Roger and Annette were heading towards the sea, and so you would have thought would be their companion the Rieben. But the Rieben was in no hurry. It left them continually to take the longest way, laying itself out in leisurely curves round low uplands, but always meeting them again a few miles farther on, growing more stately with every detour. Other streams swelled it, and presently wharves and townships stretched alongside of it, and ships came sailing by. It hardly seemed possible to Annette that it could be the same little river which one low arch could span at Riff.

At last they turned away from it altogether, and struck across the wide common of Gallowscore amid its stretches of yellowing bracken; and Roger showed her where, in past times, a gibbet used to hang, and told her that old Cowell the shepherd, the only man who still came to church in smock-frock and blue stockings, had walked all the way from Riff to Gallowscore, as a lad, to see three highwaymen hanging in chains on it.

The great oak had been blown down later, gibbet and all, and the gibbet had never been set up again.

A walking funeral was toiling across the bracken in the direction of the church on the edge of the common, and Roger drew up and waited bareheaded till it had pa.s.sed. And he told Annette of the old iniquitous Lowshire "right of heriot" which came into force when a tenant died, and how his uncle Mr. Manvers, the last lord of the manor, had let it lapse, and how d.i.c.k, the present owner, had never enforced it either.

"I couldn't have worked the estate if he had," said Roger simply. "Lady Louisa told d.i.c.k he ought to stick to it, and make me enforce it, but I said I should have to go if he did. The best horse out of his stable when a man died, and the best cow out of his field. When d.i.c.k understood what heriot meant he would not do it. He was always open-handed."

Annette looked at the little church tolling its bell, and at the three firs gathered round it.

"There is a place like this in _The Magnet_," she said. "That is why I seem to know it, though I've never seen it before. There ought to be a Vicarage just behind the firs, with a little garden enclosed from the bracken."

"There is," said Roger, and then added, with gross ingrat.i.tude to its author, "I never thought much of _The Magnet_. I like the bits about the places, and he says things about dogs that are just right, and--robins.

He's good on birds. But when it comes to people----!"

Annette did not answer. It was not necessary. Roger was under way.

"And yet," he added, with a tardy sense of justice, "Stirling's in some ways an understanding man. I never thought he'd have made allowance for old Betty Hesketh having the wood mania and breaking up his new fence, but he did. Such a fuss as Bartlet kicked up when he caught her at his wood-stack! Of course he caught her at it. Old folks can't help it.

They get wood mania when they're childish, if they've known the pinch of cold for too many years. And even if their sheds are full of wood--Betty has enough to last her lifetime--they'll go on picking and stealing. If they see it, they've got to have it. Only it isn't stealing. Mr.

Stirling understood that. He said he'd known old ladies the same about china. But the people in his books!" Roger shook his head.

"Didn't you like Jack and Hester in _The Magnet_! I got so fond of them."

"I don't remember much about them. I dare say I should have liked them if I had felt they were real, but I never did. It's always the same in novels. When I start reading them I know beforehand everybody will talk so uncommonly well--not like----"

"You and me," suggested Annette.

"Well, not like me, anyhow. And not like Janey and the kind of people I know--except perhaps Black. He can say a lot."

"I have felt that too," said Annette, "especially when the hero and heroine are talking. I think how splendidly they both do it, but I secretly feel all the time that if I had been in the heroine's place I never could have expressed myself so well, and behaved so exactly right, and understood everything so quickly. I know I should have been silent and stupid, and only seen what was the right thing to say several hours later, when I had gone home."

Roger looked obliquely at her with an approving eye. Here indeed was a kindred soul!

"In _The Magnet_," he said, with a sudden confiding impulse, "the men do propose so well. Now in real life they don't. Poor beggars, they'd like to, but they can't. Most difficult thing, but you'd never guess it from _The Magnet_. Just look at Jack!--wasn't that his name?--how he reels it all out! Shows how much he cares. Says a lot of really good things--not copy-book, I will say that for him. Puts it uncommonly well about not being good enough for her, just as Mr. Stirling would himself if he were proposing. That's what I felt when I read it. Jack never would have had the nerve to say all that, but of course a clever chap like Mr.

Stirling, sitting comfortably in his study, with lots of time and no woman to flurry him, could make it up."

Annette did not answer. Perhaps she did not want to flurry him.

"I could never _say_ anything like that," said Roger, flicking a fly off Merrylegs' back, "but I might feel it. I _do_ feel it, and more."

"That is the only thing that matters," said Annette, with a tremor in her voice.

"This is not the moment!" whispered Roger's bachelor instinct, in sudden panic at its imminent extinction. "I'd better wait till later in the afternoon," he a.s.sented cautiously to himself. "A dogcart's not the place."

They crossed the common, and drove through an ancient forest of oak and holly in which kings had hunted, and where the last wolf in England had been killed.

And Roger told her of the great flood in the year of Waterloo, when the sea burst over the breakwater between Haliwater and Kirby, and carried away the old Hundred bridge, and forced the fishes into the forest, where his grandfather had seen them weeks afterwards sticking in the bushes.

When they emerged once more into the open the homely landscape had changed. The blackberried hedges were gone, replaced by long lines of thin firs, marking the boundaries between the fields. Sea mews were wheeling and calling among the uncouth hummocked gorse, which crowded up on either side of the white poppy-edged road. There was salt in the air.

Roger pointed with his whip.

"The Rieben again," he said.

But could this mighty river with its mile-wide water be indeed the Rieben? Just beyond it, close beside it, divided only by a narrow thong of shingle, lay the sea.

And Roger told Annette how at Mendlesham Mill the Rieben had all but reached the sea, and then had turned aside and edged along, stubbornly, mile after mile, parallel with it, almost within a stone's throw of it.

"But it never seems all to fall in and have done with it," he said, pointing to where it melted away into the haze, still hugging the sea, but always with the thong of shingle stretched between.

The Rieben skirting the sea, within sound of it, frustrated by its tides, brackish with its salt, but still apart, always reminded Roger of Lady Louisa. She too had drawn very near, but could not reach the merciful sea of death. A narrow ridge of aching life, arid as the high shingle barrier, constrained her, brackish month by month, from her only refuge. But Roger could no more have expressed such an idea in words than he could have knitted the cable-topped shooting-stockings which Janey made him, and which he had on at this moment.

The carriage in front had stopped at a lonely homestead among the gorse.

On a low knoll at a little distance fronting the marsh stood an old stone cross.

Mrs. Stoddart and Mr. Stirling had already taken to their feet, and were climbing slowly through the gorse up the sandy path which led to the Holy Well. Roger and Annette left the dogcart and followed them.

Presently Mr. Stirling gave Mrs. Stoddart his hand.

Roger timidly offered his to Annette. She did not need it, but she took it. His shyness stood him in good stead. She had known bolder advances.

Hand in hand, with beating hearts, they went, and as they walked the thin veil which hides the enchanted land from lonely seekers was withdrawn. With awed eyes they saw "that new world which is the old"

unfold itself before them, and smiled gravely at each other. The little pink convolvulus creeping in the thin gra.s.s made way for them. The wild St. John's wort held towards them its tiny golden stars. The sea mews, flapping slowly past with their feet hanging, cried them good luck; and the thyme clinging close as moss to the ground, sent them delicate greeting, "like dawn in Paradise."

Annette forgot that a year ago she had for a few hours seen a mirage of this ecstasy before, and it had been but a mirage. She forgot that the day might not be far distant when this kindly man, this transfigured fellow-traveller, might leave her, when he who treated her now with reverence, delicate as the scent of the thyme, might not be willing to make her his wife, as that other man had not been willing.

But how could she do otherwise than forget? For when our eyes are opened, and the promised land lies at our feet, the most faithless of us fear no desertion, the most treacherous no treachery, the coldest no inconstancy, the most callous no wound; much less guileless souls like poor unwise Annette.

She had told Mrs. Stoddart that she would never trust anyone again, and then had trusted her implicitly. She had told herself that she would never love again, and she loved Roger.

A certain wisdom, not all of this world, could never be hers, as Mrs.

Stoddart had said, but neither could caution, or distrust, or half-heartedness, or self-regard. Those th.o.r.n.y barricades against the tender feet of love would never be hers either. Ah, fortunate Annette!

It seems, after all, as if some very simple, unsuspicious folk can do without wisdom, can well afford to leave it to us, who are neither simple nor trustful.

Still hand in hand, they reached the shoulder of the low headland, and sat down on the sun-warmed, gossamer-threaded gra.s.s.

The ground fell below their eyes to the long staked marsh-lands of the Rieben, steeped in a shimmer of haze.

Somewhere, as in some other world, sheep-bells tinkled, mingled with the faint clamour of sea-birds on the misty flats. The pale river gleamed ethereal as the gleaming gossamer on the gra.s.s, and beyond it a sea of pearl was merged in a sky of pearl. Was anything real and tangible?

Might not the whole vanish at a touch?

They could not speak to each other.

At last she whispered--

"The sea is still there."

She had thought as there was a new heaven and a new earth that there would be no more sea. But there it was. G.o.d had evidently changed His mind.