"I've never been further than Plymouth."
"You must come to London some day with me," said Blanche. She had no intention of spending all her days at Cloom, and she wished to win over this sulky beauty to her side. Vassie looked doubtfully at her, but began to thaw. London … it meant all of hope and the future to Vassie.
"I would dearly love to," she said. "I suppose you know it very well, like I know Penzance. I don't go even to Plymouth very often, and of course it's not London. The people are rather common. I daresay there's all sorts in London, but I suppose you know a lot of families up there?"
"A good many," said Blanche casually. She was pleased at the signs of a thaw; she was one of those women who are as eager to stand well with their own sex as with men and take as much care to ensure it.
"You would do well in London, Vassie," she went on, fixing her eyes on the girl after a habit she had, and which always gave the impression that she was talking to the only person on earth who really interested her; "you are very beautiful, you know."
Vassie flushed with pleasure and did not trouble to deny the obvious truth of the statement. She knew she was the only girl there with undoubted beauty; what she did not know was that she was also the only one who would never be very attractive to men. She looked at Phoebe's retreating chin, at Judith's prominent cheek-bones and deep-set, melancholy eyes with the bistre stains below them, at Blanche's subtly-broad face with its too-small lips, and unconsciously she put up her hand to feel her own lovely contours and smooth skin.
Blanche slipped a firm, cool hand into hers. "Don't worry, Vassie," she said in a low voice; "I foresee great things for you. You're a wonderful girl, my dear. Now, I suppose we ought to be helping those two poor, dear men again." She rose to her feet with one of the lithe movements that always seemed rather surprising in a girl of her firmly-knit build, which would have been heavy had it not been for its grace. Vassie, with a fulness that was so much more supple to a casual glance, yet followed her less beautifully.
"Still, a lot can be done with her," thought Blanche, watching. She motioned to her to come and help her with a row that had not yet been gathered into a bundle, and Vassie stooped over it with her.
"Why, what's that?" exclaimed Blanche, catching sight of something grey that went rustling swiftly downwards between the straws. She thrust her hand down, thinking it was a field-mouse, and caught the thing. A speckled toad wriggled in her fingers, lustily enough, but it was a toad that had seen tragedy. The keen edge of a scythe must have caught it, for one side of its head was shorn away; the eye had just been missed, but the inside of the poor little animal's mouth and throat lay exposed, pulsating and brilliantly red—a purer hue of blood was never seen than in that grey creature.
Blanche cried out in pity, while Vassie calmly advised death, seconded by Phoebe, and Judith looked away, sorry and sick, Blanche called to Ishmael, using his Christian name for the first time publicly, and aware of it herself and of its effect on Vassie through all her real pity. Ishmael came running, and, taking the little beast tenderly, offered to knock it on the head with a stone before it knew what was happening; but Blanche forbade him. She took it back, her fingers slipping in between it and his palm, and stood bending over it.
"Poor little thing!" she said; "at least it's not bleeding now, and I believe it may live. It doesn't seem to be suffering, so let's give it its chance. Put it over the wall onto the grass, Ishmael."
He vaulted over and, taking the toad from her, laid it down on the dewy grass. It sat trembling for a few moments, and then began to hop away and was lost in the tall blades that met above its mutilated head—one of the many tragedies of harvest.
Dusk had fallen while the toad's fate hung in the balance; a pastel dusk that, even as the girls still stood watching, was made tremulous by the first faint breath of the moon. From the sea came the red glare of the Wolf and the cold pure beam of the Bishop; in the north Charles' Wain gave the first twinkle of its lights; while from the roads came the creak of the terrestrial waggons beginning to lumber slowly home. It was time for supper, for lamps, for that meeting within walls which enforces a sudden intimacy after a day spent in the open, for beginning real life, as it would have to be lived, once more. The three men stayed behind to gather the remnants of the picnic, but the girls lifted their pale skirts about them and were gone over the high stone stile like moths.
That evening as supper was being eaten in the new dining-room at Cloom—a merry supper enough, for all Annie's skeleton presence at one end of the table—Archelaus walked in. It was the first time he had been over to Cloom since the night of the bush-beating, and it was the first time Ishmael had seen him since that glimpse in the light of a lantern in the wood.
Ishmael looked at his brother, and all that affair seemed very long ago, in a life when he had not been to London, mixed with men, or met Blanche. He held out a hand to Archelaus, who for a stupid moment stood staring at it; then he saw the stranger girl from London, Ishmael's girl, of whom he had heard, watching him. Beyond her sat Phoebe. Some train of thought was lit in Archelaus's mind, and burned there; the second of hesitation during which his survey and the thought took place within his mind was imperceptible as he awkwardly struck his big fist into Ishmael's palm. Everyone present was aware, in greater or less degree, according to the amount of his knowledge, of relief.
Archelaus drew out a chair and partook of supper, talking little; but that little was good, racy, at times too much so, full of shrewd observations and little flashing gleams of knowledge of men and things. Ishmael was not abashed and silenced by it as he had been on the night of his birthday; he too, as he sat there with his "girl" and his wider experiences, felt that the ground over which Archelaus roamed was not altogether untrodden by himself. Annie, by the incursion of her eldest born, was changed, as always, from an acrid acquiescence to definite enmity towards Ishmael and his concerns. She became so rude to Blanche that it seemed the temper of a veritable angel still to be able to smile and answer with politeness. For her sake Ishmael also kept his temper, though inwardly he was ragingly angry—not so much with Annie for being rude as with Archelaus for behaving so unwontedly well through it all—hushing his mother up instead of encouraging her, and speaking respectfully to Blanche himself.
After supper the young people drifted out of doors, and before the girls, wrapping themselves against the dew, joined them, Archelaus drifted in his cat-like way—odd for so big a man—to Ishmael's side.
"Will I wish 'ee joy, Ishmael?" he asked. "'Tes easy to see where your heart be set. Does the maid feel she can love 'ee and Cloom Manor?"
The last words and some indefinable quality in the tone jarred on Ishmael, disturbing the satisfaction he had felt glowing over him at the supper-table.
"If you mean have I proposed to Miss Grey?" he said a little pompously as youth will speak, "I have."
"And will she have 'ee, or has she given 'ee a clout in th' ear?"
Ishmael hated having to tell this barbarian anything about his lovely Blanche; he turned sick when he thought that this would be Blanche's brother … free to call her by her name, to take her hand…. All he could bring himself to say was that he believed Miss Grey was going to become his wife, but that he would thank Archelaus not to go talking about it, as nothing was to be made public as yet.
"There are other people to consider," he said: "her relations whom I shall have to see, and a lot of things like that. It is not like marrying a girl from the nearest village," he added tactlessly, but without, in his self-absorption, meaning to wound.
Archelaus drew away through the night. He laughed a little.
"Not as if you was wedding Phoebe, who's only a miller's girl?" he asked. Ishmael laughed too, though a little doubtfully, not sure of the cordiality of Archelaus's chuckle.
"Of course it's not like. Phoebe's a dear little thing, but Miss Grey is different, naturally."
In the passage Archelaus ran into Phoebe, emerging with the other girls, and took from her with an air of gallantry the wrap she had upon her arm.
"I'll put 'ee home," he told her: "best have this on; 'tes a bit cool on cliff."
"Oh, but—" began Phoebe. She had no hopes, such as she had cherished, against all reason, upon getting Ishmael's note that morning, of a moonlit walk home with him, but something in her shrank from the walk undertaken with Archelaus. He wrapped the shawl about her as she spoke. Phoebe could no more have resisted a man who had his mind made up than a frog can get away from a viper which has once sighted it, and she let herself be swathed without further protest. Good-byes were said, with careless affection on the part of Vassie, and kindliness from Judith and a pressure of the hand and a deep look from Blanche.
"Good-night, little girl! You're going to be very happy, too, you know," said Blanche, who knew nothing about it, but felt it was a good thing to say. Phoebe and Archelaus, both tongue-tied now they were alone, set off through the moonlight and the soft air to the cliff path.
It was a long time now since she had met Archelaus out of doors, as he had several times half-coaxed, half-bullied her into doing. Now she felt a constraint with him she had not previously, as though there were some portent in the simple act of seeing her home there had never been before. She had, of course, flirted with him in a very innocent way, if her methods had been a little cruder than Blanche's would have under the same circumstances. The repartee had been simple and the caresses nothing more than a slight touch on waist or arm, repulsed by her with more alarm than prudery. Phoebe was fonder far of Ishmael than of Archelaus; she told herself that she admired Ishmael more—he was so much the gentleman…. What she did not know was that a rebel thing in her, the thing for which poor facile, soft little Phoebe had been as much created as though she had been a field-mouse, responded to Archelaus because it felt he was so much the male. Phoebe had been safeguarded all her short life by her notions of gentility and by her fear, the fear, not of consequences, but, less base than that, the fear of actual passion, which is often implanted in very passionate girls as though to guard them till the time comes.
When they reached the first stile Phoebe lifted her skirts and pattered up to it, stood poised upon its crest, and then, with a little gasp, yielded to Archelaus's strong arms as he seized her and swung her down bodily.
"Such a lil' bit of a thing as you be," said Archelaus; "like a lil' cat in my arms, so soft and all."
They went on, he leading and brushing away the tendrils of bramble and the tougher branches of furze across the narrow cliff-path. At each stile he lifted her, only now he picked her up as they approached and carried her right over them. At the last stile he held her instead of putting her down when they reached the further side.
"Put me down, Archelaus," she whispered. He still held her, his hands beneath her armpits, so that they cupped the curve of her breast, her face just beneath his, her feet dangling.
"I'll have a kiss afore putten 'ee down, then. I've never kissed 'ee since you was a lil' maid to school."
"No!" said Phoebe; "no!" She did not know why she protested; she had been kissed with the awkward shy kisses of youth often enough for her years, but she turned her mouth this way and that to escape his. He went on holding her in air, though his arms were beginning to tremble a little with the strain, and simply followed her mouth with his, brushing it lightly. Suddenly she felt she could bear no longer that easy mastery, those following lips that passed and repassed over hers and could so easily have settled if they chose. Why didn't they? She turned like a little animal, and instead of evading any longer, sank her lips into his.
She hung there then, helpless indeed; for his mouth, no longer making a play of hers, held it, bore it down. When he released her he dropped her on to her feet at the same time. Phoebe turned from him and ran towards the mill. He followed leisurely, sure of her next action as only his experience of women could have made him sure, and found her, for all her flight, waiting for him in the shadow of the door.
"You shouldn't," she murmured. "I had to wait and tell you you shouldn't. 'Tesn't right or fitty to kiss that way. It frightens me, Archelaus."
"Why edn' it right?"
"Because—because we aren't wed," faltered Phoebe.
"Wed!…" In his voice was light laughter and a kindly scorn. "What's wed but a word? We're men and women on this earth; that's all that matters to my way of thinken!"
Phoebe was vaguely hurt and insulted, which did duty for being shocked very well. She opened the door and passed into the passage.
"I'd best be going," she said, still half-wishful to linger—anxious not to make herself cheap, yet wishing he would start some conversation which would make it possible to stay without seeming to want to over much.
"When'll you be out again?" asked Archelaus, his foot in the door.
"I don't know."
"I do. Good-night, lil' thing!" And he withdrew the foot and was off through the darkness under the elms. Phoebe was left with her awakened heart-beats.
Harvest had all been gathered in at Cloom, the threshing was over, the grain lay in heaps, grey-green and golden, in the barn, or had been sold and taken away, and the first tang of early autumn was in the air. The peewits had come down and were mewing in the dappled skies, and on the telegraph wires the high-shouldered swallows sat in rows preparing for flight; in the hedgerows the dead hemlocks, brittle as fine shells, were ready to scatter their pale seeds at a touch, and the blackberries, on which as the West Country saying has it, the devil had already laid his finger, were filmed with mildew. It was autumn, but rich, warm autumn, dropping her leaf and seed into the teeming earth, whose grain was garnered, but whose womb was already fertile with the future.
Blanche was still at Mrs. Penticost's, and the engagement, though it had not actually been announced, had leaked out, and Blanche was not at all satisfied with the results that had followed upon that dissemination of knowledge. Annie's hostility she could bear, for she knew that, once married to Ishmael, his mother would be placed somewhere too far removed for the nuisance of her to be more than occasional; it was not that which was blowing with so chill a breath over her spirit. It was, as she phrased it to herself, the whole thing….
Ever since that night upon the boulders above the wood her sureness, both of the depth of her own feeling for Ishmael and for the country method of life that went with him, had been declining, as from some crest set in too rarefied an air for her to breathe with comfort. Poise had been slipping from her, and she was genuinely distressed. In the first stage of her declension she was chiefly occupied with a frantic snatching at her passion—a sustained effort to pull it back and keep it with her; in the second she was occupied in wondering how best to get gracefully out of the entanglement, which was how she grew to envisage it. At first this seemed to be hardly possible; she saw pathetic pictures of herself going on with it and sacrificing herself, unaware how the pleasure of the moment was leading her on, how charming she found Ishmael's considerate and tender love-making that came to her jaded nerves with the refreshing quality of a draught of pure water to a man who has lived too long on champagne. The actual present continued to be pleasurable long after she had determined that it could never crystallise into anything more definite, and so she went on from day to day, enjoying herself, yet vaguely hoping something would happen which would enable her to retire from the engagement without loss of self-respect or that of Ishmael.
For gradually she became quite sure that she could not go through with it, that she must get right away. The people she wanted to know had not called on her—the Parson, on whose help she had relied, held out no assistance; Annie was stubborn and would obviously, wherever she was, do her best to make of herself a barrier against the world, the world that Blanche must know if life were to be tolerable here. The climax, to Blanche's mind, had been a ball just given by a local magnate and his wife who lived on the outskirts of Penzance. Ishmael had been invited and she with him, under the chaperonage of an elderly cousin of the Parson's who was staying at the Vicarage. And the ball, from Blanche's point of view, had been a failure. She had been received politely, but without enthusiasm; and she had overheard some of the other guests saying that they supposed young Ruan had had to be invited, but that it was really dashed awkward!… And she was beginning to realise that Ishmael, when he had paid his mother a little income, paid Vassie enough to live on, paid John-James bigger wages to allow of his living elsewhere, would not be nearly as well off as she had thought … a visit to London once a year would be the utmost to be hoped for. And for the rest—year in, year out, at Cloom, watching the waxing and waning of the seasons, bearing children, the children Ishmael looked for to inherit the horrid place after him…. Blanche, fond as she still was of him, literally shuddered as she saw where glamour, in company with boredom and desperation, had been about to lead her. After all, she need not despair: there were other men in the world, and she had been silly to expect to meet anyone she could marry at the theatre; it was no sign of waning charm that she had failed there. If only she could think of a good excuse, she would go home and write to Ishmael from there…. Yet that gave her no scope, allowed no scene such as her soul loved as long as she could shine creditably….
She could not quite decide how to stage-manage her exit; but, whether she went or not, Judy had to go back to her people—Judy who would bear with her the slim little sheaf of poems she had written during her stay, Judy sun-browned, almost more of the elf than the monkey. Killigrew had settled to go the same day to accompany her on the tiresome journey, and then he was for Paris again, his beloved Paris; he vowed that he should burst if he stayed in England any longer. On the morning of the day before Judy's departure Blanche, who, half-packed, was still trying to make up her mind, received a letter that, with no sense of impiousness, she considered providential.
Mrs. Penticost brought it in to her, between a red finger and thumb, rather steamy from washing-up, and busied herself about the room while her lodger read the closely-written pages. Mrs. Penticost was frankly curious, and if Blanche did not tell her what was in that letter she meant to find out by questioning her.
Blanche hardly noticed her presence; she was too rapt in the providential happenings described to her by the garrulous pen of her stepmother. The very crackle of the paper between her fingers gave her fresh courage as she read. And yet it was a very simple letter, coming as it did from the simple woman who she so often said had nothing in common with herself.
* * * * *
"Dear Blanche," ran the letter, "I wonder how much longer you are going to stay in Cornwall? Your father feels it hard that you should not spend any of your holiday with him, and I don't think will go on much longer with your allowance if you are neither working nor staying at home. You know he was determined you should have your chance to become a great actress, as you were so set on it and discontented at home, and indeed I do not blame you, for I know how dull it is here. However, just at present the neighbourhood is very lively, as we have a new lord of the manor—only imagine it! You know old Mr. Crossthwaite died in the spring and the place has been sold this summer to a very rich young man—trade, I think, butquitea gentleman; you would never know the difference, and has been educated at Cambridge, I am told. He seems a quite nice young man, and all the neighbours are making him give parties and giving them themselves, I believe to try and marry him to one of their daughters, but as you know there is nobody much here now. There are Dr. Smythe's daughters, but they are so very plain, poor dears! and the only others are Lady Geraldine and Lady Sybil, and I don't suppose they would look at him, being so much older and occupied in their charities, even if he were inclined, so I'm sure we can't blame the young man if he refuses to fall in love at all down here. If you were here I expect it would be a very different story; he's just your type, if you know what I mean, very like your Mr. Bellew, poor young man. I wonder what has happened to him. I did hear he married a barmaid, and I'm sure it was a judgment on his mother for saying he was too young to marry you. Well, there is no more news, except that that silly little housemaid I got a good place for at the Hall is in trouble—the gamekeeper, I believe; but she is very obstinate and won't say. These girls are enough to make one give up trying to help them. Also the carpet in the drawing-room is rightthroughat last, so I am in hopes of persuading your father we really must have a new one. I don't think it looks at all well for the rector of the parish to have a carpet that callers have to be warned not to catch their feet in. The rug cannot be made to cover it as it's right in the middle. I do my best with an occasional table, but then that gets in the way. With love, my dear Blanche, from myself and your father, believe me,
"Yours affectionately,
* * * * *
This was the letter that had flashed like a ray of sun into the scheme of things for Blanche, and whose salient portions—by which she meant those directly affecting herself—she repeated over and over. "A very rich young man … educated at Cambridge, I am told … cannot blame the poor young man if he does not fall in love down here … it would be different if you were home. He is just your style." That meant the style of man who fell in love with her, now always younger than herself.
"Got bad news, have 'ee, or is it good?" asked Mrs. Penticost, who could contain herself in silence no longer. She gave up the pretence of dusting and stood frankly looking at her lodger.
"I—I don't quite know how to take it, Mrs. Penticost," temporisedBlanche.
"Whisht kind of news that must be," remarked Mrs. Penticost, who had not watched Miss Grey these past weeks without getting a shrewd idea of the tendency of her thoughts and affections. "I was wondering whether you weren't feeling glad that time's come to go—if 'ee are going along of Miss Judy?"
There was no answer to this, and Mrs. Penticost, her rosy face set in lines of determination, began again.
"Must be rare and dull for 'ee down here after London, though there was that ball in to Penzance t'other night. Dance weth Maister Ruan, ded 'ee, my dear? They do say he handles his feet some pretty. I remember when I was a maid I was all for a man who could do that. I got as far as walking arm-a-crook weth a chap wance, and, thought I, 'I won't go for to ask he to step in till I do know if he can dance wi' I.' Some trouble I ded have keepen' he quiet till there was a gala and us could dance. Primitive Wesleyan, the gala was. He was all for me maken' up my mind long before, and I wouldn' have un till I knew, nor yet I wouldn' let un go. 'Must keep cousins weth he or he'll go off,' I thought; and so I ded, my dear, just managed it nicely. I gave the go-bye to a fine-looken chap from St. Just to dance wi' my man, and then I found that he never danced toall, and hadn't dared tell me. Mad as fire I was, and abused him worse than dung. But you couldn' ever go for to lay that complaint against Maister Ruan, nor yet any other, I should say."
"Mr. Ruan is all that is good and splendid, of course, Mrs. Penticost," said Blanche, folding up her letter.
"He is that, sure 'nough, and it'll be a bad day for the woman that ever does him a hurt, him that has had enough already to turn his very heart grey in his breast. I wouldn' like to see no woman do that."
"Mightn't it be better than making him unhappier in the long run by not doing him a hurt now, as you call it?" asked Blanche.
"If he but knew what was best for him, 'tes a sharp hurt and soon auver," said Mrs. Penticost frankly; "but he'm like all men, naught but a cheild that cries for the moon, and a woman as has a heart would sooner see a man getten' what he wants, even when 'tes bad for 'en, than see him eaten' his soul away with longing. There's a deal of satisfaction in maken' our own unhappiness, and a man has that to console him."
"You are a Job's comforter," cried Blanche, rustling out of the room. She had heard the well-known click of the little gate, and she fled upstairs to be alone with her thoughts and her letter for a few moments before meeting Ishmael. She no longer doubted she was going to break off her engagement and leave for home the next day, but she still had to decide on the type of Blanche who should appear to him and what her manner and aspect should be. A tender grieving, shown in a pale face and quiet eyes, would probably be best … and she could always introduce a maternal note in the very accent of her "dear boy…."
Not for nothing had Ishmael given way to the incursion of the personal, always before so jealously kept out of his life. His desire for impersonality now only kept by him in a fierce wish to blot out his own as much as possible, to sink it in that of the beloved, to drown in hers. He was obsessed by Blanche, she filled the world for him from rim to rim; and though with his mind he still admitted the absurdity of it, could even look at his own state dispassionately, he yet had to admit the fact. It was some time since he had been near Boase, because, although the Parson never so much as hinted it, Ishmael knew he was not in sympathy with him over this. Annie he felt he could hate for her antagonism, which, as long as it had been against himself alone, he had not minded; even Vassie would not yield altogether and come in on his side. Blanche had to fight the lot of them, he told himself—resentful, fearful lest they should frighten her away. But at the bottom of it all was the fear, the distrust of her which he refused to recognise.
On this morning as he went down over the fields to Mrs. Penticost's he was more uneasy than ever before—he knew it was not his imagination that she had been different these last few days; he began to be beset by vague fears to which he had not dared give form even in his own mind, much less in any speech with her. Yet since the dance he had faced the conclusion that they could not go on as they were, that Blanche must either agree to a wedding or a final parting….
He reached the cottage and had to wait awhile till Blanche, pale and grave, came to him in the little parlour.
"Come out," he said to her. "There's a lot of things I want to say, andI can't here. The room's too small."
Blanche hesitated, seemed to be weighing something in her mind, and then agreed docilely; she put on a hat, and then went beside him towards the cliff. As they went Ishmael tried to take her hand, trying to capture with it some of the spirit of joy which had fled, but she was carrying a little bag, which she snatched away; there came from it a crackle as of a letter…. They went down on to the cliff together and stood awhile in a speechless constraint among the withered bracken.
It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for litter for cattle. The time of year had fallen upon rust—brown-rust were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the masses of seeded hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts of down, that blew against Blanche's dress as she passed, and clung there.
Swish-swish … came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue. She felt that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder. There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray labourers, and with less space about her she felt she would find her task easier. Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread to come. Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff that he had been wont to like to wander in.
They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up thus for better protection against the wind. The close-set hedges of elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of passing from one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side. In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them assiduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance, and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers, violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always called them "the hanging gardens of Babylon"—a phrase that had filled him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare earth crumbled underfoot; even grass or weeds seemed afraid to grow there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.
Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely. Ishmael had a moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown together and were penning him in. Then he faced her and spoke.
"Blanche!" he said; "won't you tell me what is the matter?"
Blanche said nothing; tears of pity suddenly choked her, and the knowledge of the blow she was about to deal. Ishmael at last brought himself to voice his dread.
"You aren't disappointed in it all—or in me?" he asked in a low voice. "You're not getting—bored, are you, Blanche? After all, the actress sees the seamiest side of town; you won't mind leaving it? I know I'm offering you a very different life from what you're used to, but"—with a shade of the decisiveness that had always attracted her to him—"it will be much better for you. No late hours, no more of the sandwiches-at-odd-times game. We shall be very happy, just us two, even if we don't know people. People!" he cried scornfully, a wave of passion breaking over him as he caught her to him. "What do we want with other people?"
Pressing her almost roughly against him, he bent her head back into the curve of his arm and kissed her fiercely. She lay passive, deliberately taking all he gave and thrilling to it. Self-pity surged over her; she had been so happy—not only happy, but so much better! It was very hard, she felt, as she trembled with pleasure under his kisses. She shrank from giving pain, but she shrank still more from lowering herself in his eyes, and the situation needed all her skill. Disengaging herself from his arms, she faced him with what she felt to be a brave little smile.
"Ishmael! My poor boy; Ishmael!" she said.
He was suddenly very grave, but waited silently.
Still, he said nothing, and she took his hand in hers and spoke very gently.
"Ishmael, dear one! listen to me. You must see that it's impossible, that it would never do."
He did see it, her very certainty showed him plainly enough; but still he fought against it, bringing forward every plea, and ending with what was to him the great argument: "But if we love each other?"
"Of course love is very important, Ishmael," said Blanche, choosing her words carefully; "but don't you see how important other things are too? It's the externals that matter most in this life, Ishmael; see how they matter to you, who have worked so hard to alter them."
"You can be clever about it," said Ishmael, a new look that was almost suspicion glinting in his eyes; "I can't talk round a thing, but I know things. I know I love you and would spend my life trying to make you happy. You say you aren't happy in your own life."
"But how could I be happy without my friends and my own kind of people, Ishmael?" asked Blanche reproachfully. She did not add that, being incapable of loyalty, she had no real friends, but suddenly she saw it as true, and staggered under the flood of self-pity that followed. Losing Ishmael, she was indeed bereft, not only of him, but of her new self, and with the worst of all pangs—loneliness—striking through her, she laid her arms against the hedge and, hiding her face, burst into a storm of tears. Ishmael stood by her silently; like most men, he was inarticulate at the great moments, and Blanche sobbed on. She who for so many years had made herself believe what she wished, had gagged and blindfolded her own soul till truth showed its face to her in vain, was now stripped of all bandages and having facts passed relentlessly before her. She had made Ishmael love her, as she had so many men, by seeming something she was not; she had fallen in love with Ishmael herself, and must keep up the pretence of being the woman he thought her, for for her real self such a man as Ishmael could have no comprehension. She told herself that if they could only have married she would in time have grown to be the woman he thought her, and she railed bitterly at Fate. For her there only remained the old path, and the knowledge filled her with a leaden weariness. But for Ishmael—what remained for him? Never again would he be able to delight in the world of hopes he had set up with such care. What could she give him to help him face reality? The plighted word, steadfastness, friendship, none of these gifts were Blanche's to bestow, but she could at least send him away his own man again—at the sacrifice of her vanity. A struggle shook her mind, all the well-trained sophistries warring against a new clarity of vision. There were two courses open to her—she might hoodwink Ishmael, bewilder him with words, show herself as grieving, exquisite, far above him, yet in spirit unchangeably his; or she might show him the truth, let him see her as the world-ridden, egotistical creature of flimsy emotions and tangible ambitions that she was. If she chose the first way, Ishmael would have an unshattered ideal to take away and set up in his lonely heart; but it placed forgetfulness out of the question for a man of his temperament. If she decided on the second course, he would have a time of bitter disillusionment, but could some day love again, perhaps all the sooner for the shock; Blanche knew that nothing sends a man so surely into a woman's arms as a rebuff from another woman. In her heart she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling something that could never be the same again: on the one side whatever there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit of a lifetime.
She raised her head, and her glance was arrested idly by a deserted spider's web woven from branch to branch of the elder hedge and wavering gently in the breeze. Some seed husks had been blown into the meshes and clung there lightly, cream-hued against the pearly threads. Blanche found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this innovation on flies. "It is like my life," she thought, "blown husks for bread," and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell and the web run together in a silvery blur. The moment of idle thought had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she tried to compromise.
"I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not. I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life—friendship, beauty, one's own kin—mean so much to me."
He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited silently.
"Ishmael!" she said desperately; "it's no good, I'm not the sort of woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me, and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks…. Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael, I loved you so!"
Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out to Ishmael—she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap. He was yet to learn that no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.
"There's nothing to blame yourself about," he said. "You've given me the most beautiful things to remember, and it's not your fault you can't give more. When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel I couldn't let you give more even if you would…." Always unfluent of speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression. Ishmael had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love—the hackneyed expression came so readily to him. "She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books don't prepare one for the half-shades. Nobody can love without a flaw—we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite good or quite bad: nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of grey. They make life damned difficult, the half-shades!"
Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche. "I must go," he said gently. "Good-bye, Blanche!"
She held out both her hands, and he took them in his, repeating,"Good-bye, Blanche!"
Then she made her only mistake; she swayed towards him, her face held up to his in a last invitation. Roughly he put her hands away.
"Not that, Blanche … not that!" said a voice he hardly recognised as his own, and, wheeling, he went heavily through the little dead gardens. Blanche, sick with disappointment, noted dully that he never turned his head as he passed out of the last. A sob rose to her throat, and as she heard the choking sound she made, the swift thought came: "That sounded real! I must be broken-hearted to sob like that…."; and she sobbed again. Then a flash of self-revelation ran over her, and she stood aghast.
"Nothing is real about me, nothing!" she cried despairingly, "not even my sorrow at being so unreal." Drying her eyes, she stared out at the pale gleam of the Atlantic glinting through the elders and began to think. She saw love, such love as she was capable of, had been ruled out of life for her; it became all the more necessary that she should capture other things that made life pleasant. If she let this new phase of sincerity become a habit, she was lost indeed; better to slip into the old self-deceiving Blanche once again. Deliberately she shut off thoughts of Ishmael, and barred them out until such time as she could think of him, without effort, from a point of view that in no way lowered her self-esteem. She had been artificial in her strivings after sincerity; now, for the last time, she was real in her acceptance of unreality. Lightly dabbing her eyelids with a pocket powder-puff, she went back to the cottage.
There she read through the letter again, then consulted a time-table; she could change at Exeter and catch a train that would enable her to reach home that evening. She could make up a story to her stepmother to account for her sudden appearance. Blanche began composing in her mind what she would say to her. She would pretend not to have had the letter; even her gentle, garrulous little stepmother's good opinion was dear to her. She would seal it up again and forward it on herself; it would reach her at home a day after her own arrival. Yes, thought Blanche, everything would dovetail excellently. She went into the kitchen where Mrs. Penticost was ironing and the pleasant smell of warm linen hung upon the air.
"I've decided I must go home, Mrs. Penticost," she said. "That letter was to say my father is very ill, and I was only waiting till I'd seen Mr. Ruan…. I've told him I must go to-morrow. I'm so sorry, but—"
"Ah!" interrupted Mrs. Penticost; "'tes as well—'twould be dull for 'ee alone wi'out Mr. Ruan able to come so much about the place, and I wouldn' have had en here with Miss Judy gone and you alone. You was rare taken up wi' he!"
Blanche's vanity was too insatiable to spare Ishmael; she sighed pathetically.
"Oh, Mrs. Penticost! you make me feel horribly guilty, for I'm afraid it's all over," she said with simple earnestness, "but I couldn't prevent it; and poor Mr. Ruan—"
"Don't 'ee go for to tell I about it!" broke in Mrs. Penticost; "'tes downright ondecent in 'ee!"
Blanche flushed. "Horrid, insufferable woman!" she thought angrily as she went upstairs. "How thankful I shall be to see the last of her!"
Opening her box, she began to throw her belongings in viciously. From without came the crunch of Billy Penticost's boots as he crossed the little yard and the clink of a pail set down; then the rhythmic sound of pumping, so like the stertorous breathing of some vast creature, rose on the morning air. A sudden loathing of country sights and sounds gripped Blanche, and, tearing off her faded frock, she began to dress herself in the one smart travelling gown she had brought with her.
"I don't care what Mrs. Penticost thinks!" she told her reflection in the blurred looking-glass as she pulled a gold-coloured ribbon round her waist; "I don't care what any of them think—they're just country bumpkins, with no ideas in their heads beyond crops and cows!"
Without warning, a throb of memory assailed her: was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung them down.
"I'll buy some roses in Exeter," she thought; "they'll look more suitable than hedge-flowers." It was her definite rejection of the country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again—her last tribute to the memory of Ishmael.
During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness again, as insistent as before. He fought his lassitude of spirit as stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result, the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his mistress have passed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed on at Cloom. At Cloom—where there was no evading the thought of her amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still there.
There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held by the cry of the wisest of men—that "hope deferred maketh the heart sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next onslaught.
That his instinct had always been to fight the intrusion of the personal, that still it was so to the extent of a deadly clearness of vision which prevented him thinking the affair of greater importance than it was, did not prevent one shade of his pain; rather it was the more acute for raging in spite of himself. He was powerless to do anything but set his teeth and assure himself that it would eventually pass. He looked at his suffering as a man may look at a broken leg: he sees it stretched helpless before him; the pain from it ravages his whole sense, but it is local, so that he can lay his hand upon it and look from it to uninjured portions of his being which are yet unconscious of immunity, so much is his whole sense occupied with the one suffering portion.
Meanwhile Ishmael set himself to believe, or rather to realise—for he never lost his feeling for values sufficiently ever to believe otherwise—that all this would one day fall from off him; he even thought that then he would be as he had been before, not yet knowing that pain never leaves a man as it found him—that freshness of emotion lost in any direction, it can never be recaptured. Meanwhile, now and again, for all his philosophy, he was occasionally guilty of adding to the sum of his own pain by deliberately indulging in it. There were evenings when he fell on weakness and allowed himself to go over the fields at dark to Paradise, where he would stand at the point in the hedge whence he had been wont to watch her light. One evening there was a light in her window, and his heart had thudded in his chest so that he could have heard it had he been occupied in anything but clutching the hedge with both hands and staring, half-expecting a miracle to happen and her form to be shadowed on the blind at any moment. Sometimes, too, as he lay in his bed after a hard day's work and sleep would have come to him had he let it, he would start imagining, as he had been wont to do when a little boy. Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche…. If he had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if only, if only…. And if she were to come back, how he would forget all he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in uncertainty—how willingly would he catch at any excuse for trying it all over again. He would plan that too, till sometimes his vivid imaginings would for a few moments almost deceive himself, and he would realise, with a pang whose sharpness turned him sick and banished sleep, that it was all only the pretence of a child.
Nevertheless, he did not succumb to the temptation to write to her, probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted him she would write—on some other excuse. He had been in a curious way clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the death of his love no easier. Love cannot be killed—it always dies a natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes. Of all the things Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, and that was on a day when he had been telling her the many reasons why he loved her. Her mouth, her eyes, her soul, her voice, it had been the usual lover's medley. She had listened, and then perhaps, with the knowledge in her heart that disillusionment was bound to be his, said:
"There's only one safe reason for loving anyone, Ishmael, and that is—'because I am I and you are you!'… Love a person for beauty or brains or virtues, and they may all fail—there's only the one reason that may be trusted not to change." And that was, of course, precisely why he had loved her, and why the love died harder than the reasoned loves of older years which respond to reasoning.
Affairs at home were not likely to provide a pleasurable change for Ishmael's thoughts. Vassie, it was true, meant more to him, as he to her, than ever before. The pain that Vassie had suffered when Killigrew had left after his first visit, though not comparable to Ishmael's, being disappointment and hurt vanity, yet had dowered her with a degree of comprehension she might otherwise have missed. She felt she loved this young brother more dearly than she had ever thought to; something of the maternal awoke in her; she helped him in many little ways he did not notice, getting between him and their mother's tongue, exerting herself to make the affairs within the house run more smoothly. She was proud of her youngest brother, of his unlikeness to the rest, even of the aloofness and fits of dreaming which she no more than the others understood, but which she was sufficiently in advance of them to revere instead of scorning. She was more like him than she knew, though in her ambition had taken harder and more personal form.
With the spring Annie became unbearable. Archelaus had suddenly gone off again, after his fashion, this time to the goldfields of California, and Annie, who felt his departure bitterly, chose to blame Ishmael for it. Christmas had been for her the occasion to revive all her religious frenzies, and the house rang with her cracked-voiced hymns till Ishmael felt he could have smothered her with her own feather-bed. Her lust for religion, however, was taking a new direction—it was towards the Parson and his church instead of the conventicle of Mr. Tonkin. Quite what had brought about this change was hard to say—probably chiefly the infatuation of Tonkin for Vassie, a circumstance Annie took as an insult to herself.
"A man on in years like him, oldern' I be myself, and a minister before the Lard, ought to have other things to think on than wantoning with his thoughts after a maid young enough to be his daughter! Where's his religion, I should like to knaw?" This was Annie's own explanation, and even she realised that against Boase no charge of thinking about women could be brought—that quality of priesthood even her ignorance unconsciously admitted. She approached Boase on the subject of his creed and met with scant encouragement, which made her the more earnest. If the Parson had been anxious to receive her into the path he trod, she would have lagged; as it was, his brusqueness awaked a sensation of pleasure in her—there was no male to snub and bully her now that Archelaus had gone away. She set up to herself the image of Boase that some more educated women make of their doctor—a bully who had to be placated, who would scold her if she transgressed his ideas. She took to going to church every Sunday evening and sat in the Manor pew, every jet bead trembling on her bonnet as she kept her mind strained to attention—always a difficult task with her for any length of time.
One wet afternoon Vassie found she was not in the house, though when she had slipped out no one could say. Ishmael, alarmed—for nothing could have been more unlike Annie's habits—was about to set out in search of her, when the kitchen door was thrust open and slammed again and Annie stood before them, soaking with wet, her arms clasping a bundle of little books and a light of sly triumph in her eyes. Boase, shutting a dripping umbrella, was behind her. She had been across to the Vicarage in all the wet and cold to make the Parson talk to her about her soul, and to get rid of her he had finally given her a host of little cheap devotional books that had from time to time been sent to him from the publishers, and which he himself, disliking most modern books of devotion, had not troubled to read. He knew they were suited to the mentality of the average child of ten, and that therefore Annie with an effort might understand them and would certainly think them full of the Spirit.
He stood behind Annie, grave and quiet, signalling to Ishmael and Vassie with his eyes. Vassie sprang forward.
"Why, Mamma, you're soaked!" she cried. "Come! it's up to the bed you must go at once, and I'll bring you a hot drink when you're undressed. You can look at your books better in bed, you know."
"That's a true word," said Annie; "so I can. I can have 'en all around me on the bed, can't I, Vassie? I'll take en up, though; don't you touch en, I fear you'm nought but an unconverted vessel, and I won't have 'ee touchen my books."
Assuring her she should have it all her own way, Vassie got her out of the room and upstairs, while Katie heated water for a stone bottle to be put at her feet. Ishmael and Boase went into the parlour and sat down with grave faces.
"I don't understand it at all, Padre," said Ishmael. "This isn't a bit like her. Of course, she's always been funny, but she's never done a thing like this."
"It may be nothing but her annual attack of salvation," said the Parson drily. "I shouldn't worry about it if I were you; only keep an eye on her. She's not as young as she was, and it won't do her any good to be running about getting wet through."
"She'll never listen to anything I say."
"Well, Vassie seems able to manage her all right. She's a most capable girl, that!"
"She is indeed," said Ishmael, pleased at praise of his sister, whom he knew Boase as a rule was apt to criticise silently rather than admire. "I don't think my life here would be possible without Vassie. There are times when I feel I want to take mother's head and knock it against the wall. It sounds awful, but it's true. I want to knock it and hear the crunch it would make. There! But you can't think what it's like sometimes. One's soul is thrown at one, so to speak, morning, noon, and night. I don't believe it's a good thing, anyway, to be always taking one's soul out to feel its pulse. Except that mother's uneducated and ignorant about it, she reminds me very much of a woman at that vicarage in Somerset I used to go to sometimes in the holidays. She was the aunt of the family and was what she called a deaconess. It's a sort of half and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly…."
"A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?" suggested the Parson. "I think I once met the lady and I know what you mean. She had rows of little books, hadn't she?"
"Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed saying what she called her Hours. I'm sorry to be profane, but she did annoy me so though I was only a youngster. And now mother seems to be getting very like it. I wouldn't mind a bit if it made her happy, but it doesn't, not a bit of it."
"Nothing would make your mother happy—she wouldn't think it right; but she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under acquired Catholicism. I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen too much of these women."
"Women make such a fuss about nothing!" complained Ishmael.
"What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we must leave off seeing to them—that would result in our all lying down, shutting our eyes, and starving ourselves gently into futurity. I mean that we should do the things, and do them well; because they are of such an insignificance they may just as well be done right as not. Get yourself into the habit of washing dishes so well that instinctively you are thorough over the job, and you won't have to think about it while you do it. But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the average religious beats the worldly person hollow."
"They dissipate their secret bread into crumbs, in fact," said Ishmael with a laugh.
The Parson nodded. "Exactly—and stale crumbs at that. I wonder—it's easy to judge after all, and, as I once tried to tell you, it means something different to every man. Tolerance—the deeper tolerance which is charity … if life doesn't teach one that, it's all been so much waste. Who am I and who is anyone to despise the means by which another man lives? Some of us find our relief in action, in the actual sweat of our bodies; some find it in set hours and rows of little devotional books—the technique of the thing, so to speak. And some of us find it out of doors and some within narrow walls—some find it in goodness and some only by sin and shame…. One shouldn't let other people's salvation rub one up the wrong way."
"It all goes to make the pattern, as Killigrew would say," suggestedIshmael thoughtfully.
"When I was very young," went on Ishmael after a pause, "I think I lived by the Spirit—much more so than I can now, Da Boase. I seem to have gone dead, somehow," Boase nodded, but said nothing. "And then it was Cloom that meant life to me when I came back here and started in on it. Then it was love!"
He spoke the word baldly, looking away from the Parson. "Then it was love!" he repeated; "and now it's just emptiness, a sort of going on blindly from day to day. It's as though one were pressing through dark water instead of air, and one could only struggle on and let it go over one's head and hope that some time one will come out the other side."
"Don't forget," said Boase gently, "that no one can see a pattern when he is in the middle of it. It all seems confused and without scheme while we are living in the midst of it; it's only on looking back that we see it fall into shape."
"And does it, always?"
"I firmly believe so. It rests with us to make it as beautiful a pattern as possible, but a pattern it is bound to make. And a terribly inevitable one, each curve leading to the next, as though we were spiders, spinning our web out of ourselves as we go…."
"I suppose so," said Ishmael listlessly. Boase looked at him keenly. He could hardly believe that Cloom meant nothing to Ishmael; he was certain that there balm must eventually be found. He glanced out of the window, and saw that the rain had left off and a still pallor held the air.
"Come out for a turn with me," he suggested. "I haven't seen you go beyond the fields for ages. Your mother'll be all right now."
Ishmael hesitated, then picked up a stick, and went out with the Parson. Boase had wondered much how deeply Ishmael had been hurt by the defection of Blanche, and it had been difficult for him to ascertain, as the young man's reserve was not of the quality which all the time tacitly asks for questioning. On the surface he had shown no trace, except by a sudden ageing that was probably temporary; there had been, as far as Boase knew, no outbreaks of rage or pain. Now he began to suspect that it was taking a worse way—an utter benumbing of the faculty of enjoyment. Never since Ishmael's earliest boyhood had beauty failed to rouse him to emotion, and the Parson wondered whether it could fail now. At least it was worth trying, and it was not without guile that he had proposed this walk; he knew of something he meant to spring upon Ishmael as a test. He led, as though casually, to a wild gorge that lay on the way to the Vicarage, but nearer the sea than the commonly-used path, which here looped inland to avoid it. A stream, half-hidden by heavy growths of bracken and hemlock and furze, raced down this gorge to the pebbly beach, where it divided up into a dozen tiny streams that bubbled and trickled to the sea's edge. All down the gorge great hummocks of earth had been thrown up at some giant upheaval of the land's making, and over their turfy, furze-ridden slopes granite boulders were tumbled one against the other. In the treacherous fissures between brambles and bracken had grown thickly; over everything else except the bare rocks the furze had spread in a dense sea that followed the curves of the slopes and stretched on up over each side of the gorge. Everything was grey—pearly grey of the sky, grey-green of the turf, brown-grey of last year's undergrowth, cold grey of the boulders—everything except the gorse; and it was this that had caused the Parson to catch his breath and stand amazed when first he came upon it as at too much of beauty for eyes to believe—that caught at him again now though he was expecting it. He and Ishmael rounded the end of the valley, mounted a slope, and stood with all the length and sweep of the gorge rolling around them.
By some freak of soil or aspect every tuft of the low-lying cushion gorse that covered the slopes and hummocks as far as the eye could see was in full bloom, not a dry bush to be seen—bloom so thickly set that hardly a green prickle was visible; bloom of one pure vivid yellow, undimmed in the distance, unmarked to closest view, a yellow that was pure essence of that colour untinged by any breath of aught else. The air reeked with the rich scent; the greyness of sky and land became one neutral tone for the onslaught of those pools of flaring molten gold that burnt to heaven with their undestructive flame. And every ardent sheet of it had a grape-like bloom, made by the velvety quality of the thousands of close-set petals; they gave the sensation of exquisite touch merely by looking at them, while their passionate colour and scent made the senses drunken on pure loveliness.
That was how it had taken Boase—how in normal days it would have taken Ishmael, even more keenly. Now he stood staring at it, hardly seeing, untouched to anything but a bleak knowledge that it was beautiful. Not a breath of ecstasy went through him; for him it was nothing, and he never even noticed that Boase was watching him. He moved forward as though to continue the walk, and the Parson fell into stride beside him. Something in Ishmael was dead, and in dying it had for the time being stunned what Boase could only hope was a more vital and permanent part.
Ishmael said good-bye at the Vicarage and went home again, his mind floating through greyness even as his body was passing through the grey of the weather and surroundings. At home he found John-James waiting to consult him about the breaking up of a grass-field, and harnessing the horse to the iron-toothed tormentor, he took it out himself and spent the rest of the day driving it over the tumbling clods.