days were short, yet they were so beautiful while they lasted, and allowed of so much to be done, that Edgar and Adelaide scarcely regretted the rapid closing in of the evenings. Besides, to tell the truth, neither was an enthusiast for this kind of majestic scenery, though both professed to be enchanted as the right thing on a wedding tour. It was the little farce each played to each, and both failed to see through. The inns were luxurious, and not being overcrowded at this "back end of the season," the two handsome young people, with their shining luggage, gorgeous attire, manners of command, and well-filled purses, were as minor royalties to the landlord and waiters; and the "best of everything" was brought like tribute laid at their feet.

They went everywhere, if the way was not too rough, the excursion not too long, and Adelaide would not be too much fatigued; saw everything in a leisurely grandiose way, not giving themselves much trouble, but" doing the Lakes" with that conscientious indifference which makes the doing the main fact, and lets the enjoyment take care of itself. It was very beautiful, very quiet, very fascinating altogether; nevertheless they would not be sorry, they thought, when the tour was over, and they were settled at North Aston to begin life in earnest on their own plan and in their own domain.

They had worked gradually through their self-appointed task, beginning with Coniston as their first centre and ending with dear Derwentwater as their last; and now they were returning home. It was time, for quite suddenly the weather had parted with its gorgeous brilliancy, and had become dim and broken. The chill frosts of early October had killed the colours which a fortnight ago had been so intense; while the rising wind blew down showers of fluttering leaves, and the trees, which only so short a while ago glowed with crimson and shone with gold, were now mere naked boles, rayed with branches bleak and bare. The glory had disappeared, and it was indeed time for going home.

They were returning by way of Carlisle and the beautiful banks of the Eden. Edgar had a fancy too to see something of the country lying to the north of the mountains; that tract, rough and wild, at the back of Skiddaw, which no one ever sees. Besides, the old couplet

Caldbeck and Caldbeck fells

Is worth all England else

as halting in grammar as it is inexact in statement, had always struck his imagination. What if that rough tract was a mineral El Dorado, and there was more than a chance of a fortune to be made by the pick and the borer? A friend of his, who had visited the country, had once said so; and Mr. Gryce had been heard to speak enthusiastically of the Roughton Gill Mines-also of some others wherein he had dropped much of that inherited gear which sister Keziah kept in stockings and between the flock and the cover of her mattress. Edgar, a gambler in his own way like most men, had a fancy for abstract mining; and thought he should like to see this wild district with its hypothetical fortune lying a hundred feet below the surface. So they set off on Saturday, intending to drive from Derwentwater by Bassanthwaite and Ulldale to Caldbeck, where they would "rough it" for the night, and the next day, Sunday, take a short survey of the country, and then move a stage onwards to pretty leafy restful Sebergham. It would be a pleasant ending to the tour, if only the weather would keep fair.

Things began fairly well for the travellers. They set out perhaps a little late, considering the time of year; but Adelaide was not an early riser, and they would be housed before the dead dark came on them. They got through the beautiful part of the drive, under Skiddaw and through Bassanthwaite, creditably enough; when Edgar, who had a good organ of locality and believed in himself even more than he was justified in doing, saw, as he walked up the Hawse, that a short cut would take him over one of the outlying fells, whence he could strike the main road and meet the carriage after a practicable little détour which would be only a pleasant walk. He waited for the carriage to join him, and told Adelaide that he meant to cut across the fell-it was a mere trifle, not over two miles at the outside-and that he should meet her after she had gone about five miles round.

"I will come with you," said Adelaide. more than two miles?"

"You are sure it is not

"I should say it is not quite that," he answered; "but," anxiously, "you had better not come, dear. The way may be rough, and you are not a very heroic walker!"

I am good for two miles," she said; "and really it is rather cold in the carriage. Besides, it is so dull sitting here alone! No, I will come with you, Edgar."

"As you like, of course," he said reluctantly; "but I do not vouch for anything. And I do not want to see you tired."

"I shall not be tired by a two miles' walk!" she answered with her calm decision; and though he had proposed this diversion mainly to be a short time alone-the honeymoon closeness of companionship beginning to pall on him-for the sake of that politeness which he was too well bred to let drop even with his nearest relations, he was obliged to consent to her proposal to go with him, and even to feign the pleasure he did not feel.

It was now about one o'clock; and after they had left the carriage and were ascending the fell, the day, which had not been too promising from the beginning, broke suddenly, as days sometimes do in the North. The sky, which had been always sunless and overcast, became thick and heavy with clouds; the wind dropped, but the air was damp and cold; and a mist crept up from the earth which gathered and thickened till soon the whole distance, and now things near at hand, were blotted out as if a shroud was being woven round the face and form of prostrate

nature.

Colder grew the still and windless air; denser the rolling clouds of mist so dense that it was as penetrating as rain; all landmarks were destroyed, and path there was none: and there, alone on a rough fell-side, without a guide, a compass, or the faintest knowledge of their direction, caught in a mist through which they could not see two feet before them, Edgar and Adelaide transacted the last chapter of their honeymoon book of travels. No shouting brought back a human echo; once they heard the far-off barking of a dog and the bleating of some frightened sheep; and once they fell into the midst of a herd of startled cattle, whereat Adelaide screamed, and was nearly knocked down by one of the young steers starting off at full speed, scared on his side by her cries; now they came upon a bog, where they sank in an instant far over their ankles; and now they stumbled and slipped on a steep bank of shingle, lying there like one of the waste places of creation.

They did not know with what treacherous swiftness these mists gather up from the mountain sides and roll along the moorlands, nor how utterly bewildering they are. Seen through them, no object has its proper value. A boulder is an unscaleable mountain wall, a sheep is as big as a cow, and a cow like an elephant; and you see the precipice only when it is yawning at your feet, and perhaps when it is too late to save the fatal step that plunges you into eternity. It was of no use to sit down now and to bewail because they had been caught in one of these treacherous uprisings, and swathed with nature in her shroud. They must struggle on in the hope to find a place of refuge somewhere; if only the poorest hut of a moorland hind, it would be welcome to them in their present straits; and they must do their best, go on, keep up both strength and courage, for the chance of finding such a shelter, if nothing more satisfactory.

Adelaide had not said much. She was frightened, and now began to be tired; but she did not cry-to be seen. Scarcely either could she reproach her husband with their misfortunes. It had been his proposal

certainly to walk across the fell, but her own will to accompany him; and one can hardly rate a man for the sudden uprising of a mountain mist. Nevertheless, if she was silent she was more angry than sorrowful; and thought the reproaches which she did not say.

As the hours passed her fatigue and fear increased, and her reticence and self-control slackened in proportion. She had held on bravely enough for about two hours; but now her courage gave way; and sitting down on a stone she declared that she could go no farther, that they were lost for ever, and that she should die here where they were; and why had Edgar been so foolish and so wicked as to walk across the fell when he knew neither the country nor the distance, and when he might have seen the mist coming up? Women in distress are never reasonable, and Adelaide was no better than her sex.

Edgar's methods of comfort went for very little. His wife was not enough in love with him personally to be content in that love or consoled by his caresses. And truly the situation was painful! There have been more deaths than one of those lost on the mountains and the moors, and why not they as well as others? Shoutings were in vain; there was nothing to be seen through this dense cloud enveloping everything, and no chance of being found by wandering hind or passing traveller. It was terrible! Wet to the skin, chilled to the marrow, lost in a thick white fog on a pathless fell-side moor, no wonder that poor Adelaide sat down and cried when her powers were exhausted, and

with them her endurance!

The day wore on and the desolate bride more than once wished aloud that Edgar had never left his precious Leam Dundas to come to her. The glories of her state, as mistress of the Hill, were fading fast out of her mind; and to die on a wretched Cumberland moor as Edgar Harrowby's wife was not the kind of apotheosis which she coveted. She had wanted to be bis wife for the solid goods that her wifehood would bring her, not for the silly transports of a lovesick girl mated to the man of her choice, and content with a desert if shared with him. That was all very well in story-books and poetry, but when you come to the concrete miseries of wet feet, thin boots, garments soaked through and through, rain, desolation, danger, distress, and hunger, poetry flies into space and only the concrete miseries remain. Adelaide's appreciation of romance was limited; and just now she would have preferred the Yellow Dwarf in a luxurious castle to Edgar Harrowby and this cold, bleak, misty fell-side wilderness of bog and shingle.

Bitter thoughts like these, crudely spoken, coldly heard, did not help to make their miserable situation more tolerable; but they stripped off the disguise which had been carved out by fitness and showed her own soul nakedly to herself-and to Edgar as well. It was like tearing away a beautiful veil from a hideous object to hear her bitter reproaches, her still more bitter regrets. It made Edgar feel as if all life had suddenly become a lie as if he had lived until now in a dream, and had just

awakened out of it; yet he recognised in himself a strange kind of indifference to the discovery, as if he had known all through his dream that he had not married Adelaide Birkett for love, nor yet believing in her love for him. He had dreamt that he had; but even in his dream he had not been persuaded.

Conventional fitness is a fine basis for a marriage, in its own way; but then the marriage must remain in the conventional groove. When you come to love and the elemental facts of human nature, to possible death on a bleak fell-side, and to circumstances which do not admit of posturising, then the conventional fitness is nowhere, and the gap where love ought to be, and is not, is the chief thing visible.

This miserable state of things lasted for hours that seemed an eternity, and then, as the evening came on, the mist lightened and gradually dispersed, so that Edgar could see where they were, and something of the surrounding country. They were on the top, or rather on the slope, of a fell. About two miles and a half below them lay a small cluster of houses; about half a mile off one solitary square stone house, pitched straight before them on the descent. There was not another human habitation to be seen, save one, a little shieling on the ascent opposite to where they stood. Here too was a road-as Edgar conjectured, the road which led from this little hamlet below to Caldbeck and the world beyond.

"Can you exert yourself so much as to get to this house below us?" Edgar asked, speaking to his wife with a certain distant, chilling courtesy that made her wince more than his anger would have done.

Now that she was saved and was not going to die on the fell-side, how sorry she was that she had let her true mind be seen! But men are foolish creatures in the hands of a clever woman; and she would, maybe, recover by tact all that she had lost by impatience.

She put her hand over her eyes, as if to clear them.

"Yes, with your arm," she answered with a deep sigh, suggestive of flinging off a weight and coming to herself. "I think I have been a little delirious!" she then said plaintively, and again cleared her eyes and again sighed deeply.

"It has been a trying time," said Edgar coldly, offering his hand : "but come, you had better not sit longer. Let us take advantage of this break, and make the best of our way to the house below."

He spoke quietly, but with the air of a man who does what he should out of self-respect, not love, and whose tenderness is not personal so much as official.

"How good you are!" said Adelaide prettily, as she laid both her hands in his, and with pain and difficulty rose to her feet.

He made no answer, but drew her hand on his arm and, always care fully tending her, always helping and protecting her, went in unbroker silence down the half-mile intervening between them and Windy Brow. And as Adelaide was really stiff and tired and uncomfortable, she left