Chapter 80
The guide had laid a clean cloth on a flat rock, and spread upon it a loaf of bread, cheese, and a few apples. Caroline Bingley was reaching for some fruit when she saw Mary approaching. She offered no welcoming smile, but Mr. Ryder leapt up to greet her.
“If there’s anything better than eating in the open air, I should like to know what it is! May I help you to something, Miss Bennet?”
Mary took some cheese and an apple. She did not wish to spar with Miss Bingley, so politely took her leave and looked for a place to eat alone.
She soon found a patch of dry grass, with an accommodating rock to lean upon.
She sat gratefully against it, took off her hat, and shook her head, as if trying to throw off the weight of her disappointment.
Tiredness washed over her. She had no more energy to reflect on Mr. Hayward.
For as long as she could remember, it had seemed as if she was a player in a game whose rules she did not understand, in which all the dice were weighted against her.
She had done her best to learn what she was supposed to do, but somehow, she always stumbled.
As she looked into the distant hills, she realised how she longed to be free of it all, to leave behind the posturing and falsity, the niceties and stratagems. Again, Mr. Ryder’s words echoed in her mind.
Why could not relations between men and women be stripped of misunderstanding?
Why could they not be as natural and honest and simple as breathing?
She hugged her knees and closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her neck; her mind wandered and in a few seconds she was asleep.
She did not know what it was that woke her, but when she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see Mr. Ryder himself sitting not too far away from her, a blade of grass in his mouth, staring silently at the horizon. She started up, alarmed.
“Lord, sir, I must have fallen asleep! I hope it was not for long?”
“Not more than five minutes,” he replied. “Or perhaps ten.”
She sat up, reached for her hat, and began to rise; but he held out his hand to stop her. “I don’t think there’s any need to hurry. Everyone is occupied. Tom and the guide are discussing the landscape, and Miss Bingley is resting. Wait a moment and watch the view with me.”
His quiet self-possession was soothing, and Mary could not find the spirit to protest. Together, they watched the shadows cast by the clouds race across the green sides of the hills beyond them.
In the far distance, it was hard to tell where the grey sea ended and the blue sky began.
It was difficult to imagine anywhere more beautiful.
“I feel even I could write poetry here,” murmured Mr. Ryder. “It would be impossible not to do so. This place could make poets of us all.”
“That sky would be enough to persuade anyone to pick up a pen.”
“Even you, Miss Bennet? Can we expect some verses from you? ‘On Climbing Scafell,’ perhaps?”
“I hardly think my talents lie that way.” She saw a patch of daisies in the grass next to her, picked one, then another; and set to making a chain from them. He watched her indulgently.
“Excuse me if I say I doubt that. I’m sure you could do anything to which you truly set your mind.”
“You are very kind, Mr. Ryder, but quite wrong, I’m afraid. I might be capable of setting a few lines down on paper. Any of us can do that. True poetic talent however, is a rare thing. I know I do not possess it.”
“That is what Tom says,” observed Mr. Ryder. “He has often told me—usually after reading something I have written—that the desire to write poetry has no connection at all with the ability to do so. And that if you have no feeling for it, you had far better leave it alone.”
“Yes, that sounds very like him,” said Mary softly.
“Well, if I am never to read any words of yours upon the countryside around us,” continued Mr. Ryder, “perhaps you can simply tell me how it affects you. What do you think when you look at it?”
She gazed into the shimmering blue distance as if trying to fix it in her mind’s eye.
“The first impression is of beauty. The colours, the light, the airiness. But the more you look, the more you understand it is the scale of what lies before us that is most startling. It is so large, so grand, and so majestic; and we are so small and insignificant in comparison.”
“Those are my thoughts exactly!” he cried. “It is magnificent—but it is also severe. It is quite indifferent to us. And we are irrelevant to it. All our petty concerns and worries, the silly little rules by which we live, all mean nothing in its presence.”
“Looking at such a view, I understand why you might think that.”
“I do think it, Miss Bennet. This landscape gives us a proper sense of perspective. It shows us our smallness in the great scheme of things. As these mountains understand it, in the blink of an eye we, and everything we have created, will be gone.”
“That’s a gloomy thought, sir.”
“On the contrary, I find it very exciting. To me, it has but one message: do what you will and follow your heart, for we are all a very long time dead.”
He plucked the grass from his mouth, threw it away, and leant a little closer to her.
“Our lives are so brief and yet we spend so much of them obeying rules we did not make. The spirit of this place can’t help but make me imagine what it would be like to be truly free.
To speak and behave not as we thought was proper, but as we really wished to do, if we were honest enough to confess it. ”
She was a little shocked to hear her own recent thoughts refracted so clearly back to her.
“If she were here, Mrs. Gardiner would tell you this is nothing but libertine’s talk, a justification for every kind of licentiousness.”
“Can you honestly tell me—and I beg you to be truthful now—that you have not felt something of what I describe? An impatience with the way things are ordered—particularly amongst men and women?”
Mary added the last daisy to the chain and placed it carefully in her lap.
“I cannot imagine why you should think that.”
“I catch a glimpse of it every now and then in your expression before you cover it up in that way you have.”
Her self-possession faltered.
“You embarrass me, sir.”
“Only because I have seen something in you that I suspect you don’t often admit, even to yourself.”
“You go too far.”
“Then I shall stop. I don’t wish to distress you. I will only say it seems plain to me that you long for happiness and freedom. But I’m afraid the first is only to be had by embracing the second, and it takes a great deal of courage to do that. Especially for a woman.”
He rose, brushing the dust from his coat.
“For you, I think it would be a risk worth taking. You weren’t made to live a dull, ordinary, little life. You deserve more than that.”
“If I were fortunate enough to be with a man I loved, a little life would be neither dull nor ordinary.”
Mr. Ryder smiled.
“It is when you make remarks of that kind that I admire you the most.”
He took his leave, as calmly as if they had been discussing idle pleasantries over the tea table, and ambled away to find the others.
Mary did not follow him but sat for a while alone.
She stared into the hills as if seeking advice or reassurance there; but they had none to offer, and presently she too rose and went to join the rest of the party.