So vivid was the call, so absurd the refusal, that as they reached the point above the trees of the Manor House garden, Lovel stood still and laughed out loud.
“So you go back to rooms,” he said, and laughed again, but more bitterly. “You!” he said, charged with contempt.
They were closer in understanding than ever they had been in their lives. He began to speak low and rapidly, “Clare,” he said, “there is no more softness in you or in me than there is in this soil. There is no flabby flesh, only bone. No trappings, only the hard skeleton. We’ve pared away.... If I had not taken shelter in the beechwood,—and it was the nearest approach to shelter I could get,—I might have taken you by the hand and galloped away with you; you would have come. That would have been mad. I have got my mother and Olver, and not only that, but I’ve got their blood in me. I want to have sons, and I may not, because of that blood. That was why I said I envied Calladine having only himself to overcome, when here am I as hard as flint, who might beget sons with that soft squelch in them that has rotted Olver. A bad stock, I said to myself; be strong; let it die out. And then the irony ... well, you know nothing about that, and even that seems not to matter now. Never be surprised, now, if you hear that I have been borne a son or a daughter, only don’t judge me too harshly. But how could I have brought you to my mother and Olver? and our children, yours and mine,—how could I, Clare? What chance had I but to cease from seeing you? Oh, if it had not been for them and my blood, then there would have been the Downsfor you and me, Clare. Don’t share the Downs with Calladine; he lives among them, but he isn’t strong enough to endure them. There are some countries that it takes a strong man to endure. They don’t generate strength, and they crush weakness. Calladine should have lived in towns. But now that he has got you he may be rescued.”
“You know that Mr. Calladine has not got me, and never will have me, except in name,” said Clare.
“That’s true,” replied Lovel, not disputing her statement. “Let him live with you by his side, you listening, listening patiently, for as long as he chooses to discourse, and looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. I don’t say that I envy him. (“How you despise him!” she breathed.) And yet,” he said, “don’t I envy him a little? Can I help myself? He will see you every day, he will be able to call your name through the house at any moment and hear your answer. Don’t I envy him that? Wouldn’t I change places with him for that?—But he’ll tire of you, perhaps,” he added, dropping from his sudden anguish into the old whimsicality, “tire of you even though he has never got you. No, I don’t envy him. I’ll be less lonely,” he said with a fine insolence, “than he.”
“I must go, Lovel,” cried Clare.
He stepped back from her instantly.
“Go to Calladine,—in name. Go from me,—in name,” he said, out of his torn heart. “Onlygo,—go,—go!” he added, turning away from her and laying his arm across his eyes.
She left him then, feeling, although he had not once touched her, as though she had slipped all on fire from his clasp, so close had been their communion in spite of their immense separation. She did not know where he would go, or how long he would remain, gazing after her, standing on the height of the circle. For her own part she ran down amongst the trees, across the lawn, and entered the study by one of the French windows, to find her father absorbed in his work, not having noticed her absence, and blissfully unaware of any excitement or of his daughter having been in the slightest degree in danger. He said, “Bless me! bless me!” several times while she flung herself with exaggerated animation into a description of the fire, and pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead, and stared at her with an absent-minded interest as though she had just come straight out of the heart of the flames. “Dear, dear, and where’s Calladine?” he said at last. “There was something very curious I’ve come across and particularly wanted to show him. It quite corroborates my ideas. I made sure he’d bring you home.” “But you don’t understand, father: the circus-tent caught fire, and we got separated.” “Of course, to be sure,” said Mr. Warrener mildly. “Well, I daresay he’ll come over to-morrow, and I can show it him then. It’ll interest you too, Clare....”
Clare lay awake for a long time. The windows of her room were open, and outside the breeze sighed, a plaintive spirit trying to get into the house. The world outside was crying to her, endeavouring to reach her, sending its gentle messengers to plead with her. The heavy-foliaged trees rustled, as it seemed, with an unwonted nearness to her window, and the room was full of the insects of the night, which as soon as she had turned out her lamp woke into life and fluttered against her cheek and thudded softly against the ceiling like small downy ghosts. A moth imprisoned beneath her hand struggled for freedom; she shook it off with a gesture between tenderness and revulsion. Several times she lit a match, and the little creatures became still, flecking the bed with their long mottled bodies and closed wings, but no sooner had darkness fallen again than they returned in greater numbers to their soft wheeling and the bruising of their voiceless plea. She lay now shivering in spite of the summer warmth, awed to her very soul by the deepened significance of night. Darkness by shutting away the visible and reassuring world opened the field to all finer perceptions, to all the mysterious relationships, to the purified intuition of essential unity. That sense,—the sense of unity, the discarding of all irrelevancies,—was an unexpressed link between herself and Lovel; she was not sure, everything else being sifted down to its last bare expression, that it was notthelink. Out in the nightsomewhere an owl hooted, and she heard the distant baying of a dog; the spacious presence of the Downs opened out before her widened senses, their loneliness, and the secret of their ancient tombs; their untilled defiance rolling eternally under the stars. Where was Lovel now? Was he still standing like a sentinel on the dyke, between the Downs and the sleeping village, with only the vault of the black sequined sky above his head? as she fancied him there he seemed to grow in stature until in his heroic proportions he became an embodiment of that open country which called to her, and his voice rose harmoniously in a long cry above the soughing of the breeze in the trees. Or had he plunged down from the circle after she had left him, to roam across the uplands, a wisdom in his feet, a swiftness that lifted him above fatigue? That he was out somewhere in the night she was sure; no house would confine him, not even a house whose walls were built of the sarsen stones. He was out somewhere, and every moth that bruised itself so plaintively and so impotently against her was his envoy; every sound that reached her, whether the whisper of the breeze or the churning of a night-jar, bore the burden of its message from him to her. If she called back to him “Lovel! Lovel!” surely in one form or another her voice would find him among the hills.
Part Two
She had been married for four months to Calladine.
Evening after evening they sat opposite to one another over the fire at Starvecrow. Often they played chess,—a pastime to which he seemed tirelessly addicted.
He would rarely go out; he shivered and said that it was cold,—it was true that snow lay upon the Downs and that the wind blew incessantly,—and why should a man face the bitter cold of March when no necessity compelled him and when a pleasant fire could console him within doors? Nor did he like her going out without him. So they stayed in, until she felt that she could have sent walls and ceiling flying by one extravagant gesture of her arms.
But he,—oh, how content he was! He had lost his melancholy; he had brought out for her benefit from cases and cupboards numerous objects wherewith to beautify their rooms, but her inability to distinguish among the various artists was a source of infinitesimal friction between them; “No, no, my dear;Clodion, notHoudon,” he would say, and she would accept the correction meekly with a little laugh implying that the matter was not of very great importance afterall, and with that little laugh would undo all the merit of her meekness.
At first he had enjoyed making these corrections. It flattered him to think that he had brought into an atmosphere of artistic refinement this child of the hills whose knowledge although so thorough as far as it went, was concerned with such rude things as rocks and skulls and antlers, supplemented by a working experience of shepherds’ and woodman’s lore. Certainly he had always been ready to take an interest in Mr. Warrener’s work, and to entertain a respectful admiration for the old gentleman’s scholarship, but that was a different matter: it was a tabulated profession, archæology was a branch of study suitable to gentlemen, especially old gentlemen; Mr. Warrener contributed papers to the journals of several societies; he was a distinguished and accepted authority. That was quite another matter. It had been amusing, even, to find Clare dabbling her fingers in the same research; amusing to hear the terms so glib upon her lips; surprisingly instructive, sometimes, to catch the odd bits of information she let fall while out riding with him on the Downs. But what had been amusing in the child was insufficient, even unbecoming, in the married woman. To dilettantism,per se, he had no objection; he was a believer in dilettantism; but in the name of all good taste let it be dilettantism in graceful and becoming subjects! So he tried to interest Clare interres cuites, in crystals andin the bindings of books. She looked at them at first with pleasure, they were exquisite; she had never seen such things before, or suspected their existence; she exclaimed over them, marvelled at their workmanship, fingered them, discovered new loveliness in them as she turned them this way and that. Calladine was enchanted by her appreciation; he thought he might venture further; he tempted her with subtler baits. But she returned to the fragile eighteenth century statuettes. He let her have her way, tolerant, determined not to force her interest. He watched her. There was about the little terra cotta groups a false paganism, a windy grace, that intrigued and allured her. Here was something that she could nearly understand; nearly, if not quite; not quite, for there was still something, or the lack of something, which troubled her; she could not put a name to it, consider how she might, with a pucker between her brows. These dimpled children, with the thighs and hoofs of goats,—these girls with draperies blown by the wind at the moment when the sculptor caught and fixed them motionless for ever,—these young men with slanting eyes and laughing mouths,—of what did they remind her? and in what were they so evasively deficient? She circled round the table on which they stood. Calladine’s eyes followed her in amusement. She was puzzled, this nymph who was so much more like a nymph than any nymph that Clodion ever made, puzzled by the drawing-roomfaroucherieof these false fugitives. “A little self-conscious, you find them?” he had murmured at last.
But the artistic education of Clare proved a game that had palled. She had gone clean through his objects of virtue, and had come out the other side. She seemed to have been briefly deluded by them, then to have sized them up, to have detected their essential fraud, and to have discarded them from her interest. Mortified though he was, he perceived somewhere in himself a respect for her pure, uneducated instinct. Still, as this was a thing he could not, out of self-respect, admit, he continued at intervals his efforts to guide her feet into the paths he himself found so pleasant. He liked to sit within doors re-ordering his books and his treasures, while the snow drifted up against the windows and the wind cried unappeasably across the Downs. “Why are you staring out at that ugly landscape, Clare? Don’t you like the fire better, and a chair, and a book to read?” But she read very seldom; only once, when she had been reading, he saw to his consternation that tears were falling silently down her cheeks, and, going up behind her, he had seen over her shoulder that Shelley lay open on her knee:
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,A wave to pant beneath thy power, and shareThe impulse of thy strength, only less freeThan thou, O uncontrollable!...
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,A wave to pant beneath thy power, and shareThe impulse of thy strength, only less freeThan thou, O uncontrollable!...
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,A wave to pant beneath thy power, and shareThe impulse of thy strength, only less freeThan thou, O uncontrollable!...
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!...
“Clare, why so silent? I declare, you’ve grown more meditative than I,—where’s your irresponsibility? is the dignity of marriage so heavy upon you? Were you as silent with your friend Lovel? didn’t you prattle tohim? eh, tell me?”
“What funny questions you ask, Richard. Lovel? I don’t remember. No, I don’t think I ever talked much to Lovel.”
“Well, but in all those hours you spent, riding with him, fishing, and I don’t know what else....”
“Well, we were busy, Richard; too busy to talk.”
“And he was a common fellow, wasn’t he? it’s not to be expected you would have talked much to him? eh?”
“He certainly wasn’t fine like you, Richard.”
“Now how do you mean that? Too fine, am I? And he,—a poacher, wasn’t he? a bit of good-for-nothing? You don’t answer. A queer fellow, not without good looks; oh, I wouldn’t deny him that. A romantical sort of fellow, Clare?”
“Practical as he could be, on the contrary.”
“Maybe; none the less, there was something romantical about him....”
So he tormented himself by this small constant nagging about Lovel, liking to dress the man’s personality up in the lyrical words of his own choosing; but for the rest he appeared satisfied, living with Clare a captive under his roof.
But sometimes she eluded his company. Then he roamed about the house, up and down stairs, out at the front door, down to the little wicket gate in the new wall, holding his muffler close under his chin, for the wind tore at his coverings, tweaking his scarf, flapping his coat, freezing his fingers, blowing his grey hair about in wild strands. He stood at the little gate, vainly trying to smooth his hair, gazing round the expanse of the hills, and calling from time to time as loudly as he could call, “Clare!” The wind took his voice and dispersed it like smoke; instantly tattered, it streamed away on the wind. No hope that Clare should hear that futile call, and it seemed to him that the empty Downs must from her childhood onwards have accumulated the echoes of voices crying “Clare! Clare!” A bell-like and doleful name, so cried; a name made to ring out; a wailing appeal; a name to cry after a gay truant, knowing that no answer would be returned. A gay truant, marked out for tragedy, dancing away, while those who remained behind cried after her and broke their hearts.
All his complacency dropped from him, he stood at the gate, looking and calling; then turning back to the house he sought her again in every room, even up to the attic where Phoebe Batch, startled at his intrusion and dishevelled appearance, gaped at her master and stammered out her, “No, sir,”—she had seen nothing of Mrs. Calladine. Mrs. Calladine! She wasClare, just Clare; Calladine with a bitter twist could not at that moment associate her with the respectable title. He turned away, downstairs again, and back to the front door, to stand on the doorstep, gazing across the little garden, over the low wall, up to the pale inhospitable hills.
She returned, of course; every time she duly returned; and he upbraided her, and almost wept, but she said nothing, only looked at him with wide eyes, indifferent and remote. He upbraided her more loudly, even shook her on one occasion and “Don’t stand there,” he cried, “as though you had left your wits out in the blizzard,” and he flacked his fingers in his hysteria, and his voice grew shrill. But after a little while he would quieten down, and his melancholy would return, and he would sit with his head in his hands, saying that for his unhappiness he had married an elf and not a woman.
Clare looked at him, sitting sunk in his chair, and presently she would thaw, as though those wits which he said she had left out in the blizzard were creeping back little by little into her body, and then she would put her hand kindly on his head and tell him not to fret. But that was all the explanation or comfort he ever got, to his great exasperation, being a man who liked to know how his wife had occupied every moment of her time,—to know, indeed, every thought which passed through her head.
Fortunately for himself, he soon forgot; thenext morning he would descend, serene as ever, and set himself after his breakfast to his usual mild pursuits. Only in a sudden suspicious glance shot at Clare would his anxiety reawaken, and he would look at her feet, to see whether she wore her black strapped shoes and white stockings, peeping out under the fulness of her skirt. And sometimes, for a day or two after one of her escapades,—her evasions, as he called them in his own mind,—he would follow her upstairs if she went up to her bedroom.
Inquiringly she looked at him.
“Yes, Richard?”—for she was always gentle, save when she gazed past him with that far-away look, that seemed to range the Downs though her husband’s body and the walls of the house stood in her way,—“Yes, Richard?”
He mumbled, half-ashamed.
“I came to see what you were doing....” He could not bring himself to say, “I came to see whether you were changing your shoes,” for that seemed ridiculous, beneath his dignity.
He had his happy moments. Sitting in his little room with her after they had dined, in the firelight, he beheld the very picture he had so often imagined. He had got her there, for his own; and his eyes rested long upon her grace, travelling, with delicate sensuality, over her young body and the little hands lying idle along the arms of her chair. “You never sew, my Clare,” he observed to her once, regretting this,for he luxuriated in all the pretty attributes of woman. She smiled at him. “What are you thinking of?”—his favourite question, and he bent forward to pick up her limp hand and fondle it. “Tell me what you were thinking,” he repeated jealously.
For once she lifted frank eyes and gave a frank answer.
“I was wondering how much real need you had of me, Richard.”
“Remember the man I was before you came to me,” he said reproachfully, yet with a certain pride in recalling the gloom which had been his to discard.
Then she said no more,—a trick of hers, which irritated him when he would fain have had her explain and amplify. He liked argument, he liked analysis; and into neither could he draw her.
“How unwillingly,” he said, “do you dwell upon personal relationships!”
He had lost his gloom and melancholy,—or was it that he had begun to think that hobby ridden to death, sometimes inconvenient to himself and possibly diminishing in impressiveness to other people, and had welcomed his marriage as a plausible reason for abjuring it? His habitual manner he had not altered; he still maintained towards her the same elaborate courtesy and his air of rather patronising protectiveness, as though thanks to the oneconvention, he revered her, and thanks to the other, condescended.
Yet, he had changed; changed from the very day of their marriage. He had paraded her on his arm before their wedding-guests, the smile had wandered perpetually over his lips, he had abandoned his slight stoop, he had straightened himself up into a handsome and possessive bridegroom. She had been too apathetic at heart to be nettled by his so parading her in public: “My wife,” the formula constantly on his lips, had not stirred her resentment; those were the outward shows,—they could not touch her secret being. And, looking at him perhaps nevertheless with a faint surprise, she had ascribed this new manner to his natural triumph at getting her, and had expected a relapse as soon as the novelty should have staled into habit. But there had been no relapse. He had brought her home to Starvecrow, and then she had realised how all the new chintzes, the curtains in the windows, the works of art brought out from the drawers where all these years they had lain concealed, had been but the preparation for this long-schemed change in his mode of thought. They slipped now into their place, they came into their own, small but significant. He had at last now an excuse for shedding with relief the strenuous manner of years. There remained no work for her to do.
Oh, little objects of art and skill. What hours he must have spent trifling with their suavity,taking them from their hiding-places of an evening after he had heard Mrs. Quince go safely up to bed, and knew that no one was looking, no one likely to break in upon him and surprise him at his comfortable pottering; the hours of mansuetude he must have spent turning and caressing them between his fine sensitive hands! He had not brought out those little objects to show her the day she had gone to tea with him at Starvecrow; oh no! the only thing he had brought out had been the drawing of that woman’s head, which he had so dramatically destroyed in her presence. She saw that destruction now as the first step taken towards his emancipation. But the little objects he had not shown her,—those delicate fraudulent statuettes in terra cotta, those chiselled and prismatic crystals. How bare, how cheerless she had thought his room! those heavy leather armchairs, now so jaunty with chintz! She had pitied him, genuinely and kindly, even through her impatience at his mismanagement of his life. She had chided herself for any passing suspicions that his gloom might be deliberate. And she had seen in her marriage with him an opportunity to perform, supremely at her own expense, a task perhaps worth performing.
But what right had she to murmur, when she saw her intentions crumble? She had, indeed, achieved her object, albeit in a manner so disconcertingly unforeseen. She reproached herself, in her mind which gave no quarter, anymore than Lovel gave quarter; she reproached herself for not rendering thanks that her task had been thus made easy. What! she dare to murmur because she had been spared the strain of months, even of years? because she had not been permitted to string herself up to an effort daily renewed, an exertion in which her own weariness must never for an instant be allowed to appear? because Calladine had taken the law out of her hands, and had ordained for himself the resurrection to which she had intended to force him? She looked back with the smile of rueful irony to her brave and pitiful plans for his redemption. She had intended,—so gallantly—to set her back for ever towards her old life. She would have devoted herself,—so sturdily,—to the man who had need of her. She would not have flagged. The vision of her married life had disclosed itself during the weeks of her engagement in detail to her anticipation. There was no detail she had shirked,—not even the least picturesque. She had not tried to idealise Calladine; no, rather she had tried to see him in the light that Lovel’s careless scorn had thrown; not as a romantic figure, blasted by the catastrophe of an early passion, but as an incompetent, bungling, pitiable figure. Her pity, her charity, and her contempt would between them have carried her through. But now that she found herself forestalled, as it were,—found that Calladine had already accomplished for himself precisely what she had intended to accomplish forhim,—she was disconcerted, almost angry. It was in vain that she upbraided herself for her own ingratitude. The life that she had planned for herself was not falling out according to her design. She was cheated; a person who has tried to take in the dark a step that was never there. Let her keep her sense of proportion,—her refuge now, her only refuge,—and she would not even yet be wholly lost. Then she could laugh at the futility of her plans; she could see, as from without, their derision, and their full pitifulness. Her life at Starvecrow had not fallen out according to her design. What of it?
A woman spending thirty, forty, wasted years in a forgotten corner of the Downs. What of it?
Her memory would not cling about the place after she should be dead, any more than the memory of victims clung about the sacrificial stones. “Here blood was shed,” but that was a collective phrase; all individuality had long since,—almost immediately,—been telescoped into the clemency of perspective. So it would be with her, and she saw herself already as part of that anonymous crowd, whether of the victims of a savage creed, or of the women with the wasted lives,—no sublime and legendary sorrow, except in so far that all sorrow shared in the same great dignity,—women who had lost children or lovers, women who had trailed ill-health about their daily business, women who had borne the long, mute burden of uncertainty, all the grey, silent,muffled women that whispered round her, and that had taken to their graves unchronicled the blunt or the poignant sorrow of their hearts.
Nameless, they lived for her now. For her now, the Downs, hitherto so void and so spacious under the freedom of the winds and the cycle of the seasons, for her now the Downs were peopled. Their dews were brushed dark with footsteps. Their heights were scanned by searching eyes. Their flanks were bruised by the stumble of weary limbs. Their beech-clumps were threaded with the breath of secrets. She had not known, at first, whether to resent or to welcome the looming-up of this hushed population. It seemed to her that they rose up out of the ground, stealthy, ashen, tall. They were everywhere about her. They had known the Downs as she knew them, and the changing seasons had found as they did for her either a significant echo or an incongruous irony in their souls. Their presence did away with the loneliness, the untouched and indifferent loneliness of the uplands, which in her egoism she had seen as a background to her life and Lovel’s populated only, in so far as they were populated at all, by the rough figures of the men of barbarous ages, men who fought for the simple preservation of their own existence, undivided by any shredding of their moods, whose religion was one of fear and not of charity, the men who had set up the stones and raised the barrows in order to propitiate the dark Unknown of creation andof death with such rude pomp as they could devise. They had been stark, striding elementary figures, one with the tree-trunks and the sarsen stones. They had ennobled the Downs by the record of their constructions. It had seemed to Clare that the intervening centuries between their age and the present day had been blank,—that she inherited the Downs direct from their hands,—those Downs which revealed themselves to her eyes unchanged from the hour when the stone men had passed away from them. The barrows, the dew-ponds, the Grey Wethers, the green tracks, the hawks and the larks, the space,—all unaltered; the stone men, returning, would find no change. What had she said, long ago, to Calladine, “an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are, are bleached bones by now, dry and clean. I think,” she had said, “that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”
And now there came to her this newly-realised population, bruised by life down to the softness of humanity. As to her those dry, bleached ghosts of the rude ages were masculine, so those more human ghosts that rose up out of the centuries were feminine. Increasingly, they had splintered their emotions; they had departed from the stark, simple facts; they had become more complex and more wistful. The stars and the stones had meant less and less to them; the Man of Sorrows, and not the terrible orbs ofheaven, had been their god. They were kneaded, malleable. They had endured much, but in the full consciousness of endurance; their spirit, even if not their voice, had groaned under the load of life and its ironies; they had not accepted as a matter of course, unquestioning, a lot that was hard. For all that, they had not been the less courageous; perhaps even their courage had been of a sublimer brand. And they were women, women, always women. The men had remained nearer to the old, strong, practical stock,—the purveyors of necessities. It was upon the women that civilisation had had the most effect. Calladine himself, the most highly civilised man that Clare knew, had always seemed to her instinct more like a woman,—sitting in his house and picking his griefs into smaller and smaller pieces. But Calladine’s griefs were not very real griefs,—she knew that now. She knew that he was, really, quite negligible.
She had been almost afraid, for a brief period, to go out upon the Downs,—afraid of forms rising up round her, of hands pulling at her garments, and of eyes seeking hers until she was forced to look into their depths. It was not that she any longer felt resentment against the population her own imagination had evoked; no, the Downs were enriched by their company, and the calm heights acquired a new significance by contrast with their soft rustling tumult. It was that she feared the knowledge which would come to her if she spent many hours alone with thoseghostly inhabitants whispering round her like dead leaves; she feared what she would learn; she would not probe her new half-guessed discovery. Things were a degree less terrible so long as they remained without a name.
But she could not fear for long. She had pushed them back, averting her head, into the shadows, and there they had taken up their abode. They would not leave her again. Not even in the midst of joy,—if joy should ever visit,—would they leave her, any more than the shadows were ever completely absent even in the midst of sunshine on the Downs. She was grateful to them for the way they had come, stealing in upon her, silent and gradual, not in a sudden irruption that would have broken her. But now that she no longer feared them, no longer feared the learning that solitude might bring, it was for solitude that she craved, and solitude, she found, was the thing that she might not have. Calladine, who was so content in her company, expected that she should be equally content in his. When she went out, he went with her; when he was not inclined to go out, he begged that she would remain at home. “It is a rough day, Clare; let us stay happily by the fire.” Or he would consent to pace the garden, sheltered now by a little wall, and together they would look at the bare winter beds, and he would talk cheerfully of the flowers that would blow there in the spring.
She renounced the Downs. Since she mightnot wander there alone, she restricted herself to the house and the square of garden, or to the green track that led to King’s Avon when she went to see her father. Even on this expedition Calladine accompanied her. He did not notice that she walked with her eyes bent upon the ground, never allowing them to lift and stray over the rolling country; or if he noticed he gave no sign. All the time he talked of minor things, and to his talk she made adequate response. Arrived at King’s Avon she would quicken her steps and pass rapidly down the village street, glancing about her only sufficiently to acknowledge the greetings of her humble acquaintances, and only when safe within the Manor House gates would she relax a little, and show herself gentle and affectionate towards her father, who, absent as ever, would presently forget that she was married and would invite Calladine to remain to dinner, “Clare and I, my dear friend, may so rarely welcome a visitor.” Through her laughter she looked at him wistfully; he was dear and familiar, his old beehive hat as wide and as shabby as ever, his spectacles still on his nose and his mild blue eyes looking out through them. She wondered how he got on without her, but Martha told her he did not seem to notice her absence much; only once, she had found him in Miss Clare’s old bedroom, wandering round, and touching everything in a gently puzzled way. Clare was glad that he should continue his busy, happy existence. Martha shecould trust, “To be sure, Miss Clare, I look after him as though he was your own baby. It’s all I can do, not to powder him after his bath.” But she sometimes fancied that his eyes followed her a little sorrowfully down the avenue when she went away, as he stood watching their departure and waving his big silk handkerchief.
And they would set off on their homeward journey up the village street, along the road through the cut in the embankment, and along the road until it dissolved into the green track that led across the Downs. Still with her eyes upon the ground she walked rapidly, as though anxious to find herself once more safe within the shelter of Starvecrow. Calladine’s long legs easily kept pace with her; and she had the impression that, even were she to run, she could never escape from him. He strode beside her, talking of her father, talking of those minor things which, she had found, occupied so much of his attention, and always with the assumption that her interest equalled his own. Once or twice he wanted to leave the track and make their way home across country, but when he suggested this she always pretexed her anxiety to be once more ensconced in their own room. This invariably pleased him, and he acquiesced. She could not, no, she could not, stray across the Downs with him.
She renounced the Downs. She could not share them with Calladine; not even with his mere physical presence could she share them.She cramped herself within the house and the little garden. The moment came when Calladine commented upon it. “Don’t you want to go for a walk, Clare?” She did not;—she clung to their meagre patch of cultivation. “You are grown quite stay-at-home,” he prodded, fondly.
The great Downs,—that stealthy population out on the Downs. Waiting for her,—the call of nature, always, and now the call of humanity. Out there, she could respond, she could feel, she could learn. Once she had not wanted to learn. She had shirked knowledge. Now, she had acquired knowledge, and could bear a yet deeper learning. She was avid, indeed, for the deepest draught of knowledge. Those bare great Downs, they were not bare; they were peopled. She might learn the first lesson from their storm, and the ultimate lesson from their serenity. But it was not in Calladine’s company that she would learn it. Such lessons were learnt in the severest solitude, with the senses of the soul stripped to flagellation.
Therefore she clung to Starvecrow. “An uncouth name,” said Calladine discontentedly, after relishing it for years; “shall we change it?” But she begged him not to, without clearly knowing why. “Very well, we keep it,” said Calladine, smiling down at her, “as a contrast to the snug life we live beneath that uncomfortable label.” She smiled back; she could smile, always; it had become mechanical, costing her little. She clung to Starvecrow, without affection, but alsowithout anything so precise as distaste; it, like Calladine, was negligible really, and she had never gone back on her first opinion of it,—that it was not austere enough to excuse its barrenness, and merely mean in its lack of comfort. It was no different from the Manor House, which, although at first sight incongruous perhaps in the midst of the village and its barbarous temple, was in truth no more incongruous than her old father, who pottered in his big hat about the garden, or peered through his big spectacles at the shards set out upon his desk.
But still she clung to Starvecrow; it was just bleak enough to match the bleak, small disaster of her life; just comfortless enough to accord with the blank at the root of her life with Calladine.
There had been the days of her engagement, when convention demanded that she should go over and at least appear to take an interest in her future home. She had gone, driven by Calladine himself through the village in the high dog-cart; holding on to her hat she had gone, rattling along the lanes behind the raw-boned animal, the gig rocking slightly from side to side, and the low branches of the trees almost sweeping against her as they passed. Calladine had looked fondly down upon her holding on to her hat, and in response to his murmur as he bent down towards her, she had looked up, and thought, in a detached way, that he was agreeable to look at, very gentlemanly and ratherinteresting, with his sallow, high-bred face, his many-caped driving coat, and his fine skilful hands encased in his gauntlets. She wondered, in the same detached fashion, what it would feel like when he stood tall by her side, and she could say “my husband.” Already she had had little foretastes of it, when he accompanied her to the village shops, and the shopkeepers said, in their familiar, respectful way, with an admiring gaze at the couple, “Here’s our best wishes, I’m sure, Miss Clare, to you and your gentleman.” And they had come to Starvecrow, where Mrs. Quince was waiting to receive them, and for all the smiles and curtseys and the insistence that Clare should inspect every cupboard, Clare had been conscious of the hostility of the elderly woman. But she had gone,—gone all over the house under the escort of Mrs. Quince, accompanied by Calladine as far as the first floor, where with his elaborate deferential manner he had retired, conveying by all that he left unsaid, that women were best left to themselves over household matters. There was in the manner of his retirement the indefinable condescension which to Clare was so subtly irritating. A wholesome male contempt she could more easily have pardoned.... But she had not stopped to think of that, in her dismay at finding herself alone with Mrs. Quince; she needed all her wits to balance the tension between herself and the housekeeper. Mrs. Quince seemed determined to outrage down to the least detail of her own feelings; all the doorsof her most sacred cupboards were thrown open with a jingling of keys, and their immaculate depths revealed to Clare, who, her criticism being all the time slavishly invited, could respond with nothing but approval. “Though I am sure, miss, there’s many a thing in this house not carried out according to your ideas.” Mrs. Quince, indeed, seemed so anxious to be found fault with, that Clare, feeling that she must exhibit her own competence or forfeit from the outset the housekeeper’s respect, at last did offer some small disparaging comment. “Ah, there, what did I tell you?” said Mrs. Quince instantly, as though satisfied to have got finally what she had been expecting all along; “’tis not likely that old eyes and young ones should always see alike.” After this her urbanity and her constant return to the point that Clare had condemned became so excessive that Clare devoutly wished she might have forfeited all Mrs. Quince’s esteem for ever only not to be pursued by this constant reference and exaggerated subservience. And Mrs. Quince would spare her nothing, but led her up to the second storey, where, pausing on a landing carpeted with coarse matting and lit by a small skylight, she explained that “the girl” slept. Clare shrank; “Oh, no, Mrs. Quince, don’t disturb her if she is in her room.” “Indeed, and why not, miss?” said Mrs. Quince stoutly, advancing towards the door; “’tis only her room on sufferance, as you might say; and likely there would be something you would wish altered.” She threwopen the door as she spoke, and Daisy Morland, rising in confusion, let fall on to the ground the scraps of white linen at which she had been stitching.
Clare recoiled on the threshold; she had known that Daisy Morland was in the house, but had not expected to come face to face with her. Nor had Daisy expected to see Clare,—whose arrival with Calladine she had watched on tiptoe from her little dormer window,—thus ushered into her room. The mischievous eye of Mrs. Quince superintended the clash between the two girls. She had manœuvred ably; she congratulated herself. Daisy,—Daisy was curtseying,—had recovered herself so far as to remember her curtsey,—what gall, what mockery, was in that curtsey!—Miss Warrener,—Miss Warrener was nodding to her,—saying something about “nice little room,” and looking sideways all the time at the pieces of linen fallen on the floor. Mrs. Quince folded her arms and superintended. She wore a smile,—outwardly benevolent, inwardly immensely ironical. The two girls,—much of an age. Daisy, blowsy and flustered, hardly able to repress her jeer; Clare, cool and wounded, but too proud to betray her wound. A lady: Mrs. Quince paid her that grudging acknowledgment. Well, Daisy had got the gipsy fellow, and Miss Warrener had got Mr. Calladine. As it should be.
They came out of the room together, Clare and Mrs. Quince. Mrs. Quince drew back alittle, respectfully, to let her go first, and closed the door gently behind her. “I wouldn’t have taken you in there miss,” she began, “if I’d known what that shameless baggage was to be at,—stitching away at her own baby’s clothes a fortnight before her marriage. Perhaps I should not say such things to you,—but there, you’ll be married yourself before the month’s out. And I wouldn’t have kept Daisy Morland here, knowing about her what I do know now, but that I wanted to have the house well set to rights against your coming, and, thought I, why not make use of a pair of hands that’ll never do a turn of work again for honest folks, but only for herself and a shame-begotten brat and a ’scape-the-gallows husband. It’s a hard bit of luck for Farmer Morland and his wife,” continued Mrs. Quince as she followed Clare down the stairs, “after they brought their girl up decent; but what can you expect with such poachers and loafers and gipsy-like stuff hanging about the village? ’Twas the easiest thing in the world for Daisy to go sweethearting on the hills, and what with shepherds’ huts and hurdles handy there was all the chance of a bit of trouble. Well, and now she’s got it, and lucky for her,Isay, that Lovel’s ready to turn her into an honest woman, for there’s many stouter bred than him that hasn’t stuck to their girls, and I always say....” Here Calladine had come out of the sitting-room, hearing the sound of voices; he came pleasantly towards them, rubbing his hands together andbending towards Clare, “Tired, my dear? tired? a little bit, I think,—too bad, too bad, Mrs. Quince, we’ve tired her out between us; well, come in here and rest in this big chair....” he pressed her into the sitting-room, and Mrs. Quince with much solicitude settled cushions for her and placed her feet upon a footstool in spite of all Clare’s protests.
She had dreaded to find Daisy still at Starvecrow when she returned there after her marriage. It would have been simple for her to find out, but she lacked the courage to ask. And would Calladine know? would he know if one girl rather than another slept in the attic at the top of his house? She could have asked Martha Sparrow, but pride withheld her from making enquiries as to Lovel’s wedding. True, Mrs. Quince had mentioned a fortnight, but she did not trust Mrs. Quince; the elderly woman would relish laying a trap for her. But at the end of the fortnight she had known that Mrs. Quince had spoken accurately, for Martha Sparrow, coming into her room to call her that morning and whisking back the curtains along the curtain-rods, had said cheerfully, “A fine day for the gipsy’s wedding; and I wonder how many of the folk will turn out to see the customs a common Christian wouldn’t practise?”
But those folk, skulking round the church, had been disappointed. They had seen no swarthy women in scarlet handkerchiefs, no dark men with little gold rings in their ears. They hadheard no gibberish, and seen no gestures of incantation or abracadabra. They had seen only Nicholas Lovel in his ordinary clothes, inaccessibly severe, with his young woman, all simpers and dimples, on his arm; and Olver Lovel in the nave, watching the scene at the altar, obliquely in that queer little round mirror he always seemed to carry. Not even the Lovels’ old mother had they seen; and for a glimpse of her they had greatly hoped, for surely, even of a witch and a gipsy, it might be expected that she would turn out to witness the marriage of her own son. But no, she had not caused herself to be wheeled as far as the church, the bedridden old woman; and, indignant because they were disappointed of their spectacle, the village folk muttered, “Unnatural,—but what would you expect?”
Disappointed though they were, they had remained to watch the ceremony. Some of the bolder spirits had gone to the church, edging their way, sheepish but defiant, along the pews; but the majority had crowded near the door, peeping, nudging, jostling backwards whenever Lovel up at the altar threatened to turn round. There had been none of the coarse, friendly atmosphere that surrounded most village weddings. There had been, instead, an atmosphere of curiosity and fear; and at Daisy looks were thrown, full of commiseration and a fearful respect, by the villagers as at one of their own comfortable number, about to cut herself adrift from them and to become enrolled among an alien community.They fully expected that Daisy, hitherto so plump and jolly and normal, would be initiated into dark rites beyond their imagination when once she had been swallowed up into the shadows of the dim, tunnel-like passage of the Lovels’ house and the Lovels’ door closed behind her. They never expected to see her emerge again in precisely the semblance of herself familiar to them. Or would Lovel deny his secrets even to his wife? Would he keep her there, in his dark house, as a servant and a convenience, to wait on his old mother, to cook his meals and obey his behests, and above all things to hold her tongue as to all the unexplained things she might happen to witness in the course of years? Would she be no more than a terrorized servant in that house they thought so vaguely sinister? There was Olver Lovel, too; was he a sort of accomplice to his brother, a sort of sly malignant accomplice, who in his brother’s absence would bully his brother’s wife by deputed authority, so that she would be at the mercy not only of the elder Lovel, who was an unknown quantity if ever there was one, but against whom nothing but his practices in defiance of the game laws was definitely known,—not only would she be at his hard mercy, but also at that of his younger brother, of whom the blackest and most cunning arts might be believed. There were a hundred ways, they decided, talking it over between a horrid fascination and a still more horrid relish, in which Olver might exercise his nasty talents uponDaisy. John Sparrow even went so far as to predict that the day would come when she would be found wandering, as crazy as Olver himself, upon the Downs, but others more sagely replied that if indeed she were to lose her wits she would never be allowed to escape from the house. And that opened up another series of pictures, in which Daisy, crazed and foolishly happy, went about her work singing little ditties, and the door of the dark house was closed daily by Lovel upon the three inmates, the mother, the brother, and the wife, and the key lay close within his pocket.
But in the meantime the spectacle before their eyes was quite different from those evoked by their imaginations. It might be true that Lovel looked lean and stern, and that Olver followed the ceremony in that slanting way within his little round mirror, but the words the clergyman uttered were the same that they were accustomed to hear at all respectable unions, and as for Daisy, she was the picture of all a bride ought to be, muslin flounces and coyness, and if her figure was a little oddly thickened, why, that also was a thing that had been seen before at village weddings. She looked pleased with her young man; she kept glancing proudly at his height; she sniggered with content as he repeated the beautiful threadbare words after the priest, repeated them gravely and firmly, but as though he were utterly indifferent to the obligations they imposed upon him. There was nothing very startlingly unusual about the wedding. True, neither Daisy’sfather nor her mother were present, but the whole village knew that Lovel was marrying the girl because he had got her into trouble, and it was not likely that the Morlands, steady and decent folk, would be present to give the sanction of their approval. Perhaps later on, when the child was born, they might come round; for the moment, no doubt,—and very naturally,—they were sore over both the cause of the marriage and the son-in-law imposed upon them. Daisy did not seem to care. Ever since the publication of her banns she had gone about flaunting as though her marriage were a reason for pride rather than for shame and apology. Not that the village saw much shame in circumstances so common. It had, rather, a certain respect for Daisy, who, having set her heart on the gipsy,—a strange taste, but that was her business,—had at last got him to the altar. There was a tacit convention that a girl was justified in using all her weapons if she could not otherwise carry her point: and there was also, in the present instance, a peculiar satisfaction in feeling that the gipsy had been worsted. So grand, so stuck-up, Nicholas Lovel, but a girl had got the better of him in the end.
When the bridal pair came out of the vestry and proceeded down the aisle, there was a scattering in the little crowd at the church door; a lane opened, and Lovel and his wife passed out between the craning, curious faces. Lovel looked neither to left nor to right; his arm wascrooked to allow Daisy’s hand to rest within it, but that was the only concession he made to his newly-married state. She, on the contrary, sought eagerly for the faces of her friends; she dragged upon Lovel’s arm, but he moved unyielding forward. Daisy, who was trying to lag, had to take a little run, like a child that cannot keep pace with the advance of a grown-up person. With her head half-turned, her eyes still lingered over the little crowd that was once more closing in behind them. There were not many girls in the party; she knew why, and a sense of triumph came over her; they might affect to despise Lovel, but for all that they did not care to see him married to one of their own number,—ah, how clever she had been!—not many girls; two men, doddering on their sticks; and a group of young men, the lounging, insolent handsome young men, with their hands stuck into the belts of their smocks, chewing straws for all the world as though they had been in the Waggon of Hay and not on the threshold of a church. It was then that an incident occurred, the recollection of which was frequently to dash Daisy’s triumph into a sinking of uneasiness; towering behind the group she caught sight of Peter Gorwyn’s grinning, good-humoured face on the top of his enormous proportions, and as she looked at him in a sort of terror of recognition thatheof all men should have come to attend her wedding, he very slowly winked, so slowly that time seemed to be suspended between the beginning of the winkand the completion of it; and in that suspension of time, while her eyes had leisure to dwell in fascination upon the subtle and quite unambiguous process of a wink, her mind had leisure also to take in its whole significance: Peter Gorwynknew. In that wink the day of the Scouring was evoked; the fun they had shared; the irresponsibility, the momentary drunkenness. There was no reproach in the wink; there was no reproof; there was not even a threat; there was simply the amusement of a confederate, of one who knew himself quite well to be a party to a hoax. There was humour in it too; in that broad, ruddy face and blue eyes there was humour; there was even congratulation, a kind of silent applause; and a hint of gratitude to Daisy for having let him off so easily,—for having got Lovel to stand there in his place. This was all very re-assuring; there was such a phrase as honour among thieves, and big Peter, with her, was a thief if he was willing to let Lovel take his place and pay the price which should have been exacted of his own responsibility. But at the same time that wink came as a sharp shock to her, the shock that a second person shared her hoaxing secret. She thought that presently, when she had had time to settle down a little in her new life, she would catch young Gorwyn for an interview, and, without giving herself away, make quite sure, that, although he had guessed what she had concealed, he was ready to grin and hold his tongue. She thought this in a flustered way, asshe came out of the church on Lovel’s arm into the warmth of the sunny morning, and they proceeded down the path between the grave-stones, a stiff little group, robbed momentarily even of the slight relief of the bride’s simpering, with Olver bringing up the rear. Daisy shivered for the first time; this wedding was not being conducted according to her idea of weddings; there were no emotional relatives, no weeping mother, no bells pealing from the calm grey spire overhead, no bridesmaids, no best man,—only Olver shambling behind them as they proceeded between the grave-stones, Olver so slightly and indefinably mis-shapen, a solitary evil attendant, shambling as though he might at any moment break into a fawning gambol around them, a senseless dance full of irony and mischief. And Lovel, himself, dearly as she had set her heart upon him, was throwing a chill by his demeanour over the occasion; he had not once looked at her, he had offered her his arm in a coldly civil way,—less he could not do,—he had stood up stern and unbending; she was afraid of him, and discouragement began to cloud over her triumph.
They were walking now down the street towards his house, and the shopkeepers came to their doors to stare at them as they passed. Still Lovel marched on, undeviating, and Daisy began to feel herself a captive being led towards her prison. She clasped her fingers tighter round Lovel’s arm; it was hard and sinewy, typical of his lean strength. Here was a harshness shewould find tough to propitiate; and jealousy shot through her; had he shown himself harsh towards Miss Warrener? or had she discovered an unguessed marvellous Lovel? What secret understanding had they shared? Daisy scarcely understood the pain. “The minx!” she muttered; it was the only analysis she could find of her sudden twist of anguish, blind and inarticulate. Up to the present she had been too much occupied with securing Lovel; in future she would have leisure to dwell upon those memories of his which would lie for ever concealed from her. “We’re married now, aren’t we, Nicholas? I’ve got you?” she said, looking up into his face.
He took her into his house, where during the whole time of their engagement he had never allowed her to come. They were in the dark cold passage, at the end of which, in the sun, opened the little square of garden where Lovel like any other cottager grew his cabbages, his patch of flowers, his gooseberries, and his beans. Daisy became excited again; she forgot Gorwyn, she forgot her discouragement and her jealousy; she was a woman brought for the first time to her home. She peered about her with interest, while Lovel shut the door, and the passage became quite dark but for the door at the further end opening bright arch-wise on to the garden. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “I can’t see and it’s cold; leave open the door.” “For all the village to spy in upon us?” he returned, and she perceived that in this as in everything else he wouldhave his way. “It’s more friendly,” she ventured, but he did not move towards it, and she desisted: after all, she had got him, she had fooled him, the score so far was heavily in her favour; if she let him have his way now, she would get him more completely in the end. “It’s rather cold,” she said nevertheless, repressing a shiver, and, hearing a small chuckle in the shadows behind her, she turned and saw Olver crouched up against the wall.
“Take me into the kitchen!” she cried, pressing herself against Lovel.
Kitchen! the word was reassuring; her mother had kept a spruce, spacious kitchen, where bottled fruit stood ranged on shelves, and trays of floury scones stood on the scrubbed deal table, and the big Parliament clock tick-tocked in comfortable regularity against the wall. Very different was the room to which Lovel sarcastically admitted her; she stopped with the dismay of the conventional person suddenly confronted with rebel views. She was shocked as at something unseemly and profane. “Oh,” she cried, “but this isn’t a kitchen?”
She turned as though to make her escape; before her was the room with its walls of rough stone, its rafters, shadows and cobwebs, behind her was Lovel in the doorway and the dark passage beyond him, with Olver crouching in it. She stared round her, and was met everywhere by silence. “I don’t like it!” she cried in shrill terror. Lovel continued to look at her withoutspeaking. “Mother! dad!” she cried, “I want to go home!” She rushed to Lovel and beat her hands against his chest. His physical contact recalled her, and she began to sob. “Nicholas, Nicholas,” she sobbed, “I love you, I don’t understand.” She sobbed against him.
He stood still, hard and carven, while the waves of her panic broke over him. Presently a loud tapping sounded overhead, and she raised her face, mouth moist and wide open, to listen. “What’s that?” she uttered. “My mother,” he replied grimly. “Then sheisalive?” breathed Daisy, her common curiosity coming back to her, and she felt suddenly important, since she was about to see,—redoubtable privilege,—the legendary figure of the village witch. Speaking over his shoulder, Lovel said, “Olver, go you and tell her I am bringing Daisy up in a moment,” and she heard Olver shuffle off, and knew the mysterious suggestion of hearing footsteps mount an unknown stair, and the voice of an unvisualised person speaking in the recesses of an unknown house.
“Must I go up?” she said to Lovel, between fear and desire.
She wondered when she would have the chance of pouring into the ears of one of her confidential friends the account of her first entry into the old woman’s room. Not that she could be so very old in years,—not more than sixty or sixty-five, Daisy hazarded,—but her bedridden condition and the squalor of rugs and coverings underwhich she croaked and feebly moved lent to her an appearance of almost fabulous age. Dirty and tattered, a heap on the bed in the corner of the dark room, her grey locks straggled about her face, her shaking fingers crooked themselves at Daisy, and her mouth mumbled out unintelligible phrases, in which the words, “A hard son to me, Nicco ... a hard husband ... you’ll see,” alone detached themselves with any significance to the bride. She was herself too much overawed to speak, but stood close to Lovel, who, forbidding though he was, was yet the only familiar landmark in the whole of that house. For his part, he said nothing, not a word to help Daisy out of her fear or her embarrassment; he stood there, and had he not appeared so utterly indifferent she would have said he seemed resigned; he stood there waiting while his mother mumbled out her accusations,—how many years was it since she had had the opportunity of doing so save to Olver?—willing to wait although scorning to justify himself; and it was clear that he cared no more for his wife’s opinion than he did for his mother’s or anybody else’s, but had within himself a reserve of some unknown, unexplained quality, whether pride, or contempt, or self-communion, or all three, but which in any case left him invulnerable and as though he could close his ears at will when he did not choose to hear.
But although even through her fright Daisy was thinking of the succulent story she wouldmake out of this first glimpse of the old woman, the closing incident was one she would not retail. No, she would not tell any one that when the mumble had finally died away, the mumble and the bursts of laughter, she would not tell any one that as she and Lovel had started to move towards the door the old woman had raised herself up on her extraordinary mountain of sacks and pillows, heaving herself up under all the rugs, and pointing an accusing finger at her daughter-in-law, had cried in an access of malevolent amusement, “Big already, my lass, and on your wedding-day!” She would not tell any one that. She could not, even had she been willing, have described the effect that the old woman’s words, uttered in such a tone of discovery and delight, produced upon her. Hitherto she had not thought very much about her condition; it was an inconvenient consequence that often overtook girls of her class when they had omitted to behave with too self-righteous a prudery; and in her own particular case she had been able to turn her “trouble” to excellent account. But with that witchlike cackle a whole future of foreboding rushed up at her, a whole revelation of mischievous malignity. The cackle and the wink—Gorwyn knew her secret; did Lovel’s mother know it too? she was credited with sly powers; did Lovel’s brother know it? and would they sit for years upon their knowledge until one day it should hatch out, sudden and disastrous? Or had Lovel told them both that the child wasOlver’s child? Olver would accept that, surely; he had the memory of the scene in the barn to convince him. What had Lovel told them? she would never dare to ask him, and his inscrutability gave her no hope of discovering by chance.
And then she had been astonished to find how gentle he could be towards her. It was true that he was stern in his injunctions,—no tales of his house to be carried about the village, he said, and poor Daisy saw her one consolation evaporate,—but in his personal dealings with her he was uniformly gentle. Distant always, never relaxing, never easy; but kind with a kindness that wrung the very heart of her love for him. It was as though he pitied her, and was kind to her as he would have been to an animal; although she thought bitterly, there would have been more of love and less of duty in his kindness towards the meanest animal. She could not cajole herself with the idea that anything but duty lay beneath his kindness to her. He was equally gentle, she observed, with his brother Olver, and with his mother, never betraying by any sign his repulsion or his impatience; and Daisy thought sometimes with terror that she herself might be as repulsive to him as the old woman must surely be, but never would she know it, for he would never allow it to appear. And at moments, loving him, she could forget herself sufficiently to be sorry for him in his loneliness and his unrelaxing self-command.
She began to know the full significance ofsuffering. Before very long she was suffering, in her blind, ignorant way, down to the bone. For discomfort she had bargained; for a hard life of work, since she knew that the business of keeping the house and its three inmates would after her marriage devolve upon her, she had bargained also; for Lovel’s severity she had bargained, and with an obscure sense of justice and fair play she had been prepared to accept without complaint these things that she was voluntarily bringing upon herself as the price of securing Lovel for her own, for her husband; but for the torment of his kindness and his proximity she had not bargained. The work she had envisaged with a practical eye; that was within the reach of her capacity, but the emotional problem had altogether eluded her anticipation. She had thought, if she thought at all, that once she had got Lovel safely over that ticklish business of marriage, she would have consummated her supreme ambition. She had not understood that then and then only would her problem truly begin. It had been easy, pitifully easy, to trick Lovel into marriage, easy to play upon the double string of his dejection and his sense of honour; he had allowed himself to be conducted through preliminaries and ceremony alike with the same cold, trance-like indifference; that had been easy for her; but how to dig through to the man beneath that blameless mask? “Nicholas, will you take me to Bath some day, anywhen you’ve time? I’ve never seen a bigger townthan Marlborough,” and he would answer, kindly, always kindly, but like a man who might well be dead before the day for going to Bath arrived, “I’ll take you to Bath, my dear,” and she would sidle up to him and say, “That’ll be a treat for you too, Nicco?” and he would acquiesce, and at the same time, on some murmured excuse, would put her gently away.
She waited hungrily all day for his return in the evening. His presence exasperated and tortured her, but his absence left her in a perpetual fret, swallowing up what she had anticipated as the principal trial of her days, the sinister companionship of Olver and the old woman. Now that she knew her way about the house,—knew the full squalor of the old woman’s room,—had grown accustomed to the croak and the pointing finger,—no longer started at Olver’s sudden laughter in the dark passage,—she was not so much oppressed by them; but Lovel, Lovel, was always what she wanted and what she could not have. At first she had restrained herself, not knowing the temper with which she had to deal, but, seeing him so kind, she slackened her restraint, and her affection slopped increasingly over him. He could not be in the house but what she must waddle after him, pawing at his hand or trying to entice him into some friendly phrase. “You like having your house kept by me, don’t you, Nicco? You like getting hot meals, don’t you, darling?” and often she whined, “I love you, Nicco!”
It was not in her to suffer in silence. When she craved too strongly for him to touch her, she would take his hand and hold it against her full, warm breast. She would sit at his feet in front of the fire, as Olver had been used to do, and lean her head against his knee with sentimental sighs, for she quickly learnt that although he might ignore her he would never repulse her. In the kitchen, when she did this, Olver sat at the centre table squinting into his little mirror at the reflected group of his sister-in-law, his brother, and the red glow of the fire. He was content to sit doing this by the hour, but Daisy could not endure it; she clambered to her feet,—for she was rapidly growing more clumsy in her movements,—and went about the room finding small unnecessary tasks to ease her discomfort. Sometimes she turned noisily on Lovel:
“What are you thinking of, sitting there?”
He was mild in his reply, or else did not reply at all.
“Oh,Iknow,Iknow!” she would cry, in an access of jealousy, but dared say no more.
Only once, when he caught her with his strong hand as she stumbled on the stair, and uttered a word of caution, she turned on him and cried, “You’re mighty careful of another man’s brat.” But it seemed that he had set his will against being goaded into any retort.
The other man’s brat troubled her now, for she could not escape from what seemed to her an absurd desire that it should be Lovel’s. TheScouring had taken place in May; it was now December, so that she was approaching her seventh month,—but Lovel must not know that: he must think her only in the sixth month, for the incident with Olver in the barn had happened in June; she must always be careful to remember that, or the whole fabrication would be ruinously exposed. She must run the risk of incomplete preparations,—a misled midwife, a probably unavailable doctor should things go wrong. The resented child moved now vigorous within her; she had a full-blown appearance without which she still thought in her naïveté that she might have been attractive to Lovel. In the autumn his bitch had whelped, and she had watched with real anguish his tenderness towards the blind crawling puppies in their wooden box, and later his patient hands teaching them to drink as they crowded round and blew bubbles in the bowl of milk, and later still, when they grew into fluffy balls, cuffing one another and snarling in their small rage, she watched him dangling old cotton-reels for their amusement, or saw him cross the kitchen with the little pack prancing after him, and was shrewd enough to recognise that this was the first thing which had given him pleasure for many months. Now, when he was out at work, she watched them tumbling over each other on the flags of the kitchen, staggering on their still uncertain legs, and the longing grew within her that they should be babies instead, fat babies, hers and Lovel’s, and the more she longed forthis the less she welcomed the child that struck so strongly against her flanks. It should be a hearty child, conceived in laughter of healthy parents, a child that would lie content and kick and crow; a little ploughboy; but already she dreaded to see it with Lovel,—would he touch it with his hands that were so light and loving to train and fondle all young things? or would he avert his eyes from it? would it grow up to toddle always after him in preference to any one else, while he endured it between pity and loathing, and would it call him father, poor fraudulent little stranger in a house where it had no right? Only in one degree less did she speculate over Olver’s attitude towards it,—Olver who was being passed off as its father,—would he believe himself the father or did he know better? and would he croon in his odd slanting way over the cot, with a grotesque affection? and would he later try to win over the child and fill its head with queer lore? and here a fire of maternal protectiveness and indignation flamed through her, rising suddenly from the depth, as she discovered that she was not willing that her child should come under the influence of Olver.
There were endless possible groupings to be foreseen about the tiny, dangerous, controversial person of the child.
Its burden weighed her down more and more as the seasons deepened towards winter. This child, so light-heartedly conceived on a day in spring, its presence unnoticeable through theearly summer, began to oppress its mother in the saddening autumn, and with winter when the days were dark and short and gloomy, she could no longer forget its existence for a moment. The burden of the child and the burden of the year moved together increasingly towards their culmination. She looked back sadly to the easy days when the child had been light and even her preoccupations had been leavened with hope. Now everything weighed upon her, even the weather which was bleak and dismal: “I declare,” she said fretfully to herself, “I’d be no worse off in the Kennet,” and she skirted the idea, but lacked the desperation to execute it. She was, however, by now quite sufficiently unhappy. She had nearly lost any hope of gaining Lovel, her days were leaden, she lumbered about the house in slovenly clothes, since at the beginning she had used up all her poor finery by wearing her best every day in the hopes of pleasing Lovel’s eye, but now in an access of dejection, she went to the opposite extreme, and took a wilful pleasure in letting him see her at her most sluttish and ungainly. But nothing, she noticed, caused him to alter his manner towards her whether she presented herself in her muslin, or in an old bodice made of some gray tartan-like material, not joining on to her skirt, so that she appeared to be dressed in some thrown-on coverings from off his mother’s bed. But he never varied in his patience and his impersonal kindness; he neither retreated to a greater distance,nor allowed himself to become more approachable. Every evening he returned to his house to rejoin the company of Olver, his mother, and the cumbersome and plangent woman, but by no word did he betray either his nausea or his weariness. “Oh, yes, he’s a good husband,” said Daisy bitterly to young Gorwyn, “he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t hit me, and he gives me all his money. He’s a good husband enough.”