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Little work, either in field or house or fellside, was done that day; for, when all has been said about human selfishness, this truth abides, in the main, we do rejoice with those who rejoice, and we do weep with those who weep.
Everywhere there was the scent of bog-myrtle and wild-rose and sweetbrier, and the tinkling sound of becks babbling over glossy rocks; and in the glorious sunshine and luminous air, the mountains appeared to expand and elevate, and to throw out glowing peaks and summits into infinite space. Hand in hand the squire and his daughter climbed the fellside.
'Mary, do not look at me like that, as if you would read my heart. There are hearts that must not be looked into. Mine is like a charnel-house. Monotonous, yes; my life has been monotonous. No conventual gloom was ever deeper than the gloom of Fellside. My boy did nothing to lighten it for me, and his son followed in his father's footsteps. You and Lesbia have been my only consolation. Lesbia!
Hammond watched him for two or three minutes, but, as the old man's movements had an automatic regularity, the occupation soon palled, and he turned and walked toward Fellside. A few yards nearer the grounds he met James Steadman, walking briskly, and smoking his morning pipe. 'You are out early this morning, said Hammond, by way of civility. 'I am always pretty early, sir.
As he plodded onward he was suddenly hailed by a voice from behind. Turning about, he recognised one of his flock a small fellside farmer who, coming up with him, informed him that an old acquaintance was staying at the little inn close by who had been inquiring about him. 'Wha is 't? inquired the Minister.
Lady Maulevrier argued that as there was but one house among all the possessions of her race which she cared to inhabit, she had a right to make that house beautiful, and she had spared nothing upon the beautification of Fellside; and yet she had spent much less than would have been squandered by any pleasure-loving dowager, restlessly roving from Piccadilly to the Engadine, from Pontresina to Nice or Monaco, winding up with Easter in Paris, and then back to Piccadilly.
So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly. 'I had no idea you were such a tame cat, he said: 'if when we were salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I shouldn't have believed a word of it.
In front, across a stony pasture, the fellside ran up abruptly; its summit, edged with purple heath, cut against a belt of yellow sky. The long, green slope was broken by rocky scars and dotted by small Herdwick sheep that looked like scattered stones until they moved.
Smithson down the wind; but no worthier suitor had offered himself. It was Smithson or nothing. If she did not accept Smithson, she would go back to Fellside heavily burdened with debt, and an obvious failure. She would have run the gauntlet of a London season without definite result; and this, to a young woman so impressed with her own transcendent merits, was a most humiliating state of things.
'But, surely, my lady, Lady Mary will leave Fellside to go to a home of her own after her marriage. 'No, I tell you, Steadman, his mistress answered, with a touch of impatience; 'Lady Mary and her husband will make this house their home so long as I am here. It will not be long.
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