And further, there was Nicholas Lovel’s younger brother Olver, by the kind-hearted given occasional employment on odd jobs of carpentering, house-painting, and the like, for he wasskilful enough as a workman, and could be trusted to carry out his directions with the fidelity of that kind of brain commonly known as “simple.” He might have passed as a good-looking youth, with tight, chestnut curls and eyes of a curiously pale blue, rimmed with black round the iris, but for the oblique and cunning expression that was apt to cross his face like a cloud drifting across the moon, and the slight hint of deformity that clung about him,—a deformity so indefinite, that it was impossible to say precisely where it lay, whether in his neck being slightly sunk into his shoulders, or in his head being slightly too large for his body, or in his hands being slightly too well-formed, too sensitive for the hands of a workman, or in his tread being slightly too catlike for one of his build and bulk. He had in the village the reputation of slyness, a sudden shrewdness, that was disquieting and therefore repulsive in one whom mere simplicity would have entitled to the charity of all men. From this reputation of cunning the legend had grown in the village, as such things grow always in that fertile virgin soil of ignorance, the legend had grown into a variety of sinister shapes, all ornamented with copious and more or less picturesque detail: Olver Lovel’s grandmother had been burned for a witch; his mother, who was kept in such seclusion now by the severity of Nicholas, was a witch also; Olver himself practised wizardry; he went out of his mind when the moon was full; he was mortallyfeared by all animals,—this indeed was true, and a matter of common knowledge;—he controlled his evil impulses only through fear of his brother, but if his brother were to be taken away, then God help them all! These were only a few of the things that were openly uttered about Olver Lovel. Nicholas himself was not above suspicion. He had the same eyes as his brother, of the palest blue with those curious black rims, and the effect in his dark face, with his black hair, was certainly very strange. But people did not fear Nicholas as they feared Olver. Nicholas was a straight-forward man, reserved and uncompromising because his pride had so much to suffer, and no doubt his endurance too, living as he did between his two unusual relations; they had, on the whole, a good deal of sympathy and respect for Nicholas. It was no life, they said, for a young man. But who could help him? He would let no one near him, either literally or figuratively; pride was the hardest defence to deal with. A harsh young man; but he had much to put up with. And if he was harsh towards himself and forbidding towards other men, let them at least do him the justice to say that towards dumb beasts he had the gentleness of a woman for a child; ay, and the instinct too: the quick kind touch, and the certain remedy.
The villagers thought him lonely,—even lonelier than he actually was, for they knew nothing of the friendship between him and MissWarrener. They knew, certainly, that he sometimes went fishing with her down to the Kennet, but they thought nothing of that, for any young lady might be expected to take a man to carry her rod and landing-net, to fix her bait, and to deal with her catch. It wasn’t likely that even Miss Warrener would care to dabble in a mess of worms, or to get her fingers covered with scales, slime, and cold blood. No, nor to have the troublesome job of killing a pike, who of all the animal creation surely clung the most tenaciously to life. What they did not know of was the Down-life shared by Clare and Lovel; for on those splendid, solitary heights they could meet and meet again, unobserved by any save the sheep, the larks, and the circling hawks, indifferent to the pacing side by side of the two horses over the bitten turf. Various were the avocations which took Lovel to the Downs, and if occasion required he would call on Clare to lend him a hand, ordering her about, and she, meekly, followed his directions as an apprentice. She had even been in his shepherd’s-hut with him all day during the lambing season, when a blizzard swept across the hills, and he had his hands so full with his poor ewes that must be tended and sheltered that he had no time left for niceties to spare Clare’s feelings. With set teeth she had helped him that day, and had counted his brief comment at the end as a well-earned reward. And she had ridden away in the evening with her head held down against the driven sleet, and herpony’s mane blown right across his neck with little lumps of ice in the rough hair, and behind her the yellow light that shown in the window of Lovel’s hut had grown smaller and more distant, and she had known that during the whole of the night and of many days and nights to follow he would keep the vigil attendant upon his trade, and would lay on the straw beside his little paraffin lamp the poor weak new-comers into so unpropitious a world.
In all seasons and weathers she had known the Downs with him, and like sailors at sea they had accepted the bad with the good, without thought of avoidance. Like all English country people, they disliked extremes of heat as well as extremes of cold; a high summer’s day, when the heat winked along the ridge of the hills, held for them none of that poetic quality it holds for the idle. Their point of view was sober and practical; if feed grew short, they hoped for rain; if the corn in the lowlands were flattened by rain, they hoped for fine weather; it was simple. If the day were a holiday,—that is to say, if Lovel had taken no job,—then they were as content as any other idlers to lie soaked in sun upon the most exposed flank of upland they could find. They would pull the long grass to nibble it down to the juice at the end, or Lovel with a blade of grass drawn taut between his thumbs would shrill the empty air with strange whistlings, or they would tease the ants and small insects by walling them in with a circle of miniature chalk cliffs.Their laughter spread with the song of the larks as fresh and clear as water, and the great spaces lay all around them with the cloud-shadows chasing one another down and over the slopes, and creating in their overhead passage the perpetual variety of mood and colour of the Down-country.
Down-country, so temperamental; in halcyon days bright and blithe; candid in its well-being, wholesome in its wind-cleaned delight; yet keeping in the valleys and sweeping folds the deeper shadows which gave it tone like the soberness of some latent melancholy. Upon the heights it would receive the sun, and glitter and rejoice like a woman in love, but the cup of the valleys was deep with a greater richness, with remembrance, and foreboding. So, although simple and large in outline, the country,—to Clare and Lovel personal, not inanimate,—was not simple with a shallow or trivial simplicity; not the simplicity of ignorance or emotional poverty; but with a wisdom that still had the courage to be gay,—the reckless gaiety of the profoundly tragic. No monotony was possible over that landscape of sunburnt tan, of blue distances, and stains of a lowering purple. No monotony, no sentimentality; the moods all visible at once over the range of country, all definite and certain of their intention, whether the naked sunburnt heights, or the brooding plunge of shadow.
Only in winter that ever-present reminder of tragedy fulfilled itself. In summer and inautumn it robed itself in peacock colours, blue and bronze, a sorrow as sumptuous as the sorrow of a queen. But in the winter the splendour was gone, only an austerity like stone remained; grey disillusioned Downs, shaven by the winds, shelterless, inconsolable. Then came the snow; and up here, where no trees but the beech-clumps broke the white, where no hedges strove with their little maudlin pretence of security to lessen the rigour of the country towards the softness of man, here no flinching availed; grief was naked as joy had been naked, to be met and fought with, until that despondency should pass and the heights leap out once more into the sun of spring, with only the reverberations of the storm rolling still about the valleys.
Lovel, who resembled the Downs themselves both in his exuberance of spirit with the threat ever-lurking, and in his despair, which was so extravagant and so profound when it overcame him that it seemed he could never again lift himself out of the slough,—Lovel who for all his thought and his reading had never looked into himself or named what he would have found there,—Lovel who could no more control his moods than the Downs could forbid the sun to burnish their gold-brown slopes or the blizzard to rack them with a hell-ride of gale and sleet,—Lovel came upon Clare standing in the sun knee-deep in a dew-pond on one of the highest ridges of the Downs.
Her patient pony, well-accustomed, strayedand browsed near at hand; he snuffed the dry thymy turf; he plucked with disdain at a tuft of grass fit only for sheep-pasture. This was not horse-pasture, this bare beggarly brown turf up here in the glitter of the sun, beneath the exposed and unsheltered windiness of the sky. Open country, open country; no higher peaks to climb; miles of open rolling country on every side. The clean and airy liberty of open country under a blue-and-white heaven. Clare stood in the circle of the dew-pond holding her skirts picked up above her knees. She was laughing; she had seen first the ears of Lovel’s horse prick up over the rim of the hill, then she had seen Lovel himself, not looking to find her, then the shoulders of his horse, breasting the sharp climb, then the complete slim silhouette of horse and rider and two dogs at heel. And she had hailed him; a shout of laughter mingled in with his name; she had hailed him. At the top he had drawn rein, shading his eyes against the sun, and looking down he had seen her, standing down in the bowl of the dew-pond. He had caught her in the act of hesitation, afraid lest she should venture out of her depth. Capless, she stood in the dew-pond, holding up her skirts, and her white legs disappeared just below the knee into the water. She laughed up at him, holding her head a little on one side in the way he knew well, which gave her a fleeting and elusive appearance, so that her mouth and eyes seemed to slant upwards with a fugitive and sylvan air, which materialisedbut rarely,—or when, as now, he caught her at an angle,—but which always hovered there, not always willing to be revealed, but ready to glance out at the right summons, to whomsoever should hold the shibboleth to produce it.
He drew rein, looking down at her, and her pony whinnied a recognition, and strayed loose to join Lovel’s horse.
“Not deep!” he called to her.
She ventured a few steps further.
“You have seen it empty,” he rallied her.
“Do you know the secret?” she asked, stopping. The water, disturbed by her advance, rippled round her knees.
“Very few know it,” he replied cryptically.
“Ah, but you, Lovel, you know all those secrets. How do they puddle the clay? How, to hold the water? I am sure you know it, Lovel! Are you a dowser, too? they say so, in the village. They say you can pace over the country until the hazel-twigs jump in your hand. Is it true?”
“They say a lot of things in the village,” he replied laughing.
“Does it matter to you what they say?”
“Not when I’m up here,” he replied, tossing his head, and his horse tossed his head too, and the bridle jingled.
“Well, but tell me the secret of how they make the dew-ponds,” she persisted, kicking with her foot into the water.
“The secret would soon be a secret no longer,”he answered, putting her off. “And I never said I knew it.”
“Ah, but you do,” she said; and thought that those who knew the secret of the dew-ponds got their knowledge in a straight line of tradition from the earliest inhabitants of those regions. “Oh, I do envy you, Lovel,” she said, forgetting that she stood in water and stamping with her foot so that it splashed up round her, “I do envy you all the queer things you have got behind you,—they all seem to run into your fingers with your blood.”
He laughed again,—he seemed to be in a good humour to-day, and well he might be, with the bright grass glistening round his horse’s feet, and over his head the bright blue-and-white spaces where the kestrels hovered like little specks, and the green pattern of the fields far, far below. He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she were a nymph,—a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. The olive and the myrtle were alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat; the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both represented their own particular aspect ofromance, each to the other. “Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.
It was some days after this that Clare received from Calladine an invitation to visit him at Starvecrow. Although she was immediately aware that she would not reply with a refusal, she felt a shiver of chill as though she had been beckoned in from the warm sunshine to a cold and cavernous place. The impression was alarmingly vivid both in generality and detail. She had met the groom coming up the short carriage-drive of the Manor House, and after reading Calladine’s note looked up at the gaunt, raw-boned animal that the groom was riding, at its ugly quarters, and long melancholy head; she looked into the basket in which Calladine had sent her an offering, and saw the trout lying on their bed of long grasses, neatly ranged, pointed nose alternating with forked tail. The gift seemed to her gruesome and faintly absurd; trout, cold, plump, and dead. Yet on the evenings when she had gone fishing with Lovel under the willows, the trout as they laid them in the long lush grass had seemed gleaming and iridescent, cool from the water, and together they had examined the scales on the meshes of the landing-net. Lovel had lifted up their gills with his fingers, and had compared them to the under-side of a mushroom. But these trout of Calladine’swere merely dead; their eyes protruded; their gills were closed. She glanced up at the groom, and fancied that a despondency clung about him as about his horse, an absence of joy; and then she thought that this gloom came upon Calladine’s possessions because he revelled in having it so; the very name of his house, Starvecrow!—had he taken the house for the sake of its name! had he bought this horse because of its starting bones and dejected droop? engaged the groom for his sallow, unshaven appearance and lank hair? dismal envoys that he might send in reminder from Starvecrow out into a cheerful world?
She turned slowly towards the house, carrying the basket of trout on her arm. She had sent back a message of thanks to Calladine with an intimation that she would visit him on the following day, and already the prospect of this visit was hanging over her, damp and chill. Listlessly, when the afternoon arrived she put on her muslin frock and her big straw bonnet, listening meanwhile for the sound of wheels on the gravel; she saw her own reflection in her mirror, saw herself cool and outwardly serene, but the picture gave her little pleasure. This with Calladine was one of the few appointments she had ever made in her free life, and it irked her curiously. From the first moment of her waking in the morning she had felt tied. Like a hobbled colt she wanted to kick herself free. That her afternoon should be restricted, ordained in advance,—in the midst of her resentment she had laughed at her childishness, had been ashamed of her egoism. What would become of her were she suddenly to find herself bound for life? She had been content to look after her father’s innocent wants; she had not shown herself selfish towards him; she could absolve herself from that charge; but then, he had not encroached on her comings and goings; she had given freely from love what she might have refused from duty. This appointment with Calladine was a duty; now she was tied; she could not take her pony or her fishing-rod this afternoon if the whim seized her. No, she must wait obediently for the arrival of Calladine’s gig; she must climb into it and sit meekly beside the sallow groom while he drove her to Starvecrow. Arrived there, Calladine would be waiting for her, and his pleasure would be her irritation. The appointment which had been a restraint to her would have been only a delight to him. A sulky child, she stared out of the window for the approach of the gig. She heard it now; the scrunch of the wheels, the clop-clop of the horse’s trot, and now it came into sight, the familiar high, ramshackle affair, gaunt horse and all, clanking up the carriage-drive and stopping in its abrupt, dislocated way in front of the door. Clare went down. Martha Sparrow was in the hall; she crooned over Clare in her lilac-coloured gown. “A flower come to life, my pretty child....” Mr. Warrener came out of his study; he saw Clare standing inthe shadowy hall with Martha fingering round at her flounces; he pushed his spectacles on to his forehead. “Why, Clare, where are you going?” “To Mr. Calladine, father, I told you.” “Ah, to be sure, to be sure; well, he has all the luck; you’re a pretty thing to see.” She kissed him, laughed, sprang up into the gig, it started off clumsily, swaying from side to side, and the Manor House was lost to sight behind the trees.
The gaunt horse spanked along the lanes; Clare did not talk to the groom, who drove with a serious concentration which promised no unbending. She wondered whether all the servants with whom Calladine surrounded himself were as unprepossessing. She was often more than a little impatient with Calladine for his deliberate mournfulness; but, more especially since he had told her in so strange a manner the history of his life’s passion, she had tried to school herself into a reverent sympathy. She felt that she was very young and consequently ignorant, and that he was old, sad, experienced, and entitled to her respect. Instinctively she folded her hands in her lap, and sat demure. But in a moment she was again laughing at herself, and, although she tried to reprove herself for the levity, at him. The vexation of the appointment was lifting from her; her spirits rose, now that she was out in the lanes and could watch the caterpillars hanging from the oaks; she would not be affected by Calladine’s gloom, by hissoberness, his measured smiles. Of what use could she be to him if she allowed herself to become as repressed in his presence as he was himself? Turning to the groom, she began to talk to him, persevering until she got a response, and even some growls of information about Mr. Calladine’s stable; as Clare uncovered her own knowledge, the man became less grudging, and presently as their argument developed along lines of expert interest he was impelled to say that Miss Warrener evidently knew a horse when she saw one. Clare laughed merrily, and valued the compliment extremely. What she knew, she replied, she had learnt from experience and from Gipsy Lovel,—for she was glad of an opportunity of pronouncing his name. Ah, that was a chap for a horse, he said; or indeed for anything that went on four legs; that was the chap to go to a horse-fair with; Miss Warrener would never be cheated if she had Gipsy Lovel to give her advice. He seemed to have a feeling about horse-flesh; no need to pull their mouths open or run his hand over their fetlocks. He, the groom, wondered that Lovel didn’t set up as a horse-dealer himself. He would guarantee that Lovel could take in most men in the county; yes, and the whole West of England, for the matter of that. Clare triumphed in his sudden loquacity. Even the gaunt horse seemed to be sharpening its pace,—though possibly that might be only because they were drawing nearer to Starvecrow. The groom laid the whip acrossits withers, and it broke into a sort of bundling half-canter which rocked the gig up and down and obliged Clare to cling on to her big hat; she was amused, because she thought that this was the effect of Lovel. They had come now to a particularly deserted tract of country, along the foot of the Downs; and, after climbing the slope a little way, they saw a group of buildings upon an eminence, sheltered,—if shelter it might be called,—by a thicket of wind-blown thorn upon the easterly side. Other trees there were none, nor any other houses within sight, nothing but the tan rolling of the Downs and the road that climbed the hill and was lost to sight over the other side. She descried Calladine there at his gate, waiting for her, exactly as she had expected to find him. “I hesitated between coming to fetch you myself, and remaining here to welcome you when you arrived,” he said, as he came forward to help her out of the gig.
She knew at once how pleased he was to see her. There was no affectation about his pleasure. It was a tremendous event for him to receive her at his house, and he conducted her with infinite solicitude, and a half-hesitation which, she knew, was intended to give her the opportunity of noticing and commenting upon every detail. By a curious process now all the naïveté of her childishness and her upbringing dropped from her, and she became as delicately gracious as any skilful woman; she remained a little aloof from him, receiving his deference asthough it were her due, rewarding him in exchange with her friendliness and her interest, smiling at his eagerness with an amused and sympathetic smile, placing here and there the word of approval he most desired, and bestowing upon his possessions the appreciation or the gentle derision which for ever after would advance them in his eyes. He had never before seen her in this mood. He was bewildered and charmed. He had known her delightful and inconsequent, wayward and perplexing; he had seen her as a child, he had thought of her as a spirit, he had never yet seen her as a woman. Her very gestures, he thought, were different; quieter, more secure; and yet she had not lost that fugitive air of hers, that shy grace; the combination enchanted him. He followed her into the house; he was sure, now, that Starvecrow was pleasing her; he need not have been so apprehensive. To rest his eyes upon her in his little hall, so cool in her lilac frock, filled him with the deepest and most disturbing joy. It was he, now, who grew tremulous and at a loss, while she remained so exquisitely self-possessed. Seeing that he scarcely knew how best to carry on his hospitality,—for he seemed incapable of anything but of gazing at her,—it was she who led the way into the inner room, and touched his books and looked at the pictures on his walls, and at the view out of his window. Had he but known it, she was thinking Starvecrow worthy of its name, a desolate place, in a situation without the grandeurto compensate for its austerity, and without the comfort to excuse its meanness.
“You should plant some cottage roses against your house,” she said, “and some bushes of Old Man’s Beard.”
“It shall be done,” he replied, without taking his eyes off her.
She sat down in his worn old leather chair, took off her hat, and hung it on the chair-knob. She seemed to him to light the room by her presence, the room which was dingy if not actually poor, and which had never before had in it anything so delicate and fresh as Clare with her muslins and her small yellow head leaning against the chair-back. But he was afraid almost of speaking to her, lest he should scare her away, so like was she to some small shy animal which by wary gentleness he should have enticed into his home. “You are wearing all the colours of the dawn,” he said, “lavender and primrose,” and ceased because he dared not go on to the blue of her eyes, that he thought like the blue of the early sky.
She smiled at him. “You have made no garden here, in all your twenty years,” she said. “You should build a wall round a square enclosure, and fill the beds between your paths. The wall would protect you against the wind and you should grow lupin and iris and tulips, honesty, sweet sultan, and snapdragons, and a path down the centre between cottage lilies and China roses.”
She was speaking against her own convictions; she infinitely preferred her Downs uncultivated; but her instinct, strangely indulgent towards Calladine, told her what would most comfort him.
“I have no heart to do such things,” he replied, “but since you order it I will set about it immediately.”
“Mr. Calladine,” she said, leaning forward, “when you answer me so gravely, are you indeed serious, or are you laughing at me in your sleeve?”
“Serious! you can have no idea how serious,” he exclaimed, tempted to speak out his whole heart, as he had never before been tempted, by the sight of her earnest eyes; and he got up, and walked about the room. “Don’t you know, that your caprice would be my only interest? my only law? You are the only person,” he said, recollecting himself, “that has taken an interest in my poor concerns,—cared whether I steeped myself in sorrow or dragged myself out into the wholesomeness of a new life.” (“Ah,” cried Clare’s conscience within her, “how little I have cared!”) “But for you,” he went on, “I should have continued in my dejection; only your encouragement, lately, has revived me, and I have realised that I was not the old and finished man I had resigned myself to be. If you order me a garden, I will turn gardener at fifty,—if you, that is, will be my critic and my adviser, if you will command me to do this and do that.”
She saw, then, how easily swayed he was, and how an idea could take possession of his mind, for beyond an occasional kindness she could not be said to have interested herself at all in his concerns or to have encouraged him to forsake the gloomy ways of retrospect or his solitary habits of life. Still she was very glad that his imagination should be able to thrive on such meagre nourishment; it did her no harm, and she was glad if it might do him good.
“You have surely thought for long enough about the past,” she said idly.
Again he seized upon her words, and she reflected with some amusement that she had never imagined any one so susceptible to suggestion.
“I will act on what you say,” he exclaimed. He went across to his writing table and took from his drawer an etching of a woman, slightly tinted, with coarse curly hair, cruel eyes, and a large beautiful mouth. Calladine tore it into fragments; he flung the pieces on the ground and stamped on them. “I never had the courage to do that before,” he said, staring at Clare and breathing heavily; he looked really frightened at what he had done, and she knew that he wanted her to reassure him. For her part she wanted to laugh, but knew that she must not. “You should have done it years ago,” she said sensibly, “instead of living in the house with that locked into your drawer.”
“I used to take it out in the evening and pore over it until it nearly came alive,” whisperedCalladine. He kicked the fragments with his toe. “You are my angel,—my guardian,” he said, turning passionately to Clare.
She saw that the contradictory being was greatly shaken by what he had done. “He will regret it, and be glad,—be glad, and then regret again,” she thought shrewdly to herself. She wondered whether she had done wisely in not stopping his hand: would he be freed henceforth, or would he be haunted? “Now burn those pieces,” she said with authority, “or I shall think of you trying to piece them together again, when you sit alone here in the evenings.” The idea was half-frightening to her, and half-absurd. “Burn them,” she repeated, pointing to the grate.
There was no fire, but Calladine obediently gathered up the fragments and burnt each one separately, holding its corner to a lighted match. Clare watched him, thinking how familiar must once have been to him those shredded features, how he must have kissed that beautiful mouth and imagined that he sought for truth in those narrow eyes which only returned him mockery. He knelt beside the grate, burning carefully, and crumbling the charred paper between his fingers, piece by piece. She felt sorry for him suddenly.
“You must not be lonely without your picture,” she said with great gentleness.
“I hated it,” said Calladine; “let it go; you have delivered me. You saw her, didn’t you, before I burnt her? you saw her exactly as shewas: I was no match for her.” Clare thought that he could probably say this without exaggeration, and that, had she herself met the other woman, few words would have been necessary between them for the understanding of Calladine. How deep was the confederacy of sex! she had never thought of it before; she smiled at Calladine with a detached pity. “I have no longer any past,” he went on, “only the present, hourly more lovely. Shall we go out for a little and leave the dust of the past to settle in this room?”
Clare was glad to go out, for the room was making upon her a sad and cold impression, but she found little comfort in the exterior of the house, ungarnished as it well could be. She began to talk to Calladine again about the garden he must make, for not only was she really distressed for his own sake by the bleakness of his dwelling, but annoyed, almost, in a feminine way, by the man’s incompetence to deal with his own existence, and not unflattered, either, by his submission to her directions and the attentiveness with which he received every word that came from her lips. She saw that he clung to her as his salvation; she became more autocratic, with a pretty tyranny. She would transform his patch of desert into an oasis; she, over at King’s Avon would think of this Starvecrow as blooming into gaiety and colour by her orders. Calladine watched her, and she knew that he watched. But she never allowed him to speakof herself, keeping him rigorously to the business of his new garden; her laughter rang out, and she rallied him, awaking almost against his will the rare smile on his melancholy lips. At moments he thought, as he followed her about, that he must stretch out his hands and cry to her “Clare! Clare!” No one ever treated him as Clare treated him; other people always took him at the valuation he set upon himself, composed their faces to a becoming sobriety as soon as they perceived his own, and quitted his grave company with relief. He chose to construe their acquiescence into a grim sort of flattery. But Clare was privileged; Clare might assume whatever mood she would; he would endeavour to follow her, perhaps clumsily, for he had lost,—or liked to think that he had lost,—the habit of lightheartedness; still, she should teach it to him again and he would renew his youth.
He had come to the age when the sense of passing days induced a panic. Clare had youth, Clare had a reserve of youth on which he could draw without impoverishing her; he felt that she gave him life as surely as if he drank it at her breast.
She seemed, as she stood in the centre of the square she had designated as his future garden, to be all the flowers which should blow there presently at her command. He said this to her, in that courtly artificial manner he had of saying such things, with so much froth of emotion underneath. It was the first personal remark he hadmade to her since they had come out of the house, and it gave him relief. But she only laughed again, and this time he could have shaken her with rough hands for her laughter, and for her holding off the words which would stifle him if they remained unspoken. “Clare,” he said violently.
She glanced at him with that new self-possession; she was maddening him, though not with the purpose he would have attributed to any other woman. How she eluded him! how she would perpetually elude him! and so hold him forever. He knew himself to be fastidious enough to esteem only that which he had lost, or could never hope to seize. “Clare,” he repeated, this time with a genuine despair.
They went back into the house, where tea had been made ready; she noted his preparations, the honey, the girdle-cakes, the fruit and cream. He deprecated them, “A bachelor’s house....” “What could be better?” she replied; and had slipped from him once more. She ate heartily, borrowing a handkerchief to wipe the cream from her lips, unaccountably a child again, and a new bewilderment to him. He now felt that what he might have said to the woman of whom he had had a glimpse, he could not say to the child who trusted herself in his house, and he thought with baffled anger, how ably she managed her alternative of weapons. A spoonful of honey in one hand, and a cake in the other, she leaned forward, talking to him, he more helplessthan ever, and she more completely in control. He dared not think of his house when her presence should have gone out of it; he wondered whether he would suffer least pain by returning to his sitting-room directly the gig had driven away, by going for a walk on the Downs and returning only after dusk, or by driving her himself back to the Manor House. The idea of her going at all was intolerable; perhaps he had been unwise to ask her to come; perhaps he had only been at his favourite trick of turning the knife in the wound. But she was speaking, she was saying, “I shall come again to see whether you have prepared our garden against the autumn.”
By her movement he saw that she was about to take her leave; he leapt out of his own chair and stood over her, saying wildly, “Don’t go, Clare, don’t; how can I bear your going? don’t leave me again, stay with me a little longer, I can’t face the loneliness without you,” and a stream of incoherent ejaculations flooded from his lips, while his hands fumbled towards her, yet with a remnant of soberness he strove to restrain them. Clare looked at him calmly, with wondering eyes. “But I must go home if my father is not to be kept waiting for his dinner,” she said.
Calladine stepped back instantly and released her. “I am sorry,” he said. “The loneliness, perhaps, gets a little on my nerves.” He passed his hand across his eyes. “You are the firstvisitor I have welcomed here for many years, and your presence threw me off my balance.” He tried to speak lightly. “Come, I will take you to the gig,” but still he lingered, looking to see whether she had left anything behind, in a last attempt to delay her. “Shall I drive you home?” he asked desperately.
“No,” she said, not wanting his company at all, “stay here and begin to dig the garden.” She smiled. She was anxious to get away. Not until she was out in the lanes would she again breathe freely. She went without any appearance of hurry, thanking Calladine, who tore from his solitary rose-bush all the branches he could crowd into her arms, and climbed back into the gig as she had come. He saw her go, despair and joy and anguish rending him.
The strain and anxiety of being with Calladine drove her, as always, towards the wish to be with Lovel. “Brother,” she could have called him, from the ease of his companionship. She could have put her hand into his, simply for the trust she had in him. But she knew too well that the indifference of his greeting would repulse instantly any such movement of confidence on her part; he would glance at her, when they met, and his glance would take her back into the assurance of their old intimacy, but there would be no softening of sentiment in it. Never that; a challenge and a bracing, but never compassion or a caress. Could she ever go with a trouble to Lovel? Herinstinct leapt up into an affirmative; he would listen gravely, would understand without commiserating, would counsel quietly, and would fortify her with a sense of his reliance in her trustworthiness. He would trust her to behave always as he would expect that she should behave. She would endure anything rather than disappoint Lovel. More: even in his absence, even though he should know nothing of it, she kept herself constantly up to the level of his standards. She winced at any thought of his possible disapproval. She had not for him, nor could she imagine herself having, the indulgent and,—school herself to reverence as she would,—contemptuous pity she had for Calladine; what had she told Calladine to do? to grow lupin and iris, tulips and honesty, sweet sultan and snapdragons, in a walled patch of what had once been Down-land! towallthe Down? was it possible that she had told him to wall in the Down? what gulf she must divine between him and herself, between him and the Down-country in which he had elected to live, if she could tell him to wall in the Down. Yes, even a square, a stray square of Down, forgotten between a lane and Starvecrow’s farm-house. What would Lovel say, if she told him that? True, Lovel himself was sometimes set on to plough the Down, and willingly proceeded with the task; but that was different: that was the old struggle between man and the soil from which he wrested his daily bread; Lovel would tame the Down to growbarley for man or roots for his cattle,—a poor crop at best, extorted from the recalcitrant soil, like charity from an irreconcilable spirit, a poor crop, flaunting red poppies for its last flag of insubordination,—Lovel would plough the Down for that purpose, and relish the tussle, meeting in mutual understanding an adversary as stubborn as he himself; but for his mere pleasure he would not wall in a square to grow the effeminate flowers of decoration. They would blow and curtsey, Calladine’s flowers, until a wind swept over them from the angry Downs and laid them low,—but stay, what had she said?—“The wall will protect them against the wind.” Yes, and protect Calladine too: he could not stand up against the winds from the Downs. So, in her heart, she pitied Calladine and was disposed to see him protected? What had he done to deserve from her the insult of that charity? She had seen Lovel go out into a snowstorm on the heights and had not feared for his discomfort or his danger, any more than he feared for hers. Calladine she would have prevented with kind, firm words on the threshold of the door.
And it so happened, at her first meeting with Lovel after her visit to Starvecrow, that she, riding, sighted him in the distance following a plough-team over a curve of hill. He was not at work in one of the folds of the lower reaches, the favourite position for the rare stains of cultivation. He and his team were in outline against the sky, following the slow and classicalprogression of the furrow over the curve; the hempen reins looped slackly from the horses’ heads to his hand; the man, the horses, and the plough pursued their way, disengaged from all but the essentials of their labour, with the old inevitable simplicity. Clare rode towards the brown patch and, reaching Lovel, rode at a walk beside him up and down the freshly-turned furrows. The bright share cut cleanly into the sod, turning it over. They both watched it, as it slid through the sod, with a professional and satisfied criticism. “Poor soil,” Lovel said once; otherwise they had not spoken. She liked to watch him plough, appreciating his dexterity, and the jump of the plough-shaft under his hand; she liked his voice ringing out to the horses at the turn. The slow rhythm soothed her. “Who are you ploughing for?” she asked. “Morland,” he said briefly. “Shall you be finished by six?” she asked, looking across at the westering sun; and he nodded. “I’ll wait,” she said, and getting off her pony, she slipped the reins over her arm and stood watching Lovel without impatience.
At six he unhitched his team and came across to her, the horses slouching along behind him. “An ungrateful job,” he remarked, staring resentfully at the stony furrows; “they never put me on to the loam; always the chalk for me.” “I wish you had a bit of land of your own,” she said. “Ay, I’d get the better of it,” he replied, suddenly eager.
His team stood patient, heavy and shining compared to her small pony. The curious light of sunset began to creep over the Downs, turning their tan to a rosy orange. “Fine weather,” nodded Lovel. He turned to his horses, and began to adjust a bit. The rooks were settling on the patch that he had ploughed. He stooped down, and picking up a lump of earth, crumbled it between his fingers. Clare, observing his fine, bony, downward-bent face, knew that he was reflecting. Sure enough, he raised it to say, “How would you bring them up, if you had children?”
“Have you been thinking about children?” she asked, amused.
“It’s thinking about children,” he replied seriously, “that shows you the things we base life on. There’s money, there’s humbug, and there’s death. What do we say over and over again to children? ‘Don’t touch that, you’ll break it, it’ll cost money to replace.’ ‘Be polite,’—that’s humbug. ‘Don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself,’—that’s death, really, or at any rate the fear of injury. A child doesn’t see much difference between being alive or being dead. As for money, or for time, which is the same thing, it takes him years to get his brain round those two things. It’s a fine and careful system we’ve got, haven’t we? While I was following the plough, I was having an imaginary conversation with a child. ‘If I was dead,’ said he, ‘I shouldn’t know that I was dead, so whatwould it matter?’ And I couldn’t find an answer in my head.”
“But if you had children of your own,” said Clare, “you would find yourself bringing them up in the same way.”
“Oh, perforce,” he replied, “but that’s the end of all theories. We’re chained by necessity; it’s the wire across the path that brings the horse down in mid-gallop. We’ve got to teach our children caution,—the fear of death,—merely to keep them alive until they grow up. And all that we should enjoy teaching them is obscured by the don’ts and the shoutings-out to keep their limbs whole and our crockery unbroken.”
“Well,—and humbug?” she said.
“That’s civilisation. ‘What’s polite,’ asks the child, and ‘what’s a lie?’”
“Would you like to have children of your own?” asked Clare.
“Yes,” replied Lovel briefly, and changed the subject. “I have to bring a handful of sheep home for Mr. Morland from the fair at Marlborough on Tuesday. Will you be going to the fair? Horses, mostly.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Clare in delight, clapping her hands.
“Better meet me there, as ’twere by chance,” said Lovel, suddenly a little grim. “‘Miss Warrener taking up with gipsies,’—I can hear them talk. No, meet me there, make out you’re interested in a pony, and fetch me to have a look at him.”
“But we can ride home together?” said Clare crestfallen.
“We’ll meet outside the town and come home over the Downs. I don’t want all the gig-wheels in amongst my sheep.”
She laughed suddenly, seeing how practical he was, and liking it.
He slipped the reins of his team from off the gate-post where he had hitched them, and hoisted himself, sitting side-ways, on to one of the great elephantine backs. He sat there, slack and swaying to the horse’s tread, in the manner of all carters, and the other two horses lumbered after him, their hoofs going plop-plop in the thick dust of the road, and the hair round their fetlocks flopping as on spaniels’ paws. Clare followed him, light on her pony. They did not become him well, she thought, those great horses; he demanded the slimmer, swifter animals of creation, hares, Arabs, or deer. But it amused him to play the plough-boy. How indifferent he seemed, she thought,—scarcely looking at her, riding on with his gaze held towards the sunset; how different from Mr. Calladine’s eagerness to propitiate her; and a tiny sore of feminine vanity was pricked. Then she laughed at herself, immediately; what was she expecting from Lovel, her Lovel? expecting him to be different from himself? she would not like it if he were. And she knew that he was content to have her there, even though he never troubled to look around.
Lovel set off in a practical mood for Marlborough fair. He was thinking of the sheep he had to buy and bring home for Farmer Morland; in a way the farmer’s trust provoked in him a sort of contemptuous pride, and, poacher and free-lance though he was, he would have scorned to make a penny’s profit for himself out of the transaction. The commission was given him to execute; the farmer relied upon his honesty and his knowledge; the thing was simple: that was a trust of which he would not take advantage. On his lawless expeditions, he was betraying no man’s confidence; the keepers all knew him, and, meeting him unprofessionally in the lanes, would exchange with him a grin and even a wink of understanding. They stood for the law, and he for the skill that would defeat the law; they knew it, and he knew that they knew it; that was a frank challenge, with sport in it on either side; but as for Farmer Morland’s sheep, a mere matter of money, he would never demean himself to a bargain with the middle-man, and the farmer’s interests, for the moment, were his own. He might next week be snaring the same farmer’s ditches; that was a separate matter.
At the back of his mind, as he rode ambling along on the strip of grass at the roadside towards Marlborough, he retained the knowledge that he had arranged with Clare a meeting at the fair. The knowledge lay there, like a warm patch in his consciousness, and he enjoyedkeeping it just out of sight, while he directed his thoughts on to the sheep, and noted the farmers, shepherds, and cattle-men who streamed along the road in the same direction that he himself was taking, some on horseback going at a quick trot, some in their high spanking gigs, and some crawling in farm-carts with pigs and calves bundled up under a net. All the pastoral population of the district seemed to be streaming towards Marlborough along the great arterial road, and Lovel had no doubt that they were streaming equally towards it along the road on the further side of the town, and not along the main road only, but converging upon Marlborough by all the lanes and lesser roads, from Devizes and Savernake, from Ogbourne St. George and Ogbourne St. Andrew, from the Winterbournes and the Hintons. He surveyed them as they passed him; they were known to him for the most part, solid men and honest enough, their faces as broad and open as the country which had bred them; and the shepherds, who with their slow, limited movements seemed to resemble the animals committed to their care, contented in not having a preoccupation beyond the recurrent business of the animal year, with its breeding, shearing, and dipping; and the old wiseacres, who, although they no longer bought or sold, made a practice of attending all the local fairs where their fat cobs would carry them, there to criticise and shake their heads over the methods of their juniors. Lovel watched them all go by,feeling himself slightly alien, as though he had been all the while conscious of his darkness beside their ruddiness.
Gig-wheels rattled and hoofs spanked crisply along the ringing road, and Lovel watched them go by, the stream, like life itself, hurrying past him. That old road had known the traffic of the past and present, and,—although there was not much to tempt his reflectiveness in the wide airiness of the light-coloured summer morning,—he said to himself, addressing his thoughts to the rubicund pre-occupied agriculturists, that after all the hair-splitting and tangle introduced by love, malice, envy, ambition, or their kindred, were cleared aside and done with, the main business of life was nothing more than the maintenance of life, else why all this buying and selling, this labour and breeding, this system which produced tilled fields and stout farmers trotting to market, cattle-pens in Marlborough market-place, and booths with headstalls and shovels? so that nine-tenths of the population were so taken up with the business of living that it was time to die before they had ever had leisure to take a look at life at all. Lovel, thinking thus, looked at them in his detached way with a little envy, a good deal of sarcasm, and a complex wistfulness, failing to find any meaning in the conclusions his logic had led him to. A lot of pother, just to keep alive; and for what purpose?
All over the civilised world, on which Marlborough was a speck, they were doing it; butthey would not understand Lovel if he told them so, and he knew better than to diminish his reputation of being a practical man.
And now in spite of all his thoughts which bore him away on absences of speculation, his horse, which had been carrying him more soberly along, brought him in sight of Marlborough, and he saw the concourse of gigs, from which the horses had been unharnessed and led away, standing parked with the shafts stuck upright in the air, and beyond them the lime-whitened hurdles which penned up the tossing sheep; he saw the gaitered legs moving among the open spaces; he heard the barking of sheep-dogs as they rushed excitedly round, he heard the cries of the vendors and the lowing of the puzzled cattle. A cattle-market and horse fair was to him no novelty; he got off his horse, and, not thinking any more now of the cumbersome system of civilisation which had gathered all those men and beasts together from their homes to the same spot at the same hour, he walked round surveying with as shrewd an eye as any farmer there the merits and demerits of the goods and livestock offered for sale. The principal business of the sale was not yet begun, but a good deal of private bartering and haggling was going on, and the sellers at the opening of their booths were crying their wares, whether wooden baskets, hay-rakes, tarred twine, leggings, hedging gloves, chaff-cutters, milking-stools, scythes, sickles, carters’ whips, churns, shears, or in fact any ofthe smaller articles necessary to pastoral or agricultural existence. The whips hung up in heaves made gay with scarlet braid; the wooden goods were displayed along the front of the booths, clean and newly-planed, showing the honest grain of the wood and smelling fresh of sawn edges and rosin; and on some of the booths, fluttering like flags, were hung coloured petticoats and shawls to tempt the men to bring home a remembrance to their women. There were tinkers too, selling shining saucepans, and gipsies with bead necklaces; a dancing bear ambling along on a leash; hokey-pokey carts, and a hurdy-gurdy; and outside the town, in a field, was encamped a travelling circus, with a roundabout and a set of swings, that awoke in its progress shrieks of terror and ecstasy all over rural England. Among the various attractions, Lovel moved quietly and alone, his two dogs at his heels, as self-contained as their master. Several strangers threw curious glances at him, for his quiet step, which they thought stealthy, and the darkness and leanness of his air, which so differentiated him from the fair sturdy weight of the crowd of countrymen. Interrogation by these strangers evoked a glance and a reply, contemptuous in intention, yet respectful in its immediate hint of mystery, “Egyptian, they do say ... queer tales.” But Lovel, if he noticed these rare enquiries, paid no attention; he was accustomed to feel himself shunned and dreaded, and his dogs seemed to share his loneliness, forthey never crossed the road to nose another dog, but kept to Lovel’s heels, and woke to interest only when there were sheep or steers to be shepherded, in the same way as the man was scornful and kept himself aloof, but spoke keenly and with authority when any question arose relating to his various professions.
Amongst the cries and distractions of the market Lovel tried to keep his mind fixed upon the sheep business which had brought him there, until that should be despatched, but there was another business which kept his eyes straying round, and that was the hope of perceiving Clare, a small and merry figure, with her pony’s rein slung over her arm. He did not shirk, in his own mind, the desire he had to catch sight of her, or the sudden relief and satisfaction that sight would bring him. So long as she was there, Heaven might pour and thunder; but all would still be well. So long as he had not seen her, the sun might shine; there would still be a darkness at his heart. Lovel long since had faced this truth with resolution and a complete despair; but with no attempt to delude himself or to minimise. It lay quietly at the bottom of his heart, a quiet patch of certainty, which shouts and jostlings and an alert scrutiny of the frightened herds were powerless to disturb. It was there, like a thing he must put out of sight for the moment, but to which he would have to turn presently, when his business was finished; he would have to turn to it,—not reluctantly, but in duecourse, like returning home,—he would have to attend to it, grapple with it, decide what was to be done.
He found that his eyes strayed round increasingly, looking for her; her continued absence produced an emptiness, in which all things seemed meaningless and noisy. Then he saw her, standing at a little distance chatting to the landlord of the Royal George Inn, and a great calm spread, lake-like, over him. She was at hand; nothing else mattered. He proceeded quietly to transact his business, having all his faculties now undistracted about him; he did not even want to look at her, now that he knew that she was there; she would wait for him and though they both stood talking to other people, without betraying the consciousness of one another he knew that they were really converging, that their two lives were really converging upon the same moment when they would join up and turn to leave the market-place, without a word spoken, together. Sure enough, next time that he looked up, she had drawn a little nearer; he was glad; he felt his absolute silent unity with her, without any question of command or submission on either side, an almost sexless unity, and one that had grown up without any agreement spoken in words.
“Those’ll be father’s sheep, Lovel?” said a voice ingratiating, at his elbow.
He looked down, and saw Daisy Morland, the farmer’s daughter, her large freckled face raised amiably to his between the puffed red ringlets.Lovel disliked Daisy as much as Daisy liked him; he avoided her company as pointedly as she sought his; the fact that he was for the moment in her father’s employ no doubt encouraged her to think that she had a certain claim on him; and now especially when his mind was bent upon Clare she seemed to him more than usually aggressive.
“I’ll help you drive them home,” she exclaimed brightly.
“No need, I have the dogs,” said Lovel, and added, “thanks,” which he was far from feeling.
“No trouble, you know,” said Daisy, giving him a look full of meaning.
Several of their neighbours were watching the scene with amusement.
“Best let me take them quietly,” said Lovel; “and anyhow,” he added, as though that settled the matter, “I’m riding.”
“Oh, but I’ve got the cob!” cried Daisy triumphantly.
“Best not,” said Lovel, for he could think of nothing else to say.
“But I say yes,” said Daisy. “Come, Lovel,” she persisted in a coaxing voice, “my own father’s sheep? You wouldn’t stop me riding alongside you?”
Lovel felt himself beaten; he had, indeed, no reasonable objection to raise.
“I shan’t be taking them by the high road.”
“So much the better,” said Daisy.
A clear voice said beside them suddenly, “Lovel, I have a favour to ask; I don’t like riding alone in such a crowd of people, may I ask your escort back to the Manor House when you go?”
He turned upon Clare, who had come up unobserved, and saw the mischief beneath the request so formally and demurely proffered.
“Of course, Miss Warrener, I am at your service,” he replied instantly, and they stood, for a moment, the two of them together, looking at Daisy, whose freckled face had grown suffused with an unbecoming red, that clashed with the red of her hair and spread patchily round her throat down to the opening of her gown.
“Forgive me for interrupting you, Daisy,” said Clare serenely.
Daisy mumbled a “No matter, miss,” class triumphing over sex.
“Can I get your pony for you, Miss Warrener?” said Lovel to Clare politely.
“I will wait till you are ready,” said Clare politely to Lovel!
Their eyes met.
“Let us go,” said Lovel irresistibly.
With the clamour of the market all round them they manœuvred the little flock of sheep out of their pen into a side-street, leading their horses till they should be clear of the town. The cries of the market place died away behind them,—the market place where Daisy still stared after them with a stare of dull, revengeful anger, toostupefied to care as yet that the whole of Marlborough should have witnessed her humiliation. But, having no pride, she minded this less than the loss of the ride she had promised herself with Lovel. Miss Warrener had got him, taken him coolly away from under her very nose; they had drifted away together without any fuss as though they belonged naturally to one another. Miss Warrener! Who would have thought of meeting Miss Warrener at a cattle-market? It was not the first time, either, that Daisy had seen Lovel and Miss Warrener together, not by any means the first time, since she was not above following Lovel secretly and spying upon him up there on the Downs when he thought himself safe. But who could have thought that the girl would have come to Marlborough fair for the purpose of meeting Lovel? for Daisy had no doubt that that had been Clare’s intention; and so cool about it, so lady-like, “Lovel, I have a favour to ask” indeed! “Lardy-da!” said Daisy to herself, mincingly, as she angrily imitated Clare’s manner in her own mind, affecting to despise it, while really envying it as she would never have acknowledged.
She woke to the realisation that the market was still proceeding, with its shouts, its jostlings, and its huddling of beasts, round her immobilised figure, and, bestirring herself, she went in search of the fat cob, meaning to follow (at a distance, and keeping out of sight), Lovel and Clare on their ponies, who, she calculated, must by nowbe driving the little flock before them over the crest of the hill.
And she saw them go, with the eyes of a jealous woman, and knew that during the two succeeding days, while Lovel kept the flock at pasture, Miss Warrener joined him again, and sat with him on the Grey Wethers; she saw all his length stretched on the grass at Miss Warrener’s feet, and saw their fingers close together over some cat’s cradle that they were playing. But she saw no more than that, though she watched so that there wasn’t much that her eyes could have missed.
Lovel rode slowly away along the back of the Down, the woolly flock tossing and huddling along in front of him, in a hurried, senseless way, controlled by the barking of the two sheepdogs, who were swift to chase up a straggler, or to straighten out any unseemly bulge at the side of the flock,—that same flock that he had bought at Marlborough fair for Farmer Morland. Lovel, knowing he could trust his dogs, rode in an abstraction. The afternoon sun cast fitful, fan-shaped gleams down through the thin clouds, like sunbeams passed through a sieve, or seen through a veil of the finest rain; it produced an effect of shadow and wet gold familiar to him in his comings and goings over the Downs, but now for the first time it occurred to him to compare the outside world with his own life; and, while his meetings with Clare might stand for that wetgold, the shadows fell mournfully into a yet more inevitable analogy.
He came down into the village by dusk, regretful as ever to exchange the heights for the hollow. Up there he seemed to shake off for a little the burden of his life, which as soon as he re-entered the ring of the village he resumed. He was, however, too well-accustomed to this sensation to pay any particular attention as he passed through the gap of the embankment. “Charmed circle,” his mother had often croaked to him, but he always shrugged disdainfully, knowing well that his imagination was all too ready to be led away along such lines, and being determined to keep his good sense wholesomely about him. The tossing woolly backs of the sheep preceded him now in a long wedge, four or five abreast, down the narrow road; they bleated uneasily, and tried to break through the hedge on either side. “Poor silly things, ye don’t like being penned up any better than the rest of us,” Lovel said to them, as he bent from his horse to open the gate into the field, and called to his dogs to head off the flock, which crowded back helter-skelter through the gate and then dispersed themselves in a sudden browsing content in the field among the monoliths.
Lovel called off his dogs and pulled the gate shut again, with the crook of his riding whip. He surveyed the sheep for a moment over the gate: they were already grazing, dim shapes in the dusk, on the comparatively rich pasture afterthe short turf of the Downs. “A good lot,” Lovel thought professionally, “and all for the butcher to-morrow,” but he had no sentiment to waste over the fate of the sheep. He rode on into the village, leaving the circle of the embankment with its few naked trees, behind him; ahead of him, the church spire rose up against the sky, and presently as he turned the corner the village street came fully into view, with all its necessary provisions for the conduct of existence: houses for folk to be born in, shops where they might purchase the paraphernalia of daily life, the tavern where they might be merry, the church where they might worship, be christened, married, or buried according to their passing needs, and the chapel where, if they were so inclined, they might differ as to their faith with their fellow-men. Church and Chapel Lovel ignored altogether, a work which his mother had begun for him by refusing flatly to have him made a Christian. “You’ll call him Nicholas Lovel for all that Parson don’t souse him,” she had said, arms akimbo, to the indignant deputation of the parish.
John Sparrow was turning into the Waggon of Hay as Lovel rode past it. “Come join us, neighbour?” he said half in mischief; the wits of the village lived in constant hope that some day, some day, a liquor potent or sufficient enough should be found to loosen the lips of Gipsy Lovel, and what secrets they would hear then! Lovel was briefly tempted, then he shook his head, and passed on: his mother and brotherwould be waiting for their meal for him, too helpless to begin without him since he had said he would be home by four. At that moment the Church clock struck six: he was two hours late, two hours he had idled away with Clare. He strung himself up to endure the reproaches with which he knew he would be greeted.
He left his horse in the small paddock at the back of the house, and, carrying the bridle and saddle over his arm, returned to the street and went into the house by the front door. The passage within was dark, but by long habit he found the hooks on which to hang up his gear, and at the noise he made in doing so, and the tread of his riding boots on the flagged floor, his brother came eagerly out into the passage, carrying a candle.
“Oh, Nicholas, is it you? Why, you promised to be home by four, and it is gone six; where in the world have you been all this time? I have been three times down the road to look for you.”
“I wish you would do nothing of the sort when I am late,” Lovel said curtly. He hated his brother at that moment, he hated the dark house and the implied reproach; his two hours with Clare flooded over him. “Is supper ready, at least?”
Olver whined, “I had forgotten about supper,—I thought only of you,—don’t be angry with me, Nicco,—I know I should have set it out.”
“It does not matter,” said Lovel: if he got angry Olver would cringe, and whine the more.“Give me the candle, I will see to it.” He took the candle from Olver’s hand, and Olver’s strange eyes gleamed on him in its light with questioning timidity. The grandfather’s clock ticked loudly out of the dark recesses of the passage. “I hope you have kept the fire going,” said Nicholas, opening the door into the living room. Olver followed at his heels with the dogs.
The living-room was dark and low, lit redly by the logs in the open fire-place, and because there was neither paint nor paper on the walls the great stones of the masonry were visible. The eye looked down instinctively to find a floor of hard-trodden mud,—and was disappointed, for the floor here, like that of the passage, was formed of flag stones. There was little furniture: a centre table, which served for meals, a few chairs of cane and wood, a tall dresser reared against one wall, containing on its shelves the crockery for everyday use, and a shelf above the fire-place, on which stood a row of china fruits in bright, shining colours,—this comprised the sum total of furniture and decoration in the whole room. Lovel scarcely noticed what was in the room and what was not; he liked the stone walls, and would not have them covered up, but them he liked for the sake of their tradition and of the quarry from which they had come.
He now set the candle on the table, and got from out of the cupboard under the dresser a loaf of bread, some cheese and butter, and thenecessary knives and plates. He did this menial work mechanically; he had long ceased to expostulate with his brother, or to induce him to mend his neglectful ways. He supposed, when he thought about it at all, that till the end of his life he would continue to serve and provide for his mother and his brother. He was their provider, their protector, their victim, their master, and their slave; that was his function, and he did not complain against it. A servant he would not get, even could he have paid the wages ten times over, because of the tattle carried to the village. He saw, then, in the simplicity of his mind, no other course open to him than to perform all the duties himself.
He set aside upon a tray a cup of tea, when he had made it, and a bowl of gruel for the bedridden old woman upstairs. This he gave to Olver, telling him to carry it up carefully, and stood himself at the foot of the stairs holding up the candle for a light. He heard the door open above, and his mother’s querulous voice. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how long she had been waiting for her tea, and of what she would have said could she have known the cause, and have seen the two figures of himself and Clare standing in the sunlight on the Downs. This radiant vision of Clare crossed his heart in a flash; it hurt him.Hadhis mother seen them? he never knew himself the true extent of the powers he must not allow himself to think about, because he was afraid of them.Gipsy Lovel, he knew they called him in the village....
Olver came down again, and still his eyes sought his brother’s face to find whether he had been forgiven. His brother’s servility and excessive devotion to himself exasperated Nicholas. He sat over his supper tossing bits of food to the dogs, and trying to pretend to himself that Olver with his searching eyes and anxious face was not sitting opposite to him in mute beseeching, hanging on to his looks and gestures. Nicholas despised himself for his churlishness, but to-night his home, his brother, were violently intolerable to him. He could not breathe, he was being stifled; he rose nervously and kicked the logs into a blaze; in the middle of doing this he swung round.
“Why do you follow me so with your gaze?” he asked impatiently.
“You are angry with me, Nicco, for having forgotten the supper, but indeed I thought only of you, and you are all I have in the world.”
Lovel said, not unkindly, “Well, you wasted your anxiety: I am better able than most to look after myself. I am not angry any more,” but in spite of his words he still felt that the house oppressed him, and that a restlessness, usually kept under control, was gnawing at him. He knew well whom to blame: it was Clare, who appeared to him the personification of all he had abjured. He had had Clare for two hours before his eyes, the sight of her stirring him as thewind stirs a bell, and now in the place of Clare he was returned to the monotony of his sad home; in the full determination not to think of Clare he crossed over to the fire where his dogs already lay sleeping, filled his pipe and lighted it, and forthwith began to dream of nothing but Clare as he sat gazing into the heart of the red ashes.
She was so little known to him; he liked to picture,—yet his bashfulness made of it a fearful pleasure,—the ordering of her room, of her clothes laid neatly in drawers; he thought of her ribbons; he knew that in the evenings she discarded her gauntlets and her cap and wore soft coloured silks—he had heard Martha Sparrow say so. He had never seen her in these; was never likely so to see her; he trembled at the thrill of so seeing her: her arms would be bare, her throat rounded and white, with red corals up it. Yet he was not sure that he desired to see her thus, save as an experience, for thus the difference between them would be most emphasised; when he met her upon the Downs, and their ponies fell into step side by side, then she was at her closest to him, seeing the heavens and the hills with the same eye, knowing the same things as he knew, reading the signs of the weather, picking up the same landmarks familiar to them both; but such was the tremulousness of his mind that he wavered between the preference of knowing her at her closest, or at her most remote: the one caressed him infinitely, but the other mystified and tempted him, andmade his pleasure into a rapturous pain. What hope had he of ever beholding in the flesh that wraith which his fancy evoked? he, Lovel, sitting over the fire with his two rough dogs and his mazed brother, and at the end of a day’s shepherding, while she dined at the Manor House with her father in the warmth of lamplight and the quiet dignity of pervading scholarship? She was gracious enough to him when they met on the hills; there, the closeness of their age and pursuits made them forgetful of their other disparities; the same rain made them both wet, the same wind ruffled their hair; but with her nod of farewell, kindly though it might be, they were instantly severed: he sank, she rose, and drifted out of his reach. He was indignant that an accident of fortune should be the mean occasion of parting them, an accident of fortune, not of birth, for by lineage the Lovels, although so fallen, had, in the pride of their Egyptian blood, no comparison to fear. Then he remembered that a deeper irony kept him apart from any woman. He had before him constantly the sight of his mother and brother to uphold him in the resolution that with the three of them the race must end. Such blood must not be carried on. But because the primitive instincts were deep and intractable in him, the renunciation roused his anger; his animal birthright was to beget sons, and he rebelled against the chance that cheated him of it; and in the same train of thought came the image, whose lovely audacityappalled even while it enraptured him, of his children and Clare’s; he saw their strong limbs and heard their laughter, an image vivid and actual, and—he swore to himself—of a wholesome inspiration. He must see and think no more of Clare! But as he came to this conclusion, Olver, who had been squatting on the opposite side of the hearth, stirring the ashes and shooting furtive glances from time to time at his brother, said, “There came for you a message while you were away, from Mr. Warrener, to know would you go up to the Manor House to-morrow, to fix shelves for his books. William Baskett came with the message, and says, Mr. Warrener is impatient, and though the books have been stacked up on the floor for over a year, must needs have the shelves ready to-morrow now that he had at last taken the idea into his head.”