Dear Fuz,Perhaps you hadn't better come and see me again—I expect you'll think I'm mad, but it isn't any good to have rows because I've got to live here any old way.I liked seeing you, dear Fuz, and I'm sorry he made a fool of himself and I'll write some day about young Frank. No more now from your little friend,Jenny.Who cares?
Dear Fuz,
Perhaps you hadn't better come and see me again—I expect you'll think I'm mad, but it isn't any good to have rows because I've got to live here any old way.
I liked seeing you, dear Fuz, and I'm sorry he made a fool of himself and I'll write some day about young Frank. No more now from your little friend,
Jenny.
Who cares?
She gave the letter to Thomas, who took it down to the One and All. It was Jenny's inherent breeding that made her send it. All her pride bade her insist on Castleton's company, begged her to defy Trewhella, and, notwithstanding scenes the most outrageous, to establish her own will. But there was Fuz to be considered. It would not be fair to implicate him in the miserable muddle which she had created for herself. He belonged to another life where farmers did not grovel in the mud before Heaven's wrath, where husbands did not swear foully at wives, asking forgiveness from above before the filthyecho had died away. Fuz was better out of it. Yet she wished she could see him again. There were many questions not yet asked.
Trewhella was foxy when next he discussed Castleton with Jenny.
"He wasn't too careful about calling of 'ee Mrs. Trewhella," he began.
"Don't be silly. He always knew me as Jenny in the old days."
"Oh, I do hate to hear 'ee tell of they old days. I do hate every day before I took 'ee for my own."
"I can't help your troubles that way," said Jenny. "Perhaps you'd like to have married me in the cradle?"
"I'd like to have kept 'ee locked up from the time you were a frothy maiden," he admitted. "I do sweat when I think of men's eyes staring at your lovely lill body."
Jenny stamped her rage at the allusion.
"Yes, you ought to have known my mother's aunts," she said. "They'd have suited you, I think. They wanted to shut me up and make me religious."
The emphasis with which she armed her reminiscence gave the verbs an undue value, as if the aunts had intended actually to lock her in a larder of hymn-books.
"I wish with all my heart they had done so," said Trewhella. "Better that than the devil's palace of light where you belonged to dance. Oh, I wish that Cockney were in Hell."
"I can't do more than ask him to go away, so don't keep on being rude about my friends," said Jenny.
"Ess, and I wish now I'd never kicked up such a rig and frightened the pair of 'ee. He was too quick. That's where it's to."
"What are you talking about?"
"Why, if I hadn't been so straight out, I might have trapped you both fitty. If I'd waited and watched awhile."
Trewhella sighed regretfully.
"You are a sneak," said Jenny.
"Oh, I wish I could see your heart, missus. Look, I've never asked 'ee this before. How many men have loved 'ee before I did?"
"Hundreds," said Jenny mockingly.
"Kissed 'ee?" shrieked Trewhella.
"Of course. Why not?"
Veins wrote themselves across his forehead, veins livid as the vipers of Medusa.
"Witch," he groaned. "’Tis well I'm a saved man or I might murder 'ee. Hark! hark! Murder 'ee, you Jezebel! I do know now what Jehu did feel when he cried, 'Throw her down and call up they dogs and tear the whore to pieces.'"
He ran from the room, raving.
After this new fit when the wolf drove out the fox, Trewhella settled down to steady cunning. Jenny became conscious of being watched more closely. Not even the orchard was safe. There was no tree trunk that might not conceal a wormlike form, no white mound of sand that was not alive with curiosity, no wind even that was not fraught with whispered commentaries upon her simplest actions.
Bochyn could no longer have been endured without young Frank and May and Granfa. These three could strip the most secretive landscape of terrors, could heal the wildest imaginations. All the winter through, Trewhella never relaxed his efforts to trip her up over her relations with Castleton, and compel an admission of the bygone love-affair that would not necessarily, as he pointed out, involve her in a present intrigue.
"How did 'ee send him away, if there was nothing at all?"
"Because I'm ashamed for any of my friends to see what sort of a man I've married. That's why."
"I'll catch 'ee out one day," vowed Trewhella. "You do think I'm just a fool, but I'm more, missus; I'm brae cunning. I can snare a wild thing wi' any man in Cornwall."
"Fancy," Jenny mocked.
And round the dark farmhouse the winter storms howled and roared, beating against the windows and ravening by the latches.
YOUNG Frank had always been from his birth an excitement; but as he neared, reached and passed his eighteenth month, the geometrical progression of his personality far exceeded the mere arithmetical progression of his age. He could now salute with smiles those whom he loved, was empurpled by rage at any repression, and was able to crawl about with a blusterous energy that seemed inspired by the equinoctial gales of March. Jenny's fingers would dive into his mouth to discover teeth that were indeed pearls in their whiteness and rarity. Exquisite adumbrations of herself were traceable in his countenance, and so far, at any rate, his hair was curled and silvery as hers was once famed to be. His cheeks were rose-fired; his eyes were deep and gay. Only his ears seemed, whatever way they were judged, to follow his father's shape; but even they at present merely gave him a pleasant elfin look. Jenny was very proud of young Frank.
Trewhella, with the lapse of time, and after another violent outbreak on account of the arrival of a letter from Castleton, ceased to importune his wife with jealous denunciations of the old glittering days before they met. The farm prospered: he took to counting his money more than ever since an heir had given him a pledge for the commemoration of his thrift. During the winter Jenny drove once or twice in the high cart to Camston, and, with May to help her, scornfully turned out the contents of the drapery shops. On these occasions Granfa was made responsible for young Frank, and when they came back he had to give a very full account of his regency. Other winter events included a visit from Mr. Corin, who hadopened a dairy away up in the east of the Duchy. He annoyed Jenny by his exaggerated congratulations, embracing as they did himself as much as Zachary and her. Mrs. Trewhella would from time to time announce her surrender of the household keys; but Jenny was not anxious to control anything except her son, and the old woman, manifestly pleased, continued to superintend with blink and cackle maid Emily. Jenny lost her fear of bullocks, dreaded insects no longer, and might have been a Cornish maid all her life, save for her clear-cut Cockney, to which not a single western burr adhered. She no longer pined for London; was never sentimental towards eight o'clock; and certainly could not be supposed to exist in an atmosphere of regret. At the same time, she could not be said to have settled down, because her husband was perpetually an intrusion on any final serenity. She could not bear the way he ate, the grit and soil and raggedness of his face; she loathed the grimy scars upon his hands, his smell of corduroy. She hated his mental outlook, his pre-occupation with hell, his narrow pride, and lack of humor, his pricking avarice and mean vanity, his moral cowardice and religious bravery, his grossness and cunning and boastfulness and cruelty to animals. She feared the storms that would one day arise between him and his son. She felt even now the clashing of the two hostile temperaments: already there were signs of future struggles, and it was not just a fancy that young Frank was always peevish at his father's approach.
The equinox sank asleep to an April lullaby. Lambs bleated on the storm-washed air. The ocean plumed itself like a mating bird. Then followed three weeks of gray weather and much restlessness on the part of young Frank, who cried and fumed and was very naughty indeed. What with Frank and the southeast wind and the cold rain, Jenny's nerves suffered, and when May morning broke in a dazzle, she thought it would be a good plan to leave young Frank with Granfa, and in May's company to go for a long walk. May was delighted and together they set out.
They followed the path of the valley past the groves of arbutus, past the emerald meadows down into the sandy waste over which the stream carried little pebbles to the sea, flowing over the wide shallows like a diamonded lattice. They plunged in the towans that never seemed to change with the seasons. They rested in the warm hollows under larksong. They climbed precipices and ran along ridges, until at last they raced gloriously down a virgin drift out on to the virgin sands on which, a long way off, the waves were breaking in slow curves, above them a film of spray tossed backwards by the breeze blowing from the shore.
Jenny sat in the solitude, making a necklace of wine-stained shells. She was dressed in some shade of fawn that seemed to be absorbed by these wide flat sands, so that she became smaller and slighter. She wore a silver-gray bonnet set closely round her cheeks in a ruching of ivory. May was in scarlet and looked, as she lay there in the castness, not much bigger than Jenny's cap of scarlet stockinette, left long ago on the beach at Clacton.
"Hullo, there's somebody coming along the sands. Can you see them?" asked Jenny.
"A long way off?" inquired May, peering.
"Yes, just a speck—now—where those rocks are. No, you're looking in the wrong place. Much further along," directed Jenny.
"Youcansee a way," said May.
The figure drew nearer, but was still too far off for them to determine the quality or sex, as they watched the sea-swallows keep ever their distance ahead, swift-circling companies.
"I wonder who it is?" said Jenny.
"I can't ever remember seeing anyone on the beach before," said May.
"Nor can I. It's a man."
"Is it?"
"Or I think so," Jenny added.
"What a line of footmarks there'll be when he's gone past," said May.
"It is a man," Jenny asserted.
Suddenly she went dead white, flushed crimson, whitened again and dropped the half-strung necklace of shells.
"I believe I know him, too," she murmured.
"Shut up," scoffed May. "Unless it's Fuz?"
"No, it's not him. May, I'd like to be alone when he comes along. Or I don't think I'll stay. Yes, I will. And no, don't go. You stay, too. Itishim. It is."
Maurice approached them. He gave much the same impression as on the first night of the ballet of Cupid, when at the end of the court he raised his hat to Jenny and Irene.
"I—I wondered if I should meet you," he said.
His presence was less disturbing to Jenny than his slow advance. She greeted him casually as if she were saluting an acquaintance passed every morning:
"Hullo."
Maurice was silent.
"Isn't it a lovely morning?" said Jenny. "This is my sister May."
Maurice raised his cap a second time.
"I wonder," he said, looking intently at Jenny, "I wonder if—if——" he plunged into the rest of the sentence. "Can I speak to you alone a minute?"
"Whatever for?" asked Jenny.
"Oh, I wanted to ask you something."
Jenny debated with herself a moment. Why not? He had no power to move her now. She was able coldly to regard him standing there on the seashore, a stranger, no more to her than a piece of driftwood left by the tide.
"I'll catch you up in a minute," she said to May.
"All right, I'll go on. Pleased to have met you," said May, shaking hands shyly with Maurice.
He and Jenny watched her going towards the towans. When she was out of earshot, Maurice burst forth:
"Jenny, Jenny, I've longed for this moment."
"You must have treated yourself very badly then," she answered.
"I did. I——"
"Look," said Jenny sharply. "It's no good for you to start off, because I don't want to listen toanything you say. I don'twantto."
"I don't deserve you should," Maurice humbly agreed. "All the same I wish you would."
It may have been that in his voice some vibrant echo of past pleading touched her, so that across a gulf of four years the old Jenny asked:
"Why should I?"
He seemed on fire to seize the chance of explanation and would no doubt have forthwith plunged into a wilderness of emotions, had not Jenny seen May signaling from the towans.
"She wants me to go over to her."
"But you'll come out here again?"
"I might—I might come out on the cliffs over there." She pointed towards Crickabella. "I don't know. I don't think I shall. But don't try and see me at home, because I wouldn't know you there."
She ran from him suddenly across the sands back to May.
"Why did you wave like that?" she asked.
"I think there's been somebody watching you," said May, looking pale and anxious.
TREWHELLA gave no sign that he knew anything of the event on the sands; yet Jenny's instinct was to avoid a meeting with Maurice. Once or twice, indeed, she was on the point of starting out; but she never brought herself to the actual effort, and the May days went by without her leaving the precincts of Bochyn. Maurice had made but a small impression upon her emotion; had raised not a single heartbeat after the first shock of his approach over the long sands. She had no curiosity to discover why he had come down here, with what end in view, with what impulse. She cared not to know what his life had been in those four years, what seas or shores he had adventured, what women he had known. Yet somehow she felt, through a kind of belated sympathy, that every morning he was out on the cliffs by Crickabella watching for a sight of her coming up the hill. Should she go? Should she finally dismiss him, speaking coldly, contemptuously, lashing him with her scorn and wounded pride and dead love? June was in view, and still she paused. June came in, royally azure. Yet she hesitated; while young Frank waved to the butterflies and grew daily in the sun like a peach.
"He do look so happy as the King of Spain," said old Mr. Champion. "Grand lill chap, he is sure enough. Do 'ee hear what I'm speaking, my young handsome?"
Granfa bent down and tickled the boy.
"Bless his heart," said Jenny.
"I were down to Trewinnard yesterday," said Granfa, "and I were talking about him to a gentleman, or I should say an artist, who belongs painting down along. Says he's in a mind to bide here all the summertime. He do like it very well, I believe."
"What's he like?" Jenny asked.
"This artist? Oh, he's a decent-looking young chap. Nothing anyone could dislike about him. Very quiet, they're telling, and a bit melan-choly. But I believe that's a common case with artists. And I'm not surprised, for it must be a brim melancholy job painting an old cliff that any ornary man wouldn't want to look at twice, leave alone days at a stretch. But he told me he didn't properly belong to paint at all. He said his own trade was writing."
Unquestionably this was Maurice. All day Jenny thought of him out on the cliffs. The idea began to oppress her, and she felt haunted by his presence; it would be better to meet him and forbid his longer stay. To-morrow would offer a fine opportunity, because Zachary was going to Plymouth to arrange about the purchase of some farm implements and would not only be away to-night, but was unlikely to be back till late the next day. Not that it mattered whether he went away or not; yet somehow she would like to lie awake thinking of what she would say to Maurice, and to lie awake beside her husband was inconceivable to Jenny. How much better to be alone with young Frank. She would certainly go to-morrow. Maurice might not be there: if he were not, she would be glad, and there would be an end of the dismay caused by his presence, for she would not move a step from Bochyn till she heard of his departure.
Trewhella now came out into the garden where they were sitting. He was equipped for Plymouth, and looked just the same as on the afternoon Jenny met him at Hagworth Street. He was wearing the same ill-fitting suit of broadcloth and the same gleaming tie of red satin.
"Well, I'm going Plymouth," he announced.
"You're staying the night?" she asked.
"Ess, I think."
"Well, are you?"
"Ess, I believe."
He never would commit himself to a definite statement.
"What time are you coming back to-morrow?"
"In the afternoon, I suppose."
"In the afternoon?" she repeated.
Trewhella looked at her quickly.
"Kiss me good-bye, my dear."
"No, I don't want to," said Jenny, freezing.
He looked harder at her and pulled his mustache; then he leaned down to prod a farewell into his son's ribs. Young Frank immediately began to yell. The father chuckled sardonically and strode off to the cart, calling loudly as he went for Old Man Veal. He paused, with his foot on the step, to impress something on the stealthy old man. Then he told Thomas to get down and Veal to take his place. There was a sound of wheels, and everybody sighed with relief.
The long drowsy June day buzzed on. They all lay about in the shade, wishing they could splash through the stream like the cattle.
"I can't think why we don't all go paddling, I can't," said May.
"Oh, why ever not—not with young Frank?" cried Jenny, clapping her hands.
"Of course."
"And Granfa must come," Jenny insisted.
"Oh, no, no, no," declared Granfa, smiling very proudly at the suggestion. "No, no, no! But I might go along with 'ee and pick a few wrinkles off the rocks."
Jenny thought how imperative it was for Maurice to be out of these planned allurements of summer. She would never enjoy herself, if all the time she felt he were close by, liable to appear suddenly. Certainly she would see him to-morrow.
"We might even bathe," said May dauntlessly.
"Well, don't 'ee tell Zack, then," Granfa advised. "For I suppose he can see the devil in the deep sea so clear as anywhere else. That man's got a nose for evil, I believe."
The sun was now hanging over the marsh in a dazzling haze of gold in which the midges danced innumerable. Long shadows threw themselves across the hills. The stream of light dried up as the sun went down into the sea. Cool scented airs, heralds of night, traveled up the valley; traveled swiftly like the spray of fountains.
Jenny went to bed soon after half-past nine. It was scarcely dark. Along her sill were great crimson roses like cups of cool wine, and from every ghostly white border of the garden came up the delicious odor of pinks in full June bloom. Moths were dancing, fluttering, hovering: a large white owl swept past in a soundless curve. And while she brooded upon this perfumed silence, away in London the girls were trooping down for the second ballet, were giving the last touch with a haresfoot to their carmine beauty, were dabbing the last powder on their cheeks or rubbing the liquid white upon their wrists and hands. How hot it must be in the theater. She heard quite plainly the tinkle of the sequins and spangles as the girls came trooping down the stone stairs into the wings to wait there for the curtain's rise. Then she perceived in the dim light Old Man Veal diligently cleaning his master's gun. Wishing he would not sit there underneath her window, she turned back into the tall, shadowy room and lit the candle. Soon she heard his retreating footsteps, and watched him go down the garden path with the slim and wicked gun beneath his arm. Young Frank, rose-misted with dreams of butterflies and painted rubber balls, lay in his hooded cot. Shading him with her hand, which the candlelight made lucent as a shell, she watched him lying there, his fingers clasped tightly round a coral hung with silver bells, his woolly lamb beside his cheek. Jenny wondered, if she had been a boy, whether she would have looked exactly like young Frank. Then she fell to speculating whether, had he belonged to her and Maurice, he wouldhave been the same dear rogue as now. Oh, he was hers, hers only, and whatever man were his father, he would be nothing more than hers!
She went to see how May was getting on, and in company they undressed, as they used to undress before Jenny went on the stage. Soon both of them in long white nightgowns, each with a golden candle, pattered in once more to marvel at young Frank.
"Oh, I must have him in bed with me, May."
"Well, why don't you?"
Carefully they lifted him, and, warm with sun-dyed sleep, laid him in Jenny's cool bed.
"Light the nightlight, there's a love," said Jenny. "Good night."
"Good night," whispered May, fading like a ghost through the black doorway, leaving the tall room to Jenny and Frank. Tree shadows, conjured by the moon, waved on the walls, but very faintly, for the nightlight burned with steady flame in the opalescent saucer. Jenny settled herself to think what she should say to Maurice next morning. But soon she forgot all about Maurice, and "I'd rather like to have a little girl," was her last thought before she went dreaming.
JENNY woke up the next morning in a gray land of mist. A sea-fog had come in to obliterate Trewinnard and even the sparkling month of June, creating a new and impalpable world, a strange undated season. Above the elm trees and the hill-tops the fog floated and swayed in vaporous eddies. Jenny's first impulse was to postpone the meeting on the cliffs, and yet the day somehow suited the enterprise. Shrouded fittingly, she would face whatever ghosts Maurice had power to raise.
"I'm going for a walk," she told May, "by myself. I want to tell Maurice not to hang about here any more because it gets on my nerves."
"I'll look after Frank when you're gone," said May.
"Don't let him eat any more wool off that lamb of his, will you?"
"All right."
"I sha'n't be long. Or I don't expect so."
"If he comes back from Plymouth before you come in, where shall I say you've gone?" May asked.
"Oh, tell him 'Rats!' I can't help his troubles. So long," said Jenny emphatically.
"Say 'ta—ta' nicely to your mother, young Frank," commanded Aunt May.
As Jenny faded into the mist, the boy hammered his farewells upon the window-pane; and for awhile in the colorless air she saw his rosy cheeks burning like lamps, or like the love for him in her own heart. Before she turned up the drive,she waited to listen for the click and tinkle of Granfa's horticulture, but there was no sound of his spade. Farther along she met Thomas.
"Morning! Mrs. Trewhella!"
"Morning, young Thomas."
"Going for a walk, are 'ee?"
"On the cliffs," Jenny nodded.
"You be careful how you do walk there. I wouldn't like for 'ee to fall over."
"Don't you worry. I'll take jolly good care I don't do that."
"Well, anybody ought to be careful on they cliffs. Nasty old place that is on a foggy morning." Then as she became in a few steps a wraith, he chanted in farewell courtesy, "Mrs. Trewhella!"
Along the farm road Jenny found herself continually turning round to detect in her wake an unseen follower. She had a feeling of pursuit through the shifting vagueness all around, and stopped to listen. There was no footstep: only the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog from the elm boughs. Before she knew that she had gone so far, the noise of the sea sounded from the grayness ahead, and beyond there was the groan of a siren from some uncertain ship. Again she paused for footsteps, and there was nothing but the drip-drip, drip-drip of the fog in the quickset hedge. On the steep road that ran up towards Crickabella, the fog lifted from her immediate neighborhood, and she could see the washed-out sky and silver sun with vapors curling across the strange luminousness. On either side, thicker by contrast, the mist hung in curtains dreary and impenetrable. Very soon the transparency in which she walked was veiled again, and through an annihilation of shape and color and scent and sound, she pressed forward to the summit.
On the plateau, although the fog was dense enough to mask the edge of the cliff at a distance of fifty yards and to merge in a gray confusion sky and sea beyond, the fresher atmospherelightened the general effect. She could watch the fog sweeping up and down in diaphanous forms and winged nonentities. The silence in the hedgeless, treeless country was profound. The sea, oily calm in such weather, gave very seldom a low sob in some cavern beneath the cliff. Far out a solitary gull cried occasionally.
How absurd, thought Jenny suddenly, to expect Maurice on such a day. What painting was possible in so elusive a landscape, so immaterial a scene? He was not at all likely to be there. She stood for a moment listening, and was violently startled by the sight of some animal richly hued even in such a negation of color. The fox slipped by her with lowered brush and ears laid back, vanishing presently over the side of the cliff. She had thought for a second that it was Trewhella's dog, and her heart beat very quickly in the eerie imagination of herself and his master alone in this grayness. She walked on over the cushions of heather, pricking her ankles in the low bushes of gorse. Burnet roses were in bloom, lying like shells on the ground. Ahead of her she saw a lonely flower tremulous in the damp mist. It was a blue columbine, a solitary plant full blown. She thought how beautiful it looked and stooped to pluck it. On second thoughts she decided that it would be a shame not to let it live, this lovely deep-blue flower, nodding faintly.
Jenny stood once more fronting the vapors on each side in turn, and was on the point of going home, when she perceived a shadow upon the mist that with approach acquired the outlines of a man and very soon proved to be Maurice. She noticed how pale he was and anxious, very unlike the old Maurice, even unlike himself of five or six weeks ago.
"You've come at last," he said.
"Yes, I've come to say you mustn't stay here no more. It worries me."
"Jenny," he said, "I knew I'd been a fool before I saw you again last first of May. I've known for four years what a fool and knave I'd been; but, oh, God, I never knew so clearly tillthe other day, till I'd hung about these cliffs waiting for you to come."
"Where was the good?" she asked. "It's years too late now."
"When I heard from Castleton where you were, I tried not to come. He told me I should make things worse. He said it would be a crime. And I tried not to all this winter. But you haunted me. I could not rest, and in April the desire to see you became a madness. I had to come."
"I think you acted very silly. It isn't as if you could do anything by coming. I never used to think about you."
"You didn't?" he repeated, agonized.
"Never. Never once," she stabbed. "I'd forgotten you."
"I deserve it."
"Of course you do. You can't mess up a girl's life and then come and say you're sorry the same as if you'd trod on her toe."
They were walking along involuntarily, and through the mist Jenny's words of sense, hardened to adamantine sharpness by suffering, cut clear and cruel and true. She did not like, however, to prosecute the close encounter in such a profusion of space. She fancied her words were lost in the great fog, and sought for some familiar outline that should point the way to Crickabella. Presently a narrow serpentine path gave her the direction.
"Along here," she said. "I can't talk up here. I feel as if there must be listeners in this fog. I wish it would get bright."
"It's like my life has been without you," said Maurice.
"Shut up," she stabbed again, "and don't talk silly. Your life's been quite all right till you took a sudden fancy to see me again."
"Walk carefully," said Maurice humbly. "We're very near the cliff's edge."
Land and air met in a wreathed obscurity.
"Down here," said Jenny.
They scrambled down into Crickabella, slipping on the pulpy leaves of withered bluebells, stumbling over clumps of fern and drenching themselves in the foxgloves, whose woolly leaves held the dripping fog.
"This is where I often used to sit," said Jenny. "Only it's too wet in the grass now. There's a rock here that's fairly dry, though it does look rather like a gravestone sticking up out of the ground."
They were now about half-way down the escarpment from the top of which the rampart of black cliff, sheer on either side of the path, ran up for twenty feet, so far as could be judged in the deceptive atmosphere. Jenny leaned against the stone outcrop and faced Maurice.
"Jenny," he began, "when I didn't turn up at Waterloo that first of May, I must have been mad. I don't want to make excuses, but I must have been mad."
"Yes, we can all say that, when we've done something we shouldn't have."
"I know it's not an excuse. But I went away in a jangle of nerves. I set my heart on you coming out to Spain, and when you wouldn't and I was there and thought of the strain of a passionate love that seemed never likely to come to anything vital, I gave up all of a sudden. I can't explain. It was like that statue. I had to break it, and I broke my heart in the same way."
"If you'd come back," said Jenny, determined he should know all his folly, "I'd have done anything, anything you asked. I'd have come to live with you forever."
"Oh, don't torture me with the irony of it all. Why were you so uncertain, then?"
"That's my business," she said coolly.
"But I never really was out of love with you. I was always madly in love," Maurice cried. "I traveled all over Europe, thinking I'd finished with love. I tried to be happy without you and couldn't because I hadn't got you. I adored you the first moment I saw you. I adore you now and forever.Oh, believe me, my heart of hearts, my life, my soul, I love you now more, more than ever."
"Only because I'm someone else's," said Jenny.
"No," he cried. "No! no! The passion and impetuousness and unrestraint is all gone. I love you now—it sounds like cant—for yourself, for your character, your invincible joyousness, your glory in life, your perfection of form. Words! What are they? See how this fog destroys the world, making it ghostly. My mere passion for you is gone like the world. It's there, it must be there always, but your spirit, your personality can destroy it in a moment. Oh, what a tangle of nonsense. Forgive me. I want forgiveness, and once you said 'Bless you.' I want that."
"I don't hate you now," Jenny said. "I did for a time. But not now. Now you're nothing. You just aren't at all. I've got a boy who I love—such a rogue, bless him—and what are you any more?"
"I deserve all this. But once you were sorry when I—when I——"
"Ah, once," she said. "OnceIwas mad, too. I nearly died. I didn't care for nothing, not foranything. You was the first man that made me feel things like love. You! And I gave you more than I'd ever given anyone, even my mother. And you threw it all back in my face—because you are a man, I suppose, and can't understand. And when I was mad to do something that would change me from ever, ever being soppy again, from ever loving anyone again, ever, ever, I went and gave myself to a rotter—a real, dirty rotter. Just nothing but that—if you know what I mean. And that was your fault. You started me off by teaching me love. I wanted to be loved. Yes. But I gave too much of myself to you as it was, and I gave nothing to him really. Only anyone would say I did. And then my mother went mad, because she thought I was gone gay; and she died; and I got married to what's nothing more than an animal. But they're all animals. All men. Some are nicer sorts of animals than others, but they're all thesame. And that's me since you left me. Only now I've got a boy, and he's likeme. He's got my eyes, and I'm going to teach him, so as he isn't an animal, see? And I've got my little sister May, who I promised I'd look after, and I have.... Go away, Maurice, leave me. I don't want you. I can't forgive you. I can only just not care whether you're there or not. But go away, because I don't want to be worried by other people."
Maurice bowed his head.
"I see, I see that I have suffered nothing," he said. "Superficial fool that I am. Shallow, shallow ass, incompetent, dull and unimaginative block! I'm glad I've seen you. I'm glad I've heard you say all that. You've taught me something—perhaps in time. I'm only twenty-eight now—and fancy, you're only twenty-four—so I can go and think what might have been and, better, what I may be through you, what I will be. I won't say I'm sorry. That would be an impertinence ... as you said, I simply am not at all."
The mist closed round them thicker for a moment; then seemed to lighten very slowly. Jenny was staring at the cliff's top.
"Is that a bush blowing up and down or a man's head bobbing?"
"I don't see any man," he answered.
"Good-bye," Jenny said.
"Good-bye."
She turned to the upward path, pulling herself up the quicker by grasping handfuls of fern fronds. Suddenly there was a shout through the fog.
"Snared, my lill wild thing!"
There came a report. Jenny fell backwards into the ferns and foxgloves and withered bluebells.
"Good God!" cried Maurice. "You're hurt."
"Something funny's happened. Oh! Oh! It's burning," she shrieked. "Oh, my throat! my throat!... my throat!"
The sea-birds wheeled about the mist, screaming dismay.