The Law and the Lady | Page 6

later time I knew
for certain that his thoughts, wandering far away from his young wife,
were all turned inward on his own unhappy self.
For me the secret pleasure of filling my mind with him, while I felt him
by my side, was a luxury in itself.
I pictured in my thoughts our first meeting in the neighborhood of my
uncle's house.
Our famous north-country trout stream wound its flashing and foaming
way through a ravine in the rocky moorland. It was a windy, shadowy
evening. A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red in the west. A
solitary angler stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the
backwater lay still and deep under an overhanging bank. A girl (myself)
standing on the bank, invisible to the fisherman beneath, waited eagerly
to see the trout rise.
The moment came; the fish took the fly.
Sometimes on the little level strip of sand at the foot of the bank,
sometimes (when the stream turned again) in the shallower water
rushing over its rocky bed, the angler followed the captured trout, now
letting the line run out and now winding it in again, in the difficult and
delicate process of "playing" the fish. Along the bank I followed to
watch the contest of skill and cunning between the man and the trout. I

had lived long enough with my uncle Starkweather to catch some of his
enthusiasm for field sports, and to learn something, especially, of the
angler's art. Still following the stranger, with my eyes intently fixed on
every movement of his rod and line, and with not so much as a chance
fragment of my attention to spare for the rough path along which I was
walking, I stepped by chance on the loose overhanging earth at the edge
of the bank, and fell into the stream in an instant.
The distance was trifling, the water was shallow, the bed of the river
was (fortunately for me) of sand. Beyond the fright and the wetting I
had nothing to complain of. In a few moments I was out of the water
and up again, very much ashamed of myself, on the firm ground. Short
as the interval was, it proved long enough to favor the escape of the fish.
The angler had heard my first instinctive cry of alarm, had turned, and
had thrown aside his rod to help me. We confronted each other for the
first time, I on the bank and he in the shallow water below. Our eyes
encountered, and I verily believe our hearts encountered at the same
moment. This I know for certain, we forgot our breeding as lady and
gentleman: we looked at each other in barbarous silence.
I was the first to recover myself. What did I say to him?
I said something about my not being hurt, and then something more,
urging him to run back and try if he might not yet recover the fish.
He went back unwillingly. He returned to me--of course without the
fish. Knowing how bitterly disappointed my uncle would have been in
his place, I apologized very earnestly. In my eagerness to make
atonement, I even offered to show him a spot where he might try again,
lower down the stream.
He would not hear of it; he entreated me to go home and change my
wet dress. I cared nothing for the wetting, but I obeyed him without
knowing why.
He walked with me. My way back to the Vicarage was his way back to
the inn. He had come to our parts, he told me, for the quiet and
retirement as much as for the fishing. He had noticed me once or twice

from the window of his room at the inn. He asked if I were not the
vicar's daughter.
I set him right. I told him that the vicar had married my mother's sister,
and that the two had been father and mother to me since the death of
my parents. He asked if he might venture to call on Doctor
Starkweather the next day, mentioning the name of a friend of his, with
whom he believed the vicar to be acquainted. I invited him to visit us,
as if it had been my house; I was spell-bound under his eyes and under
his voice. I had fancied, honestly fancied, myself to have been in love
often and often before this time. Never in any other man's company had
I felt as I now felt in the presence of this man. Night seemed to fall
suddenly over the evening landscape when he left me. I leaned against
the Vic arage gate. I could not breathe, I could not think; my heart
fluttered as if it would fly out of