For a few days he kept up his new smooth-spoken tone; it was “little Nan” this, and “little Nan” that, and whenever he could get hold of her hand he stroked and patted it, and joined his fingers round her wrist, saying that it was fragile. “You’re very slight, Nan,” he said, feeling her arm and shoulder, and once he laid one hand against her chest and the other against her back, and said that there was no thickness in her body. She withdrew herself, shuddering, from his touch. “I’m blind, you know,” he whined, and then laughed, “Bless you, blind or not blind, I know any of you in the room before you’vespoken; there’s very little Silas doesn’t know. I know all about you, Nan, and I’m a good friend to you, too.” “But Silas ...” she began desperately. “Hush!” he said, putting his fingers to her lips and looking mysterious, “no need to say anything; we understand one another.” Just then Linnet Morgan came in, throwing aside his cap, and Nan clasped her hands in terror lest Silas should continue. “Linnet?” said Silas instantly, “you’re back early to-day.”
Linnet had work which could as easily be done at home. He began at once getting books and papers out of his cupboard, and disposing them on the table. He and Nan observed one another stealthily and quickly; he saw that she wore her dark red shirt and black skirt, and that on his entrance she had become silent as though confused, but meanwhile he talked to Silas and made him laugh, and ran his fingers backwards through his hair. Nan noticed that his crisp hair was quite golden at the roots, and that a fine white line followed the beginning of its growth. He was very fair-skinned, and the back of his neck where it disappeared into his collar was covered with a fine golden down. He was always busy; when he was not working he wastalking and laughing; Nan supposed that he had never in his life had time to think about himself.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” began Silas, resting his arms upon the table as though he were watching Nan and Linnet, “what were you two doing here the night Martin came? while I was at the Abbey?”
“The night the donkey was maimed?” asked Morgan.
“Why, fancy you remembering that!” said Silas negligently.
“I was clearing up, and we talked for a bit,” Nan put in.
“There was nothing to clear up; it was Sunday evening and you’d been singing and playing your zither. You talked mostly,—now, didn’t you?”
“Why not?” asked Morgan. He was very rarely sharp in speech, but he saw Nan’s discomfort.
“Why not, indeed? you and Nan are much of an age,” Silas replied. They considered him wonderingly; was he well-intentioned or infinitely malign? As they considered him he got up and went towards the stairs. “Back in a moment,” he said. They heard his tread upon the steps, then moving overhead. They looked at one another.
“Why did you say that about the donkey?” Nan asked.
“You think, like me, that Silas did it,” he answered, as a statement. “Don’t look so frightened,” he went on, his eyes softening into his ready smile; “I assure you, you need never be frightened of Silas. There’s no muscle in his violence. Nothing will ever come of it—beyond maiming donkeys. Oh yes, it’s horrible, I know, because it’s so futile. No, don’t shake your head—your pretty head,” he added inaudibly. An impulse came over him to cry “You tiny thing! you slip of fragility!” but he repressed it.
She uttered the most treacherous remark she had ever breathed about Silas, something which fringed the frightful truth, “I know better,” then terrified of her indiscretion, added, “Oh no, I mean nothing.”
“You are afraid of him, aren’t you?” he said, coming round the table closer to her, his attitude very sympathetic and protective, and differing by a shade from Calthorpe’s attitude. “You must not be that. One can only be sorry for Silas, who has grown warped and crooked, and who talks because there is nothing else he can do. Whenever I think of Silas, I feel so lucky in mind and body.”
She glanced at him gratefully. He had had the tact not to urge an explanation of her injudicious remark, and she knew that she could always depend upon this gentle tact; moreover, he had rescued her soul from the terror she so dreaded, and had by his words set Silas in a sane and pitiful light. It suited her temperament to have Silas drawn down from the uncomfortable heights where he seemed to dwell in perpetual strife with elements. It was no longer Silas who brooded over them, but they who endured and even loved Silas with widened charity. She was very grateful to Linnet for this. What he had done once he could do again; he could soothe her terrors. She had not yet thought of him in so human, companionable a way.
He continued the line that he had taken up, giving her time to command herself fully, making no demands upon her and pretending that nothing had been amiss. He swung himself on to the table, and talked easily,—
“I feel so lucky and thankful for having whole limbs and a sane mind. I don’t covet genius, but I do covet sanity; in fact, I’m not sure that the broadest genius isn’t the supreme sanity. Balance and justice! I think those two things are magnificentand grand,” (but he himself, she knew, would in practice always be merciful rather than just).
“I wish I had your book-learning,” she said; “you ought to stick to books.”
“Oh no,” he replied, “I like chemistry better, and those things. Science.... If I hadn’t to earn my living I shouldn’t be working on scents in this factory. No! I’d be in a country cottage with a laboratory.”
“You do your best as it is,” she said, touching his stack of scientific books.
“I had a bit of training at Edinburgh University,” he said, in wistful reminiscence, “but one ought to dedicate years....”
“Who was your father?” she asked after much deliberation whether she might venture the question. She knew Morgan only as an isolated person, who had arrived one day into the world of the factory, and had never mentioned home or relations. She knew only that he was Scotch; he had a very slight Scotch accent.
“He was an Inverness crofter,” he replied vaguely, “I used to keep the sheep on the hills in mists and snows, and properly I hated it. The dayswere short, and I thought it was always winter. I used to sit shivering on the brae-side, huddled in a plaid for shelter under a boulder, trying to read while I kept one eye on the sheep. The pages of my book used to get damp and limp, and the print got blurred when I tried to dry the page with the corner of my jacket. Then somebody found out that I wasn’t getting any education, and reported it, so I was sent back to school, and was happy again. And you—you haven’t lived here always, have you?”
“Since I was ten,” she replied, sighing, “we used to live in the south before that ... I liked that,” she said, “it was a pretty place, Midhurst, near Arundel—perhaps you know it?” She thought innocently, and rather in the fashion of a child, that every one must know what she knew.
“I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Oh, it’s under the Downs. Do you remember the day we walked with Silas to Thorpe’s Howland? that put me in mind of Midhurst; there were woods round about Midhurst.”
“You enjoyed yourself that day, didn’t you?”
He expected a little burst of rhapsody from her, but she only said quietly, “Yes, I did,” and he was aware of disappointment, and at the same time ofthe little stinging charm of her occasional unexpectedness.
“We both come from sheep country, then,” he said, but the images evoked in their minds were different: his of rough hills with their summits lost in mist, and lochs lying amongst the windings at their base; of dirty huddled flocks swept by wind and sleet; while hers were of cropped downland under a blue and white open sky, with the shadows of the clouds bowling across the downs and over the clumps of trees and little church-steeples in the valleys. He realised the disparity, saying “When I say that, we see different pictures,” and he smiled, but in his heart he longed for their childhood to have run side by side either in the Sussex or the Highland village. “Have you ever been back there?” he asked.
“Oh no; it’s a long way from Lincolnshire. I was always at the factory after I left school, and then when I was eighteen Mother died and I married.”
“Only eighteen?”
“A week after my birthday.”
“How young!” he said, with such rich and wondering compassion that she looked suddenly as it were into the depths of a cool inexhaustible well, always at hand for the quenching of her thirst. Hewas sitting on the table near her, while their conversation flowed on in its effortless interest, so that time and his books were forgotten. He seemed quite absorbed in what they were saying, looking down at her with intent consideration. They had attained an intimacy in which they could talk untroubled; she found it very precious.
“Now, Linnet!” said Silas’s bantering voice, “making love to my sister-in-law?”