Chapter XX: How They Searched for White Heather

The first beauty of the moor is young bracken, gorse is the second, and the third and best is heather. It was out at last, the pink heather, making the slopes rosy; so Beatrice proposed an expedition. They would climb up the great wet mountain called Cawsand, and search for white heather.

Burrough was quite strong again. He could walk any distance. He was no longer an invalid; the nurse had gone, and the doctor’s visits were few and far between. But he still wore the bandage, not because it was necessary, but because he did not dare to remove it. He had looked into the glass and seen the extent of his disfigurement, and straightway the last hope had gone. What would Beatrice say, Beatrice who had fled in terror from the fisherman with the wooden leg? And yet he could not tell her. He must keep her as long as he could. He continued his deceit, telling her the bandage was still necessary, promising it should come off soon, assuring her that the injury was only slight. He declared that his eye was not yet strong enough to bear the light.

“It’s no use keeping your head wrapped up,” the surgeon had said. “You want to get the sun and air upon your face, but I suppose it’s no good talking. You’re too jolly conceited to go about and show yourself. Talk about the vanity of women! Why, I believe some of our chaps spend half their time before the looking-glass, and I know from experience what a business there is if one gets a scratch on the face. They’ll take a body wound gladly, and ask for more--but a scar on the face, even if you want a magnifying glass to see it, knocks ’em over at once. They think they are spoilt for the girls, though they wouldn’t admit it under torture. We don’t confess our weaknesses to one another; but the truth of the matter is we’re always thinking of the girls, and they’re always thinking of us, and that’s the way of the world and always will be.”

Burrough had a good many troubles just then. His pen had been idle since his first meeting with Beatrice, and his bank account was dwindling at an unpleasant speed. He was not in a position to afford a summer of idleness. His love affair had not stimulated his brain, nor had it stirred his mind. On the contrary, it had acted as a drug. It had sent him into a blissful slumber, which had been rudely dispelled by the explosion of the shell and the destruction of his personal attractions.

Beatrice did not appear to be in a very good humour when they started upon their tramp. She was becoming suspicious, although he did not know it. She wanted him to bring his face from its state of partial eclipse that she might behold the full light of his countenance. His unwillingness to do so, even for a moment, was not satisfactory. Her aunt had instilled a certain amount of distrust into her mind. There was also a good deal of gossip in the village concerning Burrough. The drift of it was that the unfortunate gentleman could not be expected to uncover his face, as it was certain a considerable portion had been shot away. How did they know? It was common talk among the artillerymen. The sergeants had told them, and the officers had told the sergeants, and the doctor had told the officers. Miss Pentreath was not Burrough’s ally. She would have married him herself gladly, but she did not want Beatrice to do so. He was not good enough for Beatrice, who could pick and choose; and she had a horror of the girl going away and leaving her to wither into the last stage of discontent. Beatrice liked her aunt, and to a certain extent was influenced by her. She knew no reliance could be placed upon the utterances of Mrs. Cobbledick and Son; and yet their talk made an impression upon her. It was insistent, and any rumour which is repeated constantly without being satisfactorily disproved comes at last to bear a decided impress of truth.

They went down the gorge and crossed the river by means of the boulders in its bed, and began to climb over the masses of rock beyond. The heather covered the slopes above them with a soft pink mantle, the nap of which was ruffled by the breeze.

“You are unusually silent,” Burrough said presently, as they worked their way round a bog.

“I am thinking,” said Beatrice. “I am thinking and climbing, and I can’t do more than two things at the same time.”

“I like to hear you talk and laugh,” he replied, in the somewhat dull voice which he had adopted lately.

“Well, then, I will. I’ll tell you something, and stop thinking. We are going away in two weeks. This day fortnight we shall be packed and making for home, for my Cornish cliffs and cleaves, and Dartmoor will see us no more for another year.”

Burrough did not like her tone. There was a suggestion of detachment from himself, a sort of hint that she was free to come and go as she pleased, and that his claim upon her was a matter of slight importance. He braced himself to reply.

“You will let me come--before long?”

Beatrice picked up a stone, flung it into the mossy bog, and watched it slowly disappear. Then she turned, seated herself upon a block of granite, and looked up.

“We’ve had a jolly time together,” she said. “You entered so thoroughly into my moods from the first, though you may have thought them stupid and childish, and I liked you for it. Somehow I never thought you were going to fall in love with me. I wanted you to treat me as a boy. But you wouldn’t. You would remember I am a girl. And I got to like it--I do like it. We’ve been like lovers, and really I haven’t been flirting--worse than usual,” she added, with the old laugh. “I like you better than any man I have ever known.”

“Beatrice, why are you telling me this? You are preparing me for something?” he said moodily.

“Yes, I don’t want things to go too far. I am disappointed,” she hurried on. “You have promised me day after day to take off that ugly bandage, and you don’t do it. That is not fair upon me. I’m going to keep to my word. I don’t disbelieve you, of course I don’t, but still you cannot know what affects me, and though the mark upon your face may not be very much, as you say it isn’t, it may be more than I can bear. Just one glance would tell me, I expect, whether I could get used to it or not. Now, don’t think me very horrid. I could not get over my repugnance for anything really ugly and unpleasant. Even that bandage worries me more than you can think. You remember that dream of mine? The ugly thing that kept on growing and growing until I couldn’t bear to look at it. Now, then, let’s run on and find the white heather,” she said, with a complete change of tone and manner. “That’s sermon enough, only remember you mustn’t say ‘to-morrow’ any more.”

She jumped off the rock, and from that moment was her bright, frivolous self again. Burrough followed without speaking. The quest of the white heather had lost its charm. For a moment he contemplated removing the bandage and finishing the story; but he could not. Not in that strong pitiless sunshine which would exaggerate every detail. He must choose a subdued light. While Beatrice was still with him he could not give up hope. She had not begun to pity him yet. When she had been given time to realise the loneliness of his life and his love for her she might find herself able to contemplate that disfigurement for which she was to a certain extent responsible.

“The best white heather grows on the far side of the Artillery Range,” said Beatrice, “where we can’t go. There used to be some along the side of this shoulder.”

They tramped and climbed, with their eyes fixed upon the dwarf gorse and the endless beds of pink, but they found no white heather, and somehow this seemed to Burrough the culminating stroke of ill-fortune. At length Beatrice gave a cry. She was kneeling among the heather and had parted a thick tuft. She pointed in triumph to something that was within.

“Won’t that do?” she called.

Burrough came up. He looked into the hole that her hands had made, and perceived a somewhat pale and ghastly sprig of bloom, which was certainly white, but a ghostly and unnatural white.

“It will not do,” he said.

“Why not? It’s the right colour. I’m going to pick it anyhow, and wear it, and fancy it’s the real thing.”

“You can’t wear it,” Burrough said, a trifle bitterly. “It’s a little freak, an abortion--just the very thing you hate.”

“It’s pretty,” she declared.

“It’s a fraud and a delusion,” Burrough went on, mentally comparing himself to the unhealthy looking sprig. “It’s pink heather really. It has become bleached by being shut in so that the light couldn’t reach it. If you pick it you will see it gradually becoming pink in the sunshine--blushing with shame at its deceit.”

“I’ll leave it,” said Beatrice. “It shan’t blush for me. Do things turn white when they are always in the dark?”

“Flowers do,” he replied. “It is the sun which colours them, and the stronger the sun the richer the colour. In winter the flowers are white. In early spring they are pale yellow or pale blue. Then the sun becomes powerful and we get the high colours.”

“And yet people believe they can live out of the sunshine,” Beatrice cried. “They think it healthy to be bleached like this poor little sprig of heather. I’ll trample the bush down so that it will get some sunshine. Why can’t people be sensible and learn they want sun and rain and wind upon them, day and night, just as the flowers want them? Just think of all the people working now in slums and shops and offices, out of the air and sunshine, getting white and sickly like this poor little bit of heather, which ought to have been pink but couldn’t be, because it was smothered. I should like to take them all, and drop them here upon the moor, and say, ‘Get pink, you idiots! Get pink’!”

“Don’t call them idiots,” said Burrough gently. “Many cannot help themselves.”

“They can,” she cried. “They prefer the smokes and smuts to the wind and sunshine. I dare say this bit of heather has been chuckling to itself, because it was inside the bush. It didn’t care about the dark. It didn’t care about being pale and sickly. It was better than being cut to pieces by the wind. That’s what it says, the idiot. I think I’ll pull it to pieces. Yes, people are idiots,” she went on, having worked herself into quite a pretty state of indignation. “Our villagers go away because they want to get bleached in a nice dark slum. They leave the cliffs and moors because they hate them--idiots: they hate the granite, the gorse, the bracken, the wind, and sun, and sea; and they pine for the smokes and smuts, the fog, the stench, the filth of a dark room, in a warm court, up an airless slum, in a sunless town.”

Beatrice had dropped upon the heather and was lying in a bath of pink foam supporting herself upon her elbow. She did not look at her companion much, because she could not help thinking him rather an eyesore with that ugly bandage twisted about his head, and covering the upper part of his face leaving only the left eye visible. She disliked herself for the thought, but there was no resisting it. Decidedly he was ugly and somewhat out of place upon that heather-strewn slope of moor.

“Are we going any further?” asked Burrough, when he saw she did not seem inclined to move.

“We shan’t find the white heather. It’s too early in the year. Let’s sit here and bathe in flowers and sunshine. I think the air upon Dartmoor is the finest in the world--even better than that upon Trendreen Hill. There the air is rather too salt. Here it’s sweet with heather and gorse, with just a suspicion of the sea. I should like to die like this, up near the clouds, upon a bed of heather in full bloom, with the sun beating full upon me. I should feel that I was going to join the pixies.”

“I believe your Kingdom of Heaven is the Cornish coast,” Burrough remarked, with a rather dreary smile.

“I don’t ask for anything better,” she said. “But I’m going to see the world change before I become a pixy. I have made up my mind to live until I’m well over a hundred. I think I shall do it. It’s nonsense people saying they don’t want to live to a great age. They go on saying it until they reach their last illness, and then it’s everything they possess for just one more day in this lovely world. I come of a long-lived family. I’m a descendant of Dolly Pentreath, who was the last to speak the Cornish language. My father died young, but that was owing to a fall from his horse. He was a parson, you know,” she went on, admitting her companion for the first time into family secrets. “There wasn’t a finer sportsman in Cornwall, and he kept a curate to do the work.”

Burrough had settled himself beside her, but he was not so near as he might have been. He had an uncomfortable feeling that she was making conversation to entertain him. She was being kind because she was sorry for him. She was not finding any actual pleasure in his society. He could not venture upon any of those overt acts of love, the sight of which disturbed Miss Pentreath so greatly. He was in an equivocal position. He remembered how she had recently exposed the sprig of disfigured heather to the light, and then had destroyed it as being unfitted to survive. He knew he was about to expose his features to the light before her, and he wondered whether she would use him as she had used the heather.

“You are not attending to my words,” Beatrice said, lifting her head indolently. “I am wasting them upon the moorland air. I will speak no more.”

“Then it’s my turn,” Burrough said, rousing himself from thought, and trying to imagine that the little god of Hope was on his way back. “If you will sit up a little and lean forward----”

“I won’t sit up, neither will I lean forward,” said she.

“Just for a minute,” he pleaded.

“No, nor yet for a second, nor for any vulgar fraction of the same.”

“You are idle,” he reproved her. “You ought to be ashamed----”

“I am. I blush for my idleness. But I’d rather blush and be ashamed than sit up.”

“Then I must describe what I want you to look at. What can you see from there?”

“The firmament, two larks, and a big feather-bed cloud,” said she.

“If you were to turn over,” he suggested.

“Well, then! Now I behold ponies, as big as toy terriers, upon the side of Cawsand. I hear the river dashing below in its everlasting hurry. And I feel a bit of heather tickling my nose.”

“If you were to sit up----”

“Which is declined.”

“You would see round the curve of the shoulder,” he went on. “You would see into the cleave, and up the gorge, and at the end of all things my little stone cot.”

“Like a star at the end of a telescope,” she said. “I can imagine it. Someone said you ought to be sent to prison for six months as a punishment for building such a thing to the eternal detriment of the landscape.”

“Could you imagine yourself there?” he asked.

“Not in the least,” she laughed. “It’s much too small for a person of my expanding spirits.”

“I have tried to make it nice,” he said somewhat plaintively. “I painted the interior myself, and I chose white and green for the sitting-room, because nothing looks better, and I thought it might please somebody else one day. The big bedroom is in white and blue, and I painted bunches of forget-me-nots upon the door-panels. You haven’t seen that room. It’s never been occupied yet. I was keeping it----”

“I have seen it,” said Beatrice quickly. “I roamed about the place when you were blown up.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes, it’s pretty, and such a contrast stepping off the moor into a snuggery.”

“Then I planted bushes and creepers, but they don’t get much chance owing to the winds. Still, I’ve got some honeysuckles in flower, and the ivy is creeping up the walls. It’s so lonely there. In winter it’s too wild, and in summer too quiet. In November the wind is always rushing across the moor, and the water roaring down the gorge beneath my windows. Then the rains come, and bring down cart-loads of sand and gravel; and the woodwork swells until not a door or window will shut, and they flap and bang day and night. And Peter and I sit and listen, and wonder what is coming next.”

“Don’t you have any romances?” said Beatrice, who was feeling uncomfortable. “Don’t you ever hear knocks and noises?”

“Plenty. The wind cries and calls, and the ponies come down to find shelter and kick at my door.”

“They’re not all ponies,” said the girl blithely. “The little people are sorry for you, and they come round sometimes to invite you to one of their parties. You should go with them, and if you are nice, they might show you where to find the crocks of gold.”

“Sometimes during the long winter evenings, I feel as though I could imagine anything,” he said.

“Do let’s be cheerful,” cried Beatrice, as she began to rise from her bed of heather in unpleasant apprehension of what might be coming. “We are hooting at each other like a pair of owls. ‘Tu-whit’ says you, ‘Tu-whoo’ says I. We haven’t found any white heather, but we haven’t looked very furiously.”

Her voice died away into a gasp, and Burrough looking round saw that her face was pale. Her eyes were strained upon him, and there was fear in them, and something which was rather more unpleasant than fear; her lips were tight together, and her chin quivered. Then she withdrew her gaze from him, and he fancied she did so with a shudder.

“Why! what’s the matter?” he exclaimed.

“Ough! the beastly thing,” said Beatrice rather unsteadily. “It must have been a viper. It glided just by my hand.”

As she spoke Burrough felt the wind blowing upon his face, and it seemed to him cold. In a moment he realised that the sensation was caused by the breeze touching his face upon that part of it which had been covered. He put up his hand. The bandage had slipped down.

Beatrice began to talk some wild nonsense, but her tongue soon flagged. Then she declared she could see her aunt walking beside the leat which conveyed water to the village, and she thought she would like to run across and join the lonely lady.

“Our paths lie in opposite directions,” she said somewhat significantly. “I can just catch auntie if I run. Good-bye. I’m sorry we haven’t found any white heather.”

Burrough said nothing until she turned to go. He had readjusted the bandage as well as he could. He was glad that she had discovered the truth. But when he saw she was about to leave him the horror of the past came upon him again, and he dreaded lest she might be leaving him for ever.

“May I see you this evening?” he faltered. “After dark. And then.…”

He broke off, not knowing how to finish.

“It will be light,” Beatrice said. “There’s still a moon. Yes, walk towards the village about nine. I’ll meet you upon Brynamoor.”