"Did he?" said May. "Well, I'm jolly glad it wasn't me or I should have had a fit of the giggles."
Presently, under the scud of shifting clouds, Jenny hurried through the windy shadows of twilight down to the warm theater. When she was back in the bedroom that night, May said:
"Mr. Trewhella's struck on you."
"What do you mean?"
"He is—honest. He raved about you."
"Shut up."
"He went to see you dance and he's going again to-morrow night and all the time he's in London, and he wants you and me to go to tea again to-morrow."
"I've properly got off," laughed Jenny, as down tumbled her fair hair, and with a single movement she shook it free of a day's confinement.
"Do you like him?" May inquired.
"Yes, all right. Only his clothes smell funny. Lavingder or something. I suppose they've been put away for donkey's years. Well, get on with it, young May, and tell us some more about this young dream."
"You date," laughed her sister. "But don't make fun of the poor man."
"Oh, well, he is an early turn, now isn't he, Maisie? What did dad say to him?"
"Oh, dad. If beer came from cows, dad would have had plenty to say."
"You're right," agreed Jenny, standing rosy-footed in her nightgown. She gave one critical look at her image in the glass, as if in dreams she meant to meet a lover, then put out all lights and with one leap buried herself in the bedclothes.
On the following afternoon during tea Mr. Trewhella scarcely took his eyes off Jenny.
"Well, how did you enjoy the ballet?" she inquired.
"I don't know so much about the ballet. I was all the time looking for one maid in that great old magic lantern of a place, and when I found her I couldn't see her so well as I wanted. But, darn'ee, I will to-night. William John!"
"Zack!"
"William John, if it do cost a golden guinea to sit down along to-night, we'm going to sit in they handsome chairs close up to the harmony."
"That's all right, boy," chuckled Corin. "We'll sit in the front row."
"That's better," sighed Trewhella, much relieved by this announcement.
When Jenny said she must go and get ready for the theater, the farmer asked if he might put her along a bit of the way.
"If you like," she told him. "Only I hope you walk quicker than what you eat, because I shall be most shocking late if you don't."
Trewhella said he would walk just as quick as she'd a mind to; but Jenny insured herself against lateness by getting ready half an hour earlier than usual.
They presented a curious contrast, the two of them walking down Hagworth Street. There was a certain wildness in the autumnal evening that made Trewhella look less out of keeping with the city. All the chimneys were flying streamers of smoke. Heavy clouds, streaked with dull red veins, were moving down the sky, and the street corners looked very bare in the wind. Trewhella stalked on with his long, powerful bodybent forward from crooked legs. His twisted stick struck the pavement at regular intervals: his Ascot tie of red satin gleamed in the last rays of the sunset. Beside him was Jenny, not much shorter actually, but seeming close to him very tiny indeed.
"Look, you maid," said Trewhella when, after a silent hundred yards, they were clear of the house, "I never seed no such a thing as your dancing before. I believe the devil has gotten hold of me at last. I sat up there almost falling down atop of 'ee? Yet I'm the man who's sat thinking of Heaven ever since I heard tell of it. Look, you maid, will you be marrying me this week and coming home along back to Cornwall?"
"What?" cried Jenny. "Marry you?"
"Now don't be in a frizz to say no all at once. But hark what I do tell 'ee. I've got a handsome lill farm set proper and lew— Bochyn we do call it. And I've got a pretty lill house all a-shining wi' brass and all a-nodding wi' roses and geraniums where a maid could sit looking out of the window like a dove if she'd a mind to, smelling the stocks and lilies in the garden and harking to the sea calling from the sands."
"Well, don't keep on so fast," Jenny interrupted. "Youdon'tthink I'd marry anyone I'd only just seen? And besides you don't hardly know me."
"But I do know you're the only maid for me, and I can't go back without you. That's where it's to. When I've been preaching and sweating away down to the chapel, when I've been shouting and roaring about the glories of Heaven, I've all the time been thinking of maids' lips and wondering how I didn't care to go courting. I'm going to have 'ee."
"Thanks," said Jenny loftily. "I seem to come on with the crowd in this scene. I don't want to marry you."
"I don't know how you can be so crool-hearted as to think of leaving me go back home along and whenever I see the corn in summer-time keep thinking of your hair."
"But I'm not struck on you," said Jenny. "You're too old.Besides, it's soppy to talk like that about my hair when you've never hardly seen it at all."
Trewhella seemed oblivious to everything but the prosecution of his suit.
"There's hundreds of maids have said a man was too old. And what is love? Why, 'tis nothing but a great fire burning and burning in a man's heart, and if 'tis hot enough, it will light a fire in the woman's heart."
"Ah, but supposing, like me, she's got a fireproof curtain?" said Jenny flippantly.
Trewhella looked at her, puzzled by this counter. He perceived, however, it was hostile to his argument and went on more earnestly than before:
"Yes, but you wouldn't have me lusting after the flesh. I that found the Lord years ago and kept Him ever since. I that showed fruits of the Spirit before any of the chaps in the village. I that scat up two apple orchards so as they shouldn't go to make cider and drunkenness. You wouldn't have me live all my life in whorage of thoughts."
"Who cares what you do?" said Jenny, getting bored under this weight of verbiage. "I don't want to marry."
"I've been too quick," said Trewhella. "I've been led away by my preacher's tongue. But you'll see me there in front of 'ee to-night," he almost shouted. "You'll see me there gazing at 'ee, and I don't belong to be bested by nothing. Maid nor bullock. Good night, Miss Raeburn, I'll be looking after William John."
"Good night," said Jenny pleasantly, relieved by his departure. "I'll see you in front, then."
She thought as she said this how utterly inappropriate Trewhella and Corin would look in the stalls of the Orient. She fancied how the girls would laugh and ask in the wings what those strange figures could be. It was lucky none of them were aware they lodged in Hagworth Street. What a terrible thing it would be if it leaked out that such unnatural-looking men, with such a funny way of talking, lodged atJenny Pearl's. The thought of the revelation made her blush. Yet Corin had not seemed extraordinary before the arrival of his friend. It was Trewhella who had infected them both with strangeness. He had an intensity, a dignity that made him difficult to subdue with flippancy. He never seemed to laugh at her retorts, and yet underneath that ragged mustache he seemed to be smiling to himself all the time. And what terrible hands he had. More like animals than hands. When Jenny caught his eye glinting down in the stalls, she wished she were playing anything but an Ephesian flute-girl, for Ephesian flute-girls, owning a happier climate, dressed very lightly.
"He sat there looking me through and through," she told May, "till I nearly run off to the side. He stared at me just like our cat stares at the canary in the window next door."
"It's not a canary," May corrected. "It's a goldfinch."
"Now don't be silly, and shut up, you and your goldfinches. Who cares if it's a parrot? You know what I mean. Tell me what I'm to do about Borneo Bill."
May began to laugh.
"Well, he is. He's like the song."
On the next day Mr. Corin interviewed Jenny about the prospects of his friend's suit.
"You know, Miss Raeburn, he's very serious about it, is Zack. He's accounted quite a rich man down west. ’Tis his own farm freehold—and he's asked Mr. Raeburn's permission."
"Well, that wins it!" Jenny proclaimed. "Asked my father's permission? What for? What's it got to do with him who I marry? Thanks, I marry who I please. What a liberty!"
Mr. Corin looked apologetic.
"I only told you that so as you shouldn't think there was anything funny about it. I never saw a man so dead in earnest, and he's a religious man, too."
"Well, I'm not," Jenny retorted. "I don't see what religion's got to do with marrying."
"You come to think of it, Miss Raeburn, it's not such a bad offer. I don't believe you could meet with a safer man than Zack. I suppose if he's worth a dollar, he's worth three hundred pounds a year, and that's comfortable living in Cornwall."
"But he's old enough to be my father," Jenny contended.
"He looks older than what he is," continued Mr. Corin plausibly. "Actually he isn't much more than thirty-five."
"Yes, then he woke up," scoffed Jenny.
"No, really he isn't," Corin persisted. "But he's been a big worker all his life. Thunder and sleet never troubled him. And, looking at it this way, you know the saying, '’Tis better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave.'"
"But I don't like him—not in the way that I could marry him." Jenny had a terrible feeling of battered down defenses, of some inexorable force advancing against her.
"Yes; but you might grow to like him. It's happened before now with maids. And look, he's willing for 'ee to have your sister to live with you, and that means providing for her. What 'ud become of her if anything happened to you or your father?"
"She could go and live with my sister Edie or my brother."
"Yes; but we all know what that may mean, whereas if she comes to live with you, Zack will be so proud of her as if she were his very own sister."
Jenny was staggered by the pertinacity of this wooing and made a slip.
"Yes; but when does he want to marry me?"
The pleader was not slow to take hold of this.
"Then you'll consider it, eh?"
"I never said so," Jenny replied in a quick attempt to retrieve her blunder.
"Well, he wants to marry you now at once."
"But I couldn't. For one thing I couldn't leave the theater all in a hurry. It would look so funny. Besides——"
"Well," Zack said, "Don't worry the maid, William John, but leave her to find out her own mind and I'll bide here along till she do know it."
Mr. Corin dwelt on the magnanimity of his friend and having, as he thought, made a skillful attack on Jenny's prejudice, retired to let his arguments sink in. He had effected even more than he imagined by his cool statement of the proposal. Put forward by him, devoid of all passion and eccentricity of language, it seemed a very business-like affair. Jenny began to think how such a step would solve the problem of taking a new house, of moving the furniture, of providing for May, of getting rid of her father, now daily more irritating on account of his besotted manner of life. All the girls at the theater were marrying. It was in the air. She was growing old. The time of romantic adventure was gone. The carnival was petering out in a gloomy banality. Change was imminent in every direction. Why not make a clean sweep of the old life and, escaping to some strange new existence, create a fresh illusion of pleasure? What would her mother have said to this offer? Jenny could not help feeling she would have regarded it with very friendly eyes, would have urged strongly its acceptance. Why, she had even been anxious for Jenny to make a match with a baker; and here was a prosperous man, a religious man, a steady man, inviting her to be mistress almost of a country estate. She wished that Mr. Z. Trewhella were not so willing to wait. It made him appear so sure, so inevitable. And the time for moving was getting very near. Change was in the air. Jenny thought she would sound May's views on the future in case of sudden accident or any deliberate alteration of the present mode of life.
"Where would you live if I went away?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" said May, looking very much alarmed by the prospect, and turning sharply on her pillow.
"I mean who would you live with? Alfie or Edie?"
"Neither," May affirmed emphatically.
"Why not?"
"Because I wouldn't."
This reply, however unsatisfactory it might have been to a logician, was to Jenny the powerfullest imaginable.
"But supposing I got married?" she went on.
"Well, couldn't I live with you? No, I suppose I couldn't," said May dejectedly. "I'm a lot of good, ain't I? Yes, you grumble sometimes, but what about if you was like me?"
Jenny had always accepted May's cheerfulness under physical disability so much as a matter of fact that a complaint from her came with a shock. More than ever did the best course for May seem the right course for Jenny. She recalled how years ago her mother had intrusted May to her when a child. How much more sacred and binding was that trust now that she who imposed it was dead.
"Don't get excited," said Jenny, petting her little sister. "Whatever I done or wherever I went, you should come along of me."
May, not to display emotion, said:
"Well, you needn't go sticking your great knee in my back." But Jenny knew by the quickness with which she fell asleep that May was happy and secure.
"I'm going to have a rare old rout out this morning," Jenny announced when she woke up to the sight of an apparently infinitely wet day, a drench in a gray monotone of sky from dawn to nightfall.
About eleven o'clock the rout out began and gradually the accumulated minor rubbish of a quarter of a century was stacked in various heaps all over the house.
"What about mother's things?" May inquired.
"I'm going to put them all away in a box. I'm going through them this afternoon," said Jenny.
"I've promised to go out and see some friends of mine this afternoon," said May. "So I'll leave them to you because they aren't tiring."
"All right, dear."
After dinner when her sister had gone out and Jenny, except for the servant, was alone in the old house, she began to sort her mother's relics. One after another they were put away in a big trunk still plentifully plastered with railway labels of Clacton G.E.R. and Liverpool Street, varied occasionally by records of Great Yarmouth. Steadily the contents of the box neared the top with ordered layers of silk dresses and mantles. Hidden carefully in their folds were old prayer books and thimbles, ostrich plumes and lace. Jenny debated for a moment whether to bury an old wax doll with colorless face and fragile baby-robes of lawn—a valuable old doll, the plaything in childhood of the wife of Frederick Horner, the chemist.
"I suppose by rights Alfie or Edie ought to have that," Jenny thought. "But it's too old for kids to knock about. If they remember about it, they can have it."
So the old doll was relegated to a lavendered tomb. "After all," thought Jenny, "we wasn't even allowed to play with it. Only just hold it gently for a Sunday treat."
Next a pile of old housekeeping books figured all over in her mother's neat thin handwriting were tied round with a bit of blue ribbon and put away. Then came the problem of certain pieces of china which Mrs. Raeburn when alive had cherished. Now that she was dead Jenny felt they should be put away with other treasures. These ornaments were vital with the pride of possession in which her mother had enshrined them and should not be liable to the humiliation of careless treatment.
At last only the contents of the desk remained, and Jenny thought it would be right to look carefully through these that nothing which her mother would have wished to be destroyed should be preserved for impertinent curiosity. The desk smelt strongly of the cedar-wood with which it was lined, and the perfume was powerfully evocative of the emotions of childish inquisitiveness and awe which it had once always provoked. Here were the crackling letters of the old Miss Horners, andfor the first time Jenny read the full history of her proposed adoption. "Good job that idea got crushed," she thought, appalled by the profusion of religious sentiment and half annoyed by their austere prophecies and savage commentaries upon the baby Jenny. In addition to these letters there was a faded photograph of her parents in earliest matrimony and another photograph of someone she did not recognize—a man with a heavy mustache and by the look of his clothes prosperous.
"Wonder who he was," Jenny speculated. "Perhaps that man who was struck on her and who she wouldn't go away with." This photograph she burned. Suddenly, at the bottom of the packet of letters, Jenny caught sight of a familiar handwriting which made her heart beat with the shock of unexpected discovery.
"However on earth did that come there?" she murmured as she read the following old letter from Maurice.
422 G. R.Friday.My little darling thing,I've got to go away this week-end, but never mind, I shall see you on Tuesday, or anyway Wednesday for certain. I'll let you know at the theater. Good night, my sweet one. You know I'm horribly disappointed after all our jolly plans. But never mind, my dearest, next week it will be just as delightful. 422 kisses from Maurice.
422 G. R.Friday.
My little darling thing,
I've got to go away this week-end, but never mind, I shall see you on Tuesday, or anyway Wednesday for certain. I'll let you know at the theater. Good night, my sweet one. You know I'm horribly disappointed after all our jolly plans. But never mind, my dearest, next week it will be just as delightful. 422 kisses from Maurice.
The passion which had once made such sentences seem written with fire had long been dead. So far as the author was concerned, this old letter had no power to move with elation or dejection. No vestige even of fondness or sentiment clung to this memorial of anticipated joy. But why was it hidden so carefully in her mother's desk, and why was it crumpled by frequent reading? And how could it have arrived there in the beginning? It was written in February after Jenny had left home. She must have dropped it on oneof her visits, and her mother finding it must have thought there was something behind those few gay words. Jenny tried to remember if she had roused the suspicion of an intrigue by staying for a week-end with some girl friend. But, of course, she was away all the time, and often her mother must have thought she was staying with Maurice. All her scruples, all her care had gone for nothing. She had wrecked her love to no purpose, for her mother must have been weighed down by the imagination of her daughter's frailty. She must have brooded over it, fed her heart with the bitterness of disappointment and, ever since that final protest which made Jenny leave home, in gnawing silence. Jenny flung the letter into the fire and sat down to contemplate the dreadful fact that she had driven her mother slowly mad. These doctors with their abscess were all wrong. It was despair of her daughter's behavior which had caused it all. She went into the kitchen and watched the servant wrestle inadequately with her work, then wandered back to the parlor and slammed the lid of the trunk down to shut out the reproach of her mother's possessions. It was growing late. Soon she must get ready to start for the theater. What a failure she was! The front door bell rang and Jenny, glad of relief from her thoughts, went to open it. Trewhella, wringing wet, stepped into the passage.
"Why, Miss Raeburn," he said, "here's a grand surprise."
"Have you had your tea?" the hostess inquired.
"Ess, had tea an hour ago or more. Dirty weather, 'tis, sure enough."
He had followed her into the parlor as he spoke, and in the gray gloom he seemed to her gigantic and like rock immovable.
"Finished your business?" she asked, oppressed by the silence which succeeded his entrance.
"Ess, this right of way is settled for good or bad, according to which one's happy. And now I've got nothing to do but wait for your answer."
The lamplighter's click and dying footfall left the room ina ghostly radiance, and the pallid illumination streaming through the lace curtains threw their reflection on the walls and table in a filigree of shadows.
"I'll light the gas," said Jenny.
"No, don't; but hark to what I do say. I'm regular burnt up for love of 'ee. My heart is like lead so heavy for the long waiting. Why won't 'ee marry me, my lovely? ’Tis a proper madness of love and no mistake. Maid Jenny, what's your answer?"
"All right. I will marry you," she said coldly. "And now let me turn on the gas."
She struck a match, and in the wavering glow she saw his form loom over her.
"No," she half screamed; "don't kiss me. Not yet. Not yet. People can see through the window."
"Leave 'em stare so hard as they've a mind to. What do it matter to we?"
"No, don't be silly. I don't want to start kissing. Besides, I must run. I'm late for the theater."
"Darn the theater. You don't want to go there no more."
"I must give a fortnight's notice."
Mr. Z. Trewhella, a little more than fox, perceived it would not take much to make her repudiate her promise and wisely did not press the point.
"Will I putt 'ee down along a little bit of the road?" he asked.
"No, no. I'm in a hurry. Not to-night."
Presently, in the amber fog that on wet nights suffuses the inside of a tram, Jenny rode down towards the Tube station, picturing to herself her little sister in a garden of flowers.
TREWHELLA spent in Cornwall the fortnight during which Jenny insisted on dancing out her contract with the Orient. The withdrawal, ostensibly to prepare his mother for the wife's arrival, was a wise move on his part, for Jenny was left merely with the contemplation of marriage as an abstract condition of existence undismayed by the presence of a future husband whom she did not regard with any affection. She did not announce her decision to the girls in the theater until the night before her departure. At once ensued a chorus of surprise, encouragement, speculation and good wishes.
"If I don't like Cornwall," Jenny declared, "I shall jolly soon come back to dear old London. Don't you worry yourselves."
"Write to us, Jenny," the girls begged.
"Rather."
"And mind you come and see us first time you get to London."
"Of course I shall," she promised and, perhaps to avoid tears, ran quickly down the court, with her box of grease paints underneath her arm.
"Good luck," cried all the girls, waving farewell in silhouette against the dull orange opening of the stage door.
"See you soon," she called back over her shoulder. "Good-bye, all."
Another chorus of good-byes traveled in pursuit along the darkness as, leaving behind her a legend of mirth, an echo of laughter, she vanished round the corner.
Jenny and Trewhella were married next morning in a shadowy old church from whose gloom the priest emerged like a spectre. She was seized with a desire to laugh when she found herself kneeling beside Trewhella. She fell to wondering how May was looking behind her, and wished, when the moment came for her father to give her away, that he would not clip his tongue between his teeth, as if he were engaged on a delicate piece of joinery. Mr. Corin, too, kept up a continuous grunting and, when through the pervading silence of the dark edifice any noise echoed, she dreaded the rustle of Aunt Mabel's uninvited approach. It did not take so long to be married as to be buried, and the ceremony was concluded sooner than she expected. In the registry she blushed over the inscription of her name, and let fall a large blot like a halo above her spinsterhood. Luckily there was no time for jests and banqueting as, in order to arrive in Cornwall that night, it was necessary to catch the midday train from Paddington. Jenny looked very small beneath the station's great arch of dingy glass, and was impressed by the slow solemnity of Paddington, so different from the hysteria of Waterloo and frosty fog of Euston. Trewhella, leaning on his blackthorn, talked to their father and Mr. Corin, while the two girls ensconced themselves in the compartment.
"Take your seats," an official cried, and when Trewhella had got in, Mr. Raeburn occupied the window with his last words.
"Well, I sha'n't go down to the shop to-day, not now. Let's have a line to say you've arrived all safe. You know my address after I clear out of Hagworth Street."
"So long, dad," said Jenny awkwardly. Neither she nor May had ever within memory kissed their father, but on this last opportunity for demonstrative piety they compromised with sentiment so far as each to blow him a kiss when the train began to move, and in token of goodwill to let for a little while a handkerchief flutter from the window.
There was no one else in the carriage besides themselves,and in the stronger light that suddenly succeeds a train's freedom from stationary dimness, Jenny thought how lonely they must look. To be sure, May's company was a slight solace, but that could neither ease the constraint of her attitude towards Trewhella nor remove the sense of imprisonment created by his proximity. It was a new experience for her to be compelled to meet a man at a disadvantage, although as yet the nearness of freedom prevented the complete realization of oppression. Trewhella himself seemed content to sit watching her, proud in the consciousness of a legalized property.
So the green miles rolled by until the naked downs of Wiltshire first hinted of a strange country, and in a view of them through the window Trewhella seemed to gather from their rounded solitudes strength, tasting already, as it were, the tang of the Cornish air.
"Well, my lovely, what do 'ee think of it all?"
"It's nice, I like it," replied Jenny.
Conversation faltered in the impossibility of discussing anything with Trewhella, or even in his presence. Jenny turned her mind to the moment of first addressing him as Zachary or Zack. She could not bring herself to mouth this absurd name without an inward blush. She began to worry over this problem of outward behavior, while the unusual initial twisted itself into an arabesque at once laughable and alarming. And she was Mrs. Z. Trewhella. Jenny began to scrabble on the pane filmed with smoke the fantastic initial. As for Jenny Trewhella, madness would have to help the signature of such an inapposite conjunction. Then, in a pretense of reading, she began to study her husband's countenance, and with the progress of contemplation to persuade herself of his unreality. Sometimes he would make a movement or hazard a remark, and she, waking with a start to his existence, would ponder distastefully the rusted neck, the hands like lizard skin, and the lack luster nails frayed by agriculture.
The train was rocking through the flooded meads of Somerset in a desolation of silver, and the length of the journey wasalready heavy on Jenny's mind. She had not traveled so far since she was swept on to the freedom of Glasgow and Dublin. Now, with every mile nearer to the west, her bondage became more imminent. Trewhella loomed large in the narrow compartment as Teignmouth was left behind. They seemed to be traveling even beyond the sea itself, and Jenny was frightened when she saw it lapping the permanent way as they plunged in and out of the hot-colored Devonshire cliffs. Exeter with its many small gardens and populated back windows cheered her, and Plymouth, gray though it was, held a thought of London. Soon, however, they swung round the curve of the Albert Bridge over the Tamar and out of Devon. Sadly she watched the Hamoaze vanish.
"Cornwall at last," said Trewhella, with a sigh of satisfaction. "’Tis a handsome place, Plymouth, but I do dearly love to leave it behind me."
The heavy November twilight caught them as the train roared through the Bobmin valley past hillsides stained with dead bracken—like iron mold, Jenny thought. St. Austell shone white in the aquamarine dusk, and darkness wrapped the dreary country beyond Truro. Every station now seemed crowded with figures, whose unfamiliar speech had a melancholy effect upon the girls in inverse ratio to the exhilaration it produced in Trewhella. Jenny thought how little she knew of her destination: in fact without May's company she might as well be dead—into such an abyss of strange gloom was she being more deeply plunged with every mile. Trewhella, as if in reply to her thoughts, began to talk of Trewinnard.
"Next station's ours," he said. "And then there's a seven-mile drive; so we sha'n't get home along much before half-past eight."
"Fancy, seven miles," said Jenny.
"Long seven mile, 'tis, too," he added. "And a nasty old road on a dark night. Come, we'll set out our passels."
It was like action in a dream to reach down from the rack various parcels and boxes, to fold up cloaks and collect umbrellas.Jenny watched from the window for the twinkle of town lights heralding their stopping-place, but without any preliminary illumination the train pulled up at Nantivet Road.
"Here we are," shouted Trewhella, and as the girls stood with frightened eyes in the dull and tremulous light of the platform, he seemed fresh from a triumphant abduction. The luggage lay stacked in a gray pile with ghostly uncertain outlines. The train, wearing no longer any familiar look of London, puffed slowly on to some farther exile, its sombre bulk checkered with golden squares, the engine flying a pennant of sparks as it swung round into a cutting whence the sound of its emerging died away on the darkness in a hollow moan. The stillness of the deep November night was now profound, merely broken by the rasp of a trunk across the platform and the punctuated stamping of a horse's hoof on the wet road.
"That's Carver," said Trewhella, as the three of them, their tickets delivered to a shadowy figure, walked in the direction of the sound.
"Carver?" repeated Jenny.
"My old mare."
The lamps of the farm cart dazzled the vision as they stood watching the luggage piled up behind. To the girls the cart seemed enormous; the mare of mammoth size. The small boy who had driven to meet them looked like a gnome perched upon the towering vehicle, and by his smallness confirmed the impression of hugeness.
"Well, boy Thomas," said his master in greeting.
"Mr. Trewhella!"
"Here's missus come down."
"Mrs. Trewhella!" said the boy in shy welcome.
"And her sister, Miss Raeburn," added the farmer.
Jenny looked wistfully at May as if she envied her the introduction with its commemoration of Islington.
"Now, come," said Zachary, "leave me give 'ee a hand up."
He lifted May and set her down on the seat. Then he turned to his wife.
"Come, my dear, leave me put 'ee up."
"I'd rather get in by myself," she answered.
But Trewhella caught her in his arms and, with a kiss, deposited her beside May. Thomas was stowed away among the luggage at the back; the farmer himself got in, shook up Carver, and with a good night to the porter set out with his bride to Bochyn.
The darkness was immense: the loneliness supreme. At first the road lay through an open stretch of flat boggy grassland, where stagnant pools of water glimmered with the light of the cart lamps as the vehicle shambled by. After a mile or so they dipped down between high hedges and overarching trees that gave more response to their lights than the open country, whose incommensurable blackness swallowed up their jigging, feeble illumination.
"It smells like the inside of a flower-shop, doesn't it?" said May. "You know, sort of bathroom smell. It must be glorious in the daytime."
"Yes, 'tis grand in summer time, sure enough," Trewhella agreed.
The declivity became more precipitous, and the farmer pulled up.
"Get down, you, boy Thomas, and lead Carver."
Thomas scrambled out, and with a loud "whoa" caught hold of the reins.
"It's like the first scene of a panto. You know, demons and all," said Jenny.
Indeed, Thomas, with his orange-like head and disproportionately small body, leading the great mare, whose breath hung in fumes upon the murky air, had a scarcely human look. At the walking pace May was able to distinguish ferns in the grass banks and pointed them out to Jenny, who, however, was feeling anxious as in the steep descent the horse from time to time slipped on a loose stone. Down they went, downand down through the moisture and lush fernery. Presently they came to level ground and the gurgle of running water. Trewhella pulled up for Thomas to clamber in again. Beyond the rays of their lamps, appeared the outline of a house.
"Is this a place?" Jenny asked.
"’Tis Tiddlywits," Trewhella answered. "Or belonged to be rather, for there's nothing left of it now but a few mud walls. A wisht old place, 'tis."
On restarting, they splashed through a stream that flowed across the road.
"Oo-er," cried Jenny, "take care, we're in the water."
Trewhella laughed loudly, and a moorhen waking in sudden panic rose with a shrill cry from a belt of rushes.
"Oo-er, I'm getting frightened," said Jenny. "Put me down. Oh, May, I wish we hadn't come."
Trewhella laughed louder than before. The wish appealed in its futility to his humor.
Now came a slow pull up an equally deep lane, followed at the summit by another stretch of open country very wild. Suddenly the mare swerved violently. Jenny screamed. A long shape leaned over them in menace.
"Ah, look! Oh, no! I want to go back," she cried.
"Steady, you devil," growled Trewhella to the horse. "’Tis nothing, my dear, nothing only an old stone cross."
"It gave me a shocking turn," said Jenny.
"It mademefeel rather funny," said May. "You know, all over like."
The girls shivered, and the cart jogged on across the waste. They passed a skewbald sign-post crowded with unfamiliar goblin names, and a dry tree from which once depended, Trewhella assured them, the bodies of three notorious smugglers. One of the carriage candles proved too short to sustain the double journey and presently flickered out gradually, so that the darkness on one side seemed actually to advance upon them. After a long interval of silence Trewhella pulled up with a jerk.
"Listen," he commanded.
"Oh, what is it?" asked Jenny, with visions of a murderer's approach. On a remote road sounded the trot of horses' hoofs miles away.
"Somebody coming after us," she gasped, clutching May's sleeve.
"No, that's a cart; but listen, can't you hear the sea?"
Ahead of them in the thick night like the singing of a kettle sounded the interminable ocean.
"Wind's getting up, I believe," said Trewhella. "There's an ugly smell in the air. Dirty weather, I suppose, dirty weather," he half chanted to himself, whipping up the mare.
Soon, indeed, with a wide sigh that filled the waste of darkness, the wind began to blow, setting all the withered rushes and stunted gorse bushes hissing and lisping. The effort, however, was momentary; and presently the gust died away in a calm almost profounder than before. After another two miles of puddles and darkness, the heavy air was tempered with an unwonted freshness. The farmer again pulled up.
"Now you can hark to it clear enough," he said.
Down below boomed a slow monotone of breakers on a long flat beach.
"That's Trewinnard Sands, and when the sea do call there so plain, it means dirty weather, sure enough. And here's Trewinnard Churchtown, and down along a bit of the way is Bochyn."
A splash of light from a dozen cottages showed a squat church surrounded by clumps of shorn pine trees. The road did not improve as they drew clear of the village, and it was a relief after the jolting in and out of ruts to turn aside through a white gate, and even to crunch along over a quarter of a mile of rough stones through two more gates until they reached the softness of farmyard mud. As they pulled up for the last time, between trimmed hedges of escallonia a low garden gate was visible; and against the golden stream suffusedby a slanting door, the black silhouette of a woman's figure, with hand held up to shade her eyes.
"Here we are, mother," Trewhella called out. Then he lifted down the two girls, and together they walked up a flagged path towards the light. Jenny blinked in the dazzle of the room's interior. Old Mrs. Trewhella stared critically at the sisters.
"Yon's a wisht-looking maid," she said sharply to her son, with a glance at May.
"Oh, they're both tired," he answered gruffly.
"And what do 'ee think of Cornwall, my dear?" asked the old woman, turning to the bride.
"I think it's very dark," said Jenny.
THE bridal feast was strewn about the table; the teapot was steaming; the cream melted to ivory richness, and, among many more familiar eatables, the saffron cake looked gaudy and exotic. After the first bashful make-weights of conversation, Jenny and May put their cloaks down, took off wraps, and made the travelers' quick preparation for a meal which has expected their arrival for some time. Then down they all sat, and with the distraction of common hunger the painful air of embarrassment was temporarily driven off. Old Mrs. Trewhella was inclined with much assertion of humility to yield to Jenny her position at the head of the table; but she, overawed by the prodigal display of new dishes, of saffron cake and pasties and bowls of cream, prevailed upon the older woman to withhold her resignation.
The living-room of Bochyn was long, low, and raftered, extending apparently to the whole length of the farmhouse, except where a parlor on the left of the front door usurped a corner. Very conspicuous was the hearth, with its large double range extravagantly embossed with brass ornaments and handles. On closer inspection the ironwork itself was hammered out into a florid landscape of pagodas, mandarins and dragons. Jenny could not take her eyes off this ostentatious piece of utility.
"Handsome slab, isn't it?" said Trewhella proudly.
"Slab?"
"Stove—we do call them slabs in Cornwall."
"It's nice. Only what a dreadful thing to clean, I should say."
"Maid Emily does that," explained Mrs. Trewhella.
Jenny turned her glances to the rest of the room. By the side of the slab hung a copper warming-pan holding in ruddy miniature the room's reflection. Here were also brass ladles and straining spoons and a pair of bellows, whose perfectly circular box was painted with love-knots and quivers. On the high mantlepiece stood several large and astonished china dogs with groups of roughly cast, crudely tinted pottery including Lord Nelson and Elijah, all set in a thicket of brass candle-sticks. Indeed, brass was the predominant note in the general decoration. The walls were shining with tobacco boxes, snuffers, sconces and trays. Very little space on the low walls could be found for pictures; but one or two chromolithographs, including "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," had succeeded in establishing a right to be hung. All down the middle of the room ran a long oak trestle-table, set with Chippendale chairs at the end which Jenny and the family occupied, but where the rest of the household sat, with benches. The five windows were veiled in curtains of some dim red stuff, and between the two on the farther side from the front door stood an exceptionally tall grandfather's clock, above whose face, in a marine upheaval that involved the sun, moon and stars, united rising, a ship rocked violently with every swing of the pendulum. A door at the back opened to an echoing vault of laundries, sculleries, larders and pantries, while in the corner beyond the outhouse door was a dark and boxed staircase very straight and steep, a cavernous staircase gaping to unknown corridors and rooms far away.
Old Mrs. Trewhella suited somehow that sinister gangway, for, being so lame as to depend on a crutch, the measured thump of her progress was carried down the gloom with an eternal sameness of sound that produced in the listener a sensation of uneasiness. She had a hen-like face, the brightness of whose eyes was continually shuttered by rapid blinks. Her hair, very thin but scarcely gray, was smoothed down so close as to give her head the appearance of a Dutch doll's. She hada slight mustache and several tufted moles. There was much of the witch about her and more of the old maid than the mother.
When the new arrivals had been seated at the table for some minutes, the rest of the household trooped in through the outhouse door. Thomas Hosken led the procession. His face under the glaze of soap looked more like an orange than ever, and he had in his walk the indeterminate roll of that fruit. Emily Day came next, a dark slip of a maid with long-lashed stag's eyes, too large for the rest of her. She was followed by Dicky Rosewarne, a full-blooded, handsome, awkward boy of about twenty-three, loose-jointed like a yearling colt and bringing in with him a smell of deep-turned earth, of bonfires and autumn leaves. Bessie Trevorrow, the dairymaid, ripe as a pippin, came in, turning down the sleeves of a bird's-eye print dress over forearms that made Jenny gasp. She could not reconcile the inconsistencies of feature in Bessie, could not match the burning almond eyes with the coarse lips, nor see how such weather-stained cheeks could belong to so white a neck. Last of all came Old Man Veal, whose duties and status no one rightly knew. The household individually slid into their separate places along the benches with sidelong shy greetings to Jenny and May, who for their part would have sat down with more ease to supper with a flock of sheep. One chair still remained empty.
"Where's Granfa Champion?" asked Trewhella.
"Oh, my dear life, that old man is always last," grumbled Mrs. Trewhella. "What a thing 'tis to have ancient old relations as do never know to come in to a meal. Go find him, boy Thomas," she added with a sigh.
Thomas was much embarrassed by this order, and a subdued titter ran round the lower part of the table as Thomas made one of his fruit-like exits to find Granfa Champion.
"He's my uncle," explained Mrs. Trewhella to Jenny. "A decent old man as anyone could wish to meet, but most terrible unknowing of the time. I believe he's so old that time domean nothing to him. I believe he's grown to despise it."
"Is he very old?" asked Jenny, for want of anything better to say.
"Well, nobody do know how old he is. There's a difference of twenty years in the opinions you'll hear put about. Poor old soul, he do give very little trouble at all. For when the sun do shine, he's all the time walking up and down the garden, and when 'tis dropping, he do sit in his room so quiet as a great old lamb."
Here Thomas came back with positive news.
"Mr. Champion can't get his boot off and he's in some frizz about it."
"How can't he get his boot off? How didn't 'ee help him?"
"So I did," said Thomas. "But he wouldn't hear nothing of what I do know about boots, and kept on all the time telling what a fool I was. I done my best with 'en."
At this moment Granfa Champion himself appeared, his countenance flushed with conquest, his eyes shining in a limpid blue, his snow-white hair like spindrift round his face.
"Come in, you Granfa," his nephew invited.
"Is the maids come?" he asked.
"Ess, ess, here they are sitting down waiting for 'ee."
Mr. Champion advanced with a fine stateliness and nobility of welcome. Indeed, shy as she was, his entrance tempted Jenny to rise from her chair.
"Come, leave me look at 'ee," said Granfa, placing his hands on her shoulders.
"Keep quiet, uncle," said Mrs. Trewhella. "You'll make her fire up."
"Ah, nonsense," contradicted the old man. "That's nothing. I do dearly love to see maids' cheeks in a blush. Wish you well, my lovely," he added, clasping Jenny's hands. "I'm terrible hurried I wasn't here to give 'ee a welcome by the door."
Jenny liked this old man, who for the exile from a distant country by his age and dignity and sweetness conjured a fewtears of home. The supper, a late meal for such a household, went its course at a fair speed; for they were all anxious to be off to bed with the prospect of work in the windy November dawn. Very soon they all vanished through the out-house door, and Granfa, with lighted candle, a hot brick wrapped in flannel under his arm, twinkled slowly up to bed through the hollow staircase. The rest of them were left alone in a silence. It was ten o'clock, and the fire was already paling behind the fluted bars of the slab.
"Well, I suppose you're thinking of bed?" suggested Mrs. Trewhella.
May looked anxiously at her sister.
"Yes, I suppose we are," Jenny agreed.
Zachary began to whistle a Sankey hymn tune.
"You'll be wishing to unpack your things first," continued Mrs. Trewhella.
"Yes, I ought to unpack," Jenny said in a frozen voice.
"I've put May in the bedroom next to you. Come, I'll show 'ee."
Zachary still sat whistling his hymn tune. A bird shielded from view by the window-curtain stirred in his cage. Mrs. Trewhella lighted three candles. Cloaks were picked up and flung over arms, and in single file the three figures, each with her winking guide, vanished up the staircase.
"What a long passage," whispered Jenny when they stood in a bunch at the top.
Mrs. Trewhella led the way to the bride's chamber.
"You're here, where the wives of the Trewhellas have slept some long time."
After the low room downstairs the bedroom seemed enormous. The ceiling in Gothic irregularities of outline slanted up and up to cobwebs and shadows. It was a great barn of a room. A tall four-post bed, hung with faded tapestries of Love and War, was set off by oak chests-of-drawers and Court cupboards. The floor was uneven, strangely out of keeping with the rose-infested Brussels carpet so vividly new. Mostof the windows, latticed and small, were set flush with the floor; but high up in a dormer was a large window with diamonded panes, uncurtained, black and ominous. A couple of tall cheval-glasses added to the mystery of the room with their reduplication of shadowy corners.
"And May's in here," Mrs. Trewhella informed them, leading the way. "The loft begins again after your bedroom, so the ceiling isn't so tall."
Certainly, May's room was ordinary enough, even dainty, with the dimity curtains and wall-paper of bows and forget-me-nots. Round the toilet-table crackled a pink chintz valance, draped in stiffest muslin.
Mrs. Trewhella looked closely at Jenny for a moment before she left them.
"You're thin, my dear," she commented. "Ah, well, so was I; and I can mind the time when they wondered what a man could see in such a maid. The men was all for plumpness then. Wish you good night."
The old woman thumped off down the corridor, her candle a-bob with every limping step.
"What a dreadful place," said Jenny.
"Don't let's stay," said May eagerly. "Don't let's stay. Let's go back—now—now."
"Don'tbe silly. How can we? But we never oughtn't to have come. Oh, May, I only wish I could sleep in here with you."
"Well, why don't you?" suggested May, who was shocked to see how the usually so indomitable sister was shaking with apprehension. "There's plenty of room and I'd chance whathesays."
Jenny pulled herself together by a visible effort.
"No, I can't go on sleeping with you. I'vegotto be married, now I've done it."
The two sisters, as if drawn by some horrid enchantment, went back to the bride's room.
"How big that candle looks, doesn't it, but small in one way. May, I'm frightened," whispered the bride.
There was a rattle of falling plaster, a squeak, a dying scamper.
"Oo-er, what was that?" cried May.
"Rats, I suppose. Oh, this is a shocking place," said Jenny, trembling. "Never mind, it's got to be done. It's got to be finished some day. It'll be all the same in a hundred years, and anyway, perhaps it won't be so bad in the morning. May!" she added sharply.
"What?"
"Why, when you come to think of it, the second ballet's well on now and here am I starting off to undress in this dog's island. Let's go back to your room for a minute."
Again the sisters sought May's kindlier room and Jenny had an idea.
"May, if we pushed your bed back close to the wall, you could tap sometimes, and if I was awake in the night I'd hear you. May, don't go to sleep. Promise you won't go to sleep."
They pushed the bedstead back against the ribbons and forget-me-nots. Then Jenny, summoning every tradition of pride, every throb of determination, kissed May and ran to the lonely Gothic room, where the flame of the solitary candle burned so still and shapely in the breathless night. She undressed herself in a frenzy. It was like falling into a river to enter those cold linen sheets and, worse, to lie there with pulses thudding and breast heaving under a bravery of new pink bows and ribbons. It could not be long now. She sat up in bed thinking to tap on the wall; but the tapestried headpiece muffled the sound. May, however, heard and rapped her answer.
"To-morrow," vowed Jenny, "I'll slit those unnatural curtains with my scissors so as I can tap easily."
Then down the passage she heard her husband's tread. He was still whistling that tune, more softly, indeed, but with a continuous reiteration that was maddening. Round the doorhis shadow slipped before him. Jenny hid beneath the bed-clothes, breathing faster than a trapped bird. She heard his movements slow and dull and heavy, accompanied by the whistling, the endless damnable whistling. Then the lights went out and, as if he walked on black velvet, Trewhella stole nearer to the bed.
JENNY lay awake in a darkness so intense, so thick, so material that her effort to repulse it produced an illusion of a suffocating fabric desperately torn. What ivory cheeks were hidden by the monstrous gloom, what sparkling eyes were quenched in the dry mouth of night!
"Oh, morning, morning," she moaned. "Come quickly, oh, do come quick."
Far away in the blackness a cock crowed. She from London did not understand his consolation. Trewhella, sleeping soundly as he was wont to sleep on market nights, did not stir to the appeal. Jenny lay sobbing.
"What's it all for?" she asked. Then sleep, tired of love's cruelty, sent rosy dreams to comfort her, and in the morning, when she woke, her husband was gone from her side. It was a morning of moist winds and rich November sunlight, of pattering leaves and topaz lights, full of sea-gulls' wings and the cawing of rooks.
A little sister stood by the end of the bed.
"Oh, get in beside me," Jenny cried.
And whatever else was mad and bad, there would always be that little sister.
BOCHYN was built to escape as easily as possible the many storms of the desolate country that surrounded it. The windows in the front of the house looked out between two groves of straight Cornish elms over a moist valley to a range of low hills, whose checkered green and brown surface in the perpetual changes of light and atmosphere took on the variety and translucence of water or precious stones; and not merely their peripheral tints, but even their very contours seemed during the courses of the sun and moon hourly to shift. Behind the house was the town-place, a squelchy courtyard hemmed in by stables and full of casual domestic animals. From here a muddy lane led up to the fields on the slopes above, slopes considerably more lofty than those visible from the front windows and ending in a bleak plateau of heather and gorse that formed the immediate approach to the high black cliffs of many miles of coast. The house itself was a long two-storied building, flanked by low gray stone hedges feathered with tamarisks and fuchsias. The garden, owing principally to the care of Granfa Champion, had an unusual number of flowers. Even now in November the dahlias were not over, and against the walls of the house pink, ivy-leaved geraniums and China roses were in full bloom. The garden itself ended indeterminately, with no perceptible line of severance, in the moors or watery meads always vividly colored, and in summer creaming with meadow-sweet. At the bottom of the garden was a rustic gazebo, from which it waspossible to follow the course of the stream up the valley between cultivated slopes that gave way to stretches of gorse and bracken, until the valley swept round out of sight in thick coverts of dwarfed oaks. Westward in the other direction the stream, flowing straighter and straighter as it neared the sea, lost itself in a brown waste of sand, while the range whose undulations it had followed sank abruptly to a marsh. This flatness made the contrary slope, which jutted forward so as to hide the actual breaking of the waves, appear portentously high. Indeed, the cliffs on that side soon reached three hundred feet and on account of their sudden elevation looked much higher. The stream spread out in wide shallows to its outlet, trickling somewhat ineffectively in watery furrows through the sand.
On the farther side of the brown waste, where not even rushes would grow, so complete and perpetual was the devastation of the gales, a line of towans followed the curve of the coast, a desolate tract, gray-green from the rushes planted to bind the shifting surface, and preserving in its endless peaks and ridges the last fantastic glissades and diversely elevated cones into which the wind had carved and gathered and swept the sand. Mostly, these towans presented to the beach a low line of serrated cliffs perhaps forty feet high; but from time to time they would break away to gullies full of fine drifted sand, whose small cavities hoarded snail-shells wind-dried to an ethereal lightness, and rabbit-bones bleached and honeycombed by weather. After a storm the gullies gave an impression of virgin territory, because the sand lay in drifts like newly fallen snow on which footprints were desecration. The beach itself was at low water a very wide and flat and completely desolate expanse, shining near the sea's edge with whatever gold or silver was in the air, shot with crimson bars at sunset, crinkled by the wind to a vast replica of one of its own shells, ribbed and ploughed by tempests. The daily advance or retreat of extreme high water was marked by devious lines of purple muvices, by claws of seaweed and the stain ofdry spume. Beyond the limit of the spring tides the sand swept up in drifts against the low cliffs that crumbled like biscuit before an attempted ascent.
This sea solitude reduced all living things to a strange equality of importance. Twittering sea-swallows whose feet printed the sand with desultory and fugitive intagliation, sea-parrots flying in profile against the sky up and down over the water, porpoises rolling out in the bay, sand-hoppers dancing to any disturbance, human beings—all became equally minute and immaterial. Inland the towans tumbled in endless irregularities of outline about a solitude equally complete. The vegetation scarcely marked the changing seasons, save where in winter the moss was a livelier golden-green, or where, beside spurges and sea-holly and yellow horned poppies, stone-crops were reddened by August suns. At wide intervals, where soil had formed over the sand, there was a close fine grass starred in spring with infinitesmal squills and forget-me-nots. But mostly the glaucous rushes, neither definitely blue nor green nor gray, occupied the landscape. Close at hand they were vitreous in color and texture, but at a distance and in the mass they seemed to have the velvety bloom of a green almond or grape. Life of a kind was always present in the scud of rabbits, in the song of larks and click of stonechats, in the dipping steel-blue flight of the wheatear and ruffled chestnut feathers of the whinchat. Yet as the explorer stumbled in and out of the burrows, forcing a prickly advance through the sharp rushes and often plunging ankle deep in drifts of sand, life was more apparent in the towans themselves than in the presence of the birds and beasts haunting their solitude. The sand was veritably alive in its power to extract from the atmosphere every color and quality. Sometimes it was golden, sometimes almost snow-white. Near sunset mauve and rose and salmon-pink trembled in waves upon its surface, and as it caught fire to welcome day, so it was eager to absorb night. Moonlight there was dazzling when, in a cold world, it was possible to count the snail-shells likepearls and watch the sand trickle from rabbit-skulls like powdered silver.
Perhaps Jenny had never looked so well placed as when, with May beside her in a drift of sand, she rested against the flat fawns and creams and distant blues and grays of the background. Years ago when she danced beneath the plane tree, her scarlet dress by long use had taken on the soft texture of a pastel. Now she herself was a pastel, indescribably appropriate to the setting, with her rose-leaf cheeks buried in the high collar of a lavender-colored frieze coat, with her yellow curls and deep blue eyes, deeper with the loss of their merriment. Her hands, too, were very white in the clear sea air. May sitting beside her looked dark as a pine tree against an April larch. If Jenny was coral, May was ivory. Here they sat while the sea wind lisped over the sand. Jenny marked the beauty of the country the more carefully because she disliked so intensely the country people. Every day the sisters went for long walks, and when May was tired she would sit on the beach, while Jenny wandered on by the waves' edge.
November went by with silver skies and silver sunsets, with clouds of deepest indigo and pallid effulgences of sun streaming through traveling squalls. Days of swirling rain came in with December, when Jenny would have to sit in the long room, listening to the hiss of the wind-whipped elms, watching the geranium petals lie sodden all about the paths, and the gulls, blown inland, scattered on the hillsides like paper. The nights were terrible with their hollow moanings and flappings, with the whistle and pipe of the chimneys, with crashing of unclosed doors, with rattled lattices and scud and scream and shriek and hum and roar of the wild December storms. Every morning would break to huge shapes of rain swept up the valley, one after another until the gales of dawn died away to a steady drench of water. Then Jenny would sit in the hot room, where the slab glowed quietly into the mustiness, and idly turn the damp-stained pages of year-old periodicals, of mildewed calendars, even of hymn-books. At last she would sally forthdesperately, and after a long battle with wind or gurgling walk through mud and wet, she would return to a smell of pasties and saffron cake and sometimes the cleaner pungency of marinated pilchards.
Some time before Christmas the gales dropped; the wind veered releasing the sun, and for a fortnight there was fleckless winter weather. These were glorious mornings to wander down through the west garden past the escallonias aromatic in the sunlight, past the mauve and blue and purple veronicas, out over the watery meadows and up the hill-sides, where the gorse was almond-scented about midday in the best of the sun. Here for a week she and May roamed delightfully, until they found themselves in a field of bullocks and, greatly terrified, went back to the seashore. "Handsome weather," old Mrs. Trewhella would say, watching them set out for their long walks, and, after blinking once or twice at the sun, thumping back to the kitchen, back to household superintendence and the preparation of heavy meals for the farm workers. Jenny was not inclined to talk much with them. They lived a life so remote from hers that not even the bridge of common laughter could span the gulf. Dicky Rosewarne, for all his good looks, was detestably cruel with his gins and snares and cunning pursuit of goldfinches and, worse, his fish-hooks baited for wild duck. Yet he was kind enough to the great cart-horses, conversing with them all work-time in a guttural language they seemed perfectly to comprehend. Bessie Trevorrow, the dairymaid, was even less approachable than Dicky. She had the shyness of a wild thing, and would fly past Jenny, gazing in the opposite direction. Once or twice, under the pressure of proximity, they embarked upon a conversation; but Jenny found it difficult to talk well with a woman who answered her in ambiguous phrases of agreement or vague queries. Old Man Veal Jenny disliked since on one occasion she observed him bobbing up and down behind a hedge to watch her. Thomas was her favorite among the hands. He had grown used to bringing her curiosities newlyfound, and others chosen from a collection that extended back to his earliest youth. These he would present for her inspection, as a dog lays a stick at his mistress's feet. Jenny, although she was profoundly uninterested by the cannon-ball he had found wedged between two rocks, by the George III halfpenny turned up by the plough, by his strings of corks and bundles of torn nets, was nevertheless touched by his offer to strike a "lemon" for her under a jam-jar in the spring. Nor did she listen distastefully to the long sing-song tales with which he entertained May.
The fine weather lasted right up to Christmas Day. Violets bloomed against the white stones that edged the garden paths. Wallflowers wore their brown velvet in sheltered corners and, best of all, bushes of Brompton stocks in a sweetness of pink and gray scented the rich Cornish winter. Jenny and May would wander up and down the garden with Granfa, while the old man would tell in his high chant tales as long as Thomas's of by-gone Australian adventures, tales ripened in the warmth of spent sunshine, and sometimes stories of his own youth in Trewinnard with memories of maids' eyes and lads' laughter. Then in January came storm on storm, dark storms that thundered up the valley, dragging night in their wake. Lambing went on out in the blackness, a dreadful experience, Jenny thought, when Zachary came in at all hours, sometimes stained with blood in the lantern light. Jenny was scarcely aware of her husband in the daytime. The volubility which had distinguished his conversation in London was not apparent here. Indeed, he scarcely spoke except in monosyllables, and spent all his time working grimly on the farm. He did not seem to notice Jenny, and never inquired into her manner of passing the day. She was his, safe and sound in Cornwall, a handsome property like a head of fine stock. He had desired her deeply and had gained his desire. Now, slim and rosy, she was still desirable; but, as Jenny herself half recognized, too securely fastened, too easily attainable for any misgiving. She certainly had no wish for a closer intimacy,and was very thankful for the apparent indifference which he felt towards her. She would have been horrified, had he suggested sharing her walks with May, had he wanted to escort them over Trewinnard Sands, or worst of all, had he invited her to sit beside him on his Sunday drives to preach at distant chapels. He did not even bother her to come and hear him preach in Trewinnard Free Church. Yet as the weeks went by, Jenny came to think that he regarded her more than she thought at first. He often seemed to know where she had been without being informed. When she complained about Old Man Veal's spying on her, Zachary laughed oddly, not much annoyed presumably by his servant's indiscretion. Jenny tried sometimes to imagine what Trewinnard would have been like without her sister. The fancy made her shudder. With May, however, it was like a rather long, pleasantly dull holiday.
February brought fair days, scattered shining celandines like pieces of gold over the garden beds, set the stiff upright daffodil buds drooping and was all too soon driven out by the bleakest March that was ever known, a fierce, detestable month of withering east winds, of starved primroses, and dauntless thrushes singing to their nests in the shaken laurustinus. Jenny began to hate the country itself now, when all she could see of it was savage and forbidding as the people it bred.
In the middle of this gray and blasted month, Jenny became aware that she was going to have a baby. This discovery moved her principally by a sudden revival of self-consciousness so acute that she could scarcely compel herself to break the news even to May. It seemed such an absurd fact when she looked across the table at Zachary somberly munching his pasty. She could hardly bear to sit at meals, dreading every whisper and muffled giggle from the lower end of the table. Although the baby would not arrive till September, and although she tried to persuade herself that it was impossible for anyone to discern her condition, her own knowledge of it dismayed her.
"But it'll be nice to have a baby," said May.
"What, in this unnatural house? Idon'tthink. Oh, May, whatever shall I do? Can't I go away to have it?"
"Why don't you ask him?" suggested May.
"Don't be silly, how can I tellhimanything about it?"
"He's got to know some time," May pointed out.
"Yes, but not yet. And then you can tell the old woman and she can tell him, and I'll hide myself up in the bedroom for a week. Fancy all the servants knowing. What a dreadful thing! Besides, it hurts."
"Well, it's no use for you to worry about that part of it now," said May. "I call it silly."
"I hope it'll be a boy," said Jenny. "I love boys. I think they're such rogues."
"I'd rather it was a girl," said May.
"Perhaps it don't matter which after all," Jenny decided. "A boy would be nicest, though, if you loved the man. Because you'd see him all over again. Perhaps I'd rather have a girl. I expect she'd be more like me. Poor kid!" she added to herself, meditating.
During April the subject was put on one side by mutual consent. There was no immediate necessity for bother; but Jenny's self-consciousness made her unwilling to wander any more over the towans, for all that the weather was very blue and white, and the sheltered sand-drifts pleasantly warm in the spring sun. Jenny, however, felt that every rush-crowned ridge concealed an inquisitive head. She knew already how curious the country people were, and that Old Man Veal was no exception. Once she had walked through Trewinnard Churchtown near dusk, and had been horribly aware of bobbing faces behind every curtained window, faces that bobbed and peered and followed every movement and gesture of her person.
Therefore May and Jenny determined to withdraw all opportunity from inquisitiveness by exploring the high cliffs behind Bochyn. They climbed up a steep road washed verybare by the sea wind, but pleasant enough with its turfed hedges fluttering with the cowslips that flourished in a narrow streak of limestone. At the top the road ran near the cliff's edge through gorse and heather and moorland scrub. They found a spot where the cliff sloped less precipitous in a green declivity right down to the sea. This slope was gay with sea-pinks and fragrant with white sea-campion. Primroses patterned the turf, and already ferns were uncrumpling their fronds. Below them the sea was spread like a peacock's tail in every lustrous shade of blue and green. Half-way down they threw themselves full length on the resilient cushions of grass and, bathed in sunshine, listened to the perpetual screaming of the gulls and boom of the waves in caverns round the coast.
"Not so dusty after all," said Jenny contentedly. "It's nice. I like it here."
"Isn't it lovely and warm?" said May.
So they buzzed idly on with their sunlit gossip and drowsy commentaries, until a bank of clouds overtook the sun and the water became leaden. Jenny shivered.
"Somebody sitting on my grave," she said. "But it's nice here. Nicer than anywhere we've walked, I think."