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The Trust invites you to come, and you are at peace, and know that no man will stop you if you walk over its preserves. Moreover, it holds a delectable bit of country on Lake Derwentwater, known as the Brandlehow Park Estate. It extends for about a mile along the shore of the lake and reaches up the fell-side to the unenclosed common on Catbels. It is a lovely bit of woodland scenery.
So the sad days wore on, and the fell-side air had not yet brisked up Emmanuel's adopted daughter as his sister prophesied. Indeed, she seemed slighter and paler than ever, and if possible more submissive to her lot and more taciturn.
She, with the sun of the South in her veins, her dreams of pomegranates and orange-groves, of music and color and bright blue skies, of women as beautiful as mamma, of that one man not of the South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain suddenly translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the most desolate corner of Cumberland where for lush hedges were cold, grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she could not gather, and heather which had no perfume to a house set so far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in person, rough of mood if true of soul, or creatures even worse than herself; she, with that tenacious loyalty, that pride and concentrated passion, that dry reserve and want of general benevolence characteristic of her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth strangers whose ways she must adopt, and who were physically loathsome to her; dead to the only man she loved, his love for her killed by her own hand, herself by her own confession accursed; and to bear it all in silent patience, was it not heroic?
Laura shut her eyes an instant, imagining the goings to and fro the rising on winter dawns to feed the stock; the shepherd on the fell-side, wrestling with sleet and tempest; the returns at night to food and fire. Her young fancy, already played on by the breath of the mountains, warmed to the farmhouse and its primitive life.
All the week Anthony was to be busy at the fell-foot, wall-building against the coming of the winter storms: the work was heavy, for he was single-handed, and the stone had to be fetched from off the fell-side. Two or three times a day he led his rickety, lumbering cart along the lane that passed the vicarage gate, pausing on each journey to glance furtively up at the windows.
Come your ways with me and I'll set you out by the back door. You can come in again the same road if you've a mind." On which she bustled up, and Alick, escorted by her, went through the house and on to the fell-side. It was, if possible, grander now than it had been in the earlier part of the day.
He at least had rubbed off some of the native fell-side mould by rolling about foreign parts, gathering experience if not moss, and becoming rich in knowledge if not in guineas; but Keziah, who had spent the last twenty years of her life in close attendance on a paralytic old mother, had stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very thick.
Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and gloomed at the wrath to come. Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each other and made momentary riot. But farm-work has to get itself done through fair or foul.
Silver-bright the woods and fell-side, on the west; while on the east the woods in shadow, lay sleeping, 'moon-charmed. The air was balmy; and one seemed to hear through it the steady soft beat of the summer life, rising through the leaves and grass and flowers.
Above the western fells they had just crossed, hung towers and domes of white cumulus, beneath which a pearly sunshine slipped through upon the broad fell-side, making of it one wide sunlit pleasance, dyed in the red and orange of the withered fern, and dotted with black holly and juniper.
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