Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

PART TWO

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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, not Houdon,” he would say, and she would accept the correction meekly with a little laugh implying that the matter was not of very great importance after all, 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 in terres cuites, in crystals and in 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-room faroucherie of 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 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 to him? 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 was Clare, 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; the next 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 one convention, 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, any more 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 for him,—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 and of 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 of heaven, 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 those ghostly 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 might not 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 she could 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 also without 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 rather interesting, 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 doors of 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 threw open 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 a little, 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, I say, 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 and bending 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 had heard 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 upon Daisy. 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’s father 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 was crooked 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 that he of 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 wink and 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 Gorwyn knew. 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, as she 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 she would 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 would have 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 without speaking. “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 she is alive?” 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 under which 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 would make 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 was Olver’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 of suffering. 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 town than 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, I know, I know!” 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. The Scouring 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 for this 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 the early 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.”

Young Gorwyn lounged gracefully round the house-door.

“Then you’ve fallen soft,” he observed in his drawling voice, surveying Daisy from head to foot as she stood just within the entrance to the dark passage.

“I’ve fallen soft,” she echoed, full of sarcasm.

This was in October, and in the blue early dusk people were gossiping at their house-doors, up and down the street. Young Gorwyn felt a spice of adventure in philandering thus openly with the newly-wedded wife of the redoubtable Lovel,—advertising to the whole street his disregard of Lovel. Not that there was any glory in passing the time of day with Daisy; everybody knew that Daisy was cheap and easy, giving impudence for impudence, a joke for a joke. But in making free with Lovel’s property there was glory, in being so near to Lovel’s house; almost inside it, one might say; in dawdling there, treating it as any ordinary house. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his breeches, and lounged, and stared at Daisy. She was a good sort, and he had got off cheap, were his dominant reflections; and was quite sure,—with a grin,—that she read his thoughts and wholly sympathised with them; would not have been shocked, in fact, had he voiced them and held out his hand, thanking her for the escape she had allowed him. He did not credit her perhaps with very much respect for him, but then he had equally little for her.

“Let’s see our kid now and then,” he said.

“What?” she said sharply.

“Let’s see the kid now and then,” he repeated, so that she wondered whether she had heard him right the first time.

“Oh,—maybe,” she replied, trying to show herself nonchalant about it as he, being a woman who readily took her cue from men.

She remembered the wink in the porch of the church, and that small, all-compromising word, so slily slipped into his phrase, seemed to her a first cousin of the wink; they had the same family air of innuendo, of confederacy. The impertinence! she thought, in her heart of hearts frightened rather than indignant, and she had a good mind to have the question out with him then and there, but, giving him a preliminary look, she decided to hold her tongue; an admission, once made, could not be recalled, whereas silence committed one to nothing. She was far, however, from trusting young Gorwyn now that she came to examine him more closely; he was strong and sleepy and graceful, lounging against the door-post, but there was something of the cat in his face with the broad cheek-bones, and the fair-lashed blue eyes so deep-set that when he smiled they almost disappeared into two little slits, and the way his fair hair grew so thick and low on his forehead; and she knew from experience,—all too well,—how caressing were his hands, caressing and heavy, when he reached them out towards a girl. A return of the passing attraction he had had for her came upon her, and she had a moment of queer disloyalty to Lovel, contrasting his slim darkness with the square Saxon strength of Gorwyn, to whom she was really so suitably mated. Their glances crossed; they understood one another too well, and looked away. “I must be getting on,” said Gorwyn after a pause which lasted a perceptible moment.

But that was in October, and she had not seen him again for any private conversation, however evasive. Autumn had gone, winter had come, with the violence and completeness to which dwellers on those uplands were accustomed. Snow blocked the roads. Communication with Marlborough was cut off, the inhabitants of King’s Avon resigned themselves to rely upon their own store of provisions, the Downs lay around them, white and enormous. They did not resent their isolation, but accepted it, almost yearly, as coming in its turn in the nature of things. It imprisoned them, more than ever self-contained, in their cup within the earthwork, with their pagan stones, their Christian church, their shops, and their Manor House, where Mr. Warrener was now their only representative of gentry; snugly a homogenous community. Lovel alone saw in the snow something more than a mere barrier against the outside world, a barrier that was almost a defence; he saw the stones standing up black out of a white field, the black trees powdered and spangled; he knew that he could go up on to the Downs without the fear of meeting any stranger riding there for pleasure. He could look from the crest of the White Horse Hill out over the country, without seeing the roads of civilisation, without seeing the White Horse itself, and his shepherd’s hut was as rough a shelter as primitive man would have devised. He took a certain pleasure in the discomfort and severity of his winter life. Often he would be the only man to leave the village of a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. Here, as he stood alone with the spears of the weather driving through him, he had a sense of triumph: he had got the better of the Downs, he had got the better of his own soul. His physical and mental endurance were alike strong enough to cope with the utmost rigours that Nature and fate were able to devise for his trial. This grim satisfaction, he felt, was the last luxury he permitted himself to indulge. For the rest, he had stripped himself bare of soft superfluities as a man could be; down to bone and sinew he had stripped himself. At times, in his moments of strange, harsh exaltation, when the gale screamed most piteously around him, he wished he might divest himself of his clothing, outward symbol of protection, and stand naked to support the lashings of the wind and the frozen hail; he thought proudly that no harm would come of it to his lean body. But although he never allowed himself to exploit the desires of this fanatical folly, he knew that he had touched the apex of his conquest over himself and his country, and, relaxing, he considered with a grin the superstitious amazement of his fellow-villagers should they, passing below, chance to see upon the skyline the naked figure of Lovel (whom they had always known for a wizard) crucified against elements where horse and man might scarcely hope to live.

He had his reward when the storm ceased, and, again alone upon the heights, he surveyed, as though his will alone had imposed the calm, the thick smooth quilt of snow and the blood-red sun descending towards the beech-clump through the perfect stillness.

But in the direction of Starvecrow he never wandered, where Calladine edged with some rare book closer to the fire, and Clare stood with her face against the panes staring out of the window over the snowy Downs.

Daisy began now to cling to him more and more. Her child was nearly due, but since she alone knew this,—and perhaps young Gorwyn, if he took the trouble to reckon up the dates,—every one believed the birth to be distant yet another month. Daisy was frightened; she dared not tell Lovel that the child might now be born any day; but she dreaded his long absences, for she feared that she might die without making her confession or obtaining his forgiveness. If all went well, she had no intention of confessing; but if she saw her life in any danger she had made up her mind to barter the security of this life against that of the next. Superstitious, she imagined that she would run more danger through bearing this child that she had carried during the months of deception and fraud, than she would through bearing a child honestly conceived and carried. She was mortally afraid of death, and mortally afraid of losing Lovel. She tried to sound him, “You’d be sorry if anything happened to me, Nicco?”

Lovel had heard this a dozen times already.

“Why should anything happen to you?” he replied.

“I shouldn’t have gone with Olver,” she mumbled, twisting the corner of her skirt.

“That’s a long time ago,—that’s over and done with,” he replied patiently and cheerfully, feeling sorry for what he thought was her genuine repentance.

“But this is the result,” she said, not consoled.

“Don’t distress yourself,” he said.

“Supposing I was tooken bad,” she began again.

“’Tisn’t for a month yet,” said Lovel.

“One doesn’t know always, with such things.”

“Will you see the midwife?” he asked, perceiving that she was worried. But the whole subject, and Daisy’s very existence, though he spoke with solicitude and bent a kindly gaze on her to discover what were the poor creature’s real wishes,—the whole subject to him was utterly remote and meaningless.

“The midwife over to Marlborough by this snow-fall!” she cried disdainfully.

“I’ll ride over and get her if you like,—I’ll bring her out on a pillion.”

“No, no, Lovel,” she said, shaking her head, “neither now nor when the child is born,—I’ll die without midwife, or doctor, more likely.”

“You’re determined to see it in its blackest light,” said Lovel, but he spoke good-humouredly, without losing his patience.

“Well, it isn’t of me or my baby you think, when you sit silent by the hour, is it?” said Daisy, suddenly losing her temper, pulling herself up with the help of the table, and wandering aimlessly around. “’Tisn’t your baby, so why should you think of it? and if I come to die, well, good riddance for you, and you’ll be able to think you did your duty by me. But much you care now, when you go out into the snow like the crazed gipsy you are,—to meet Miss Warrener, Mrs. Calladine, for all I know,—much you care that I sit at home and think myself sick over the danger I’ll run and the pain I’ll suffer, while you maybe won’t come near home till it’s all over one way or the other.”

“When the time gets near I’ll stop closer to home.”

She wanted to cry out, “You dolt, you blockhead, the time is near now,” but dared only repeat “One doesn’t always know ...” and began to whimper.

“I won’t go far afield,” said Lovel, soothing her. He was full of pity for all women in her condition, so that none of her words had power to anger him.

A small remorse came over her when he was kind like this, a compunction for having tricked him: would he have been so kind, so long-suffering about the child had he not believed without question in his own brother’s guilt? She tried to edge closer to him; “Nicholas, if anything happened to me, you wouldn’t think too hardly of me, would you?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” said Lovel, weary of the discussion, but still patient and kind.

“You won’t go far, Nicco, will you?”

“No, if that comforts you.”

He was committed now, having given his promise; there would be no more roamings for him; but he was willing to forgo their small solace, negligible in the midst of his desolation, if thereby he might reassure the poor contemptible creature.

“Nicco,” she said timidly, with an impulse of honesty, prompted by his gentleness, “’tisn’t fair to ask you, hardly ... ’tisn’t your child, after all’s said and done.”

“I’m responsible for my brother,” said Lovel, and she turned away from him and wept, overcome.

“You’re an upright man, Lovel,” she cried through her tears, “too upright for such as me.”

He had not understood her full meaning, of course; he had told her again not to distress herself, he had assured her again that he would not go far from home, he had even patted her shoulder, letting her see nothing of the effort it cost him, and he had gone out then, to a house down the street where he had a small carpentering job to finish. Daisy remained alone in the kitchen, alone with the satisfaction of having gained her point that he would abandon his long absences, but still she was not satisfied as she expected; she sat on where he had left her, bluntly probed by conscience, she whose conscience had never troubled her until this contact with Lovel and his standards: what was she doing to Lovel, she asked herself now? she had got him, but was that all? was that enough for her? to have got him and to know she had caught him by a trick? to see him inert under his dull unhappiness? never to hear him complain, never to catch him at fault, but to see him quiet as though his spirit was ebbing daily from him? Even she, in her blundering insensitiveness, stirred uneasily at the thought of his injuries. “But what was I to be at?” she cried to herself in self-justification; “I wanted him, and all’s fair....” She moved in her chair and twisted her hands. “Nicco, Nicco,” she moaned. “If he knew how I wanted him he’d forgive me,” and with this reflection came a deeper stab: it was probably true that he would indeed forgive her,—that she had indeed broken him down to the extent of that saint-like clemency. What would put anger and mettle back into him? what would put life back into him? Clare, nothing but Clare, without whom he was incomplete, only a gentle husk; and for a passing moment her thoughts travelled to Clare, living out her life in some fashion or another by Calladine’s side at Starvecrow. What, in her ignorance, had she helped to bring about? She paused and drew back on the brink of things she did not understand, taking refuge again in her own miseries, comfortably familiar by reason of the many times she had pored over them, with no dark corners or frightening perspectives, but all close, small and personal, under the range of her poor niggling microscope. And she was in the right frame of mind for such brooding, feeling herself oppressed and full of foreboding, as she sat in the kitchen big with the child, and big with the failure of her life, waiting indeed for deliverance from the child, but seeing no solution to the greater oppression, which she might expect to continue until she should grow as spiritless and broken as Lovel and their existence should dwindle to a grey twilight of apathy unenlivened even by anger or revolt. She had rarely felt so dejected; the very stones of the kitchen walls crushed her with their rude size; the child within her, usually so active, so ironically vigorous, was so quiet to-day that she began to wonder whether it were dead; the old woman overhead made no sound; and all round the house lay the thick soft deadening pall of snow that muffled the country from Thames to Severn. She wished that Lovel had not gone out; disheartened though she now was, she still clung to the tormenting comfort of his presence; it was almost a consolation to see him suffering beside her. Since life held neither hope nor joy for either of them, let her in her own pain at least be able to sneer at the sight of his; let them be together in their separation. She grew frightened at the wildness and virulence of her thoughts. They were not so much thoughts, as impulses that floated a little crazily across her mind. She was not well to-day; it was not surprising; it was cruel of Nicholas to leave her alone. She stirred, and looked round, saw no one, but fancied that eyes watched her. “Olver!” she cried out, although she had seen nothing.

In a pause that followed her cry she breathed heavily, staring round with eyes that dared not flutter into a blink. Her eyeballs became tense and dry, her hands strained at the edge of the table. For all that she knew, her brother-in-law might have been in the room all the time; she was still startled by his soft appearances and vanishings, as by his sudden meaningless laughter, and by the arrows of shrewdness that would dart across his erratic brain. “Olver?” she whispered next, half-expecting him to answer from under her very feet, and little as she desired his company, she thought that any answer would be preferable to the continued silence in the room and to the doubt as to whether Olver was there or not.

She was coming to the conclusion that her instinct had been a mistaken one, since five minutes had certainly elapsed while she stared and peered round the room, and she was about to relax from her strain of looking and listening for Olver, when she heard a faint tap on the window, and, looking round, she saw his face pressed against the window pane from outside. Her fright gave way to petulance; she called out to him to give over his tricks, and at the same time she beckoned imperiously to him to come into the house. Well-accustomed to him by now, she felt relief when he materialised out of the silence. “How long had you been watching me?” she asked.

“That’s my secret,” he replied.

She struggled, impatient of the little mysteries he liked to make.

“Anyhow, Nicholas isn’t here,” she observed, turning away from Olver and tapping her fingers irritably upon the table.

“I don’t want Nicholas,” said Olver, “I want you.”

He came further into the room, while she looked at him in enquiry.

“Oh, you’ve found an old bird’s nest you want to show me,” she said disdainfully.

“That’s as far as you can think,” replied Olver with equal disdain. He came up to her. “Have you ever thought that there’s things you’ve no idea of going on all round you?”

“Why,” she said, fright again overtaking her, “that’s what I was thinking just now.”

“But you didn’t like to think too close on it?”

“No, perhaps I didn’t. Let me be, Olver; I’ve troubles enough without you moidering me.”

“And are you the only one to have troubles?”

“Let me be, Olver, I tell you.”

“No, I won’t let you be. I’ve a grudge against you. I’ve thought it out.”

“I’m not well, Olver; keep your grudge till I’ve got my baby. Then I’ll have it out with you if I must.”

“You hadn’t any pity on Nicco.”

“Oh, that’s how the land lies, is it?”

“No use being brazen about it, Daisy. I’m here to speak for Nicco, and nothing you say’ll stop me.”

“If you don’t let me be, I’ll tell Nicholas, and he’ll be angry with you.”

“I’m not afraid of Nicco.”

“Oh, yes, you are. We all are. Even me,—and I’m his wife.”

“A pretty wife. Nicco can kill me if he likes; I’ll speak first. I know better what’s good for him than he knows himself. You’ve broken his heart.”

“Not me, Olver, not me only. His heart would have been broken anyhow. And God knows he’s breaking mine.”

“Who cares about yours? Nicco’s worth everything.”

“I know that, do you suppose I don’t know that? It’s making me mad, Olver. Can’t you have a little pity on me and leave me to myself?”

“I wouldn’t have any pity for you, not if you were dying.”

“Well, I shall be dying before very long, if that’s any consolation to you.”

“You aren’t the sort that dies. Nicco’ll have you stuck to him for years; he’ll leave you before you leave him.”

“Don’t say that, Olver; he’s strong; different, but as strong as me.”

“Oh, his body’s strong enough, but there’s something burns him away inside. Look at his eyes.”

“Olver, don’t say such terrible things. What do you know? I never can tell how much you know,—you’re simple, aren’t you? He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t complain to you, does he?”

“He’ll die, but he won’t have complained once. And we shall never know. He’s good to us both, isn’t he?”

“Good,—yes, he’s good; but you don’t understand, Olver, you needn’t rub it into me how good he is or how much he’s worth. I know it already, I love him so much it makes me sick and mad. It’s almost too much for me, what I have to put up with, what with one thing and another.... Now go away, can’t you? I’ve told you, I’ve admitted it all to you; I can’t put it more plainly.”

“He’s good to you just as he’s good to me; he hasn’t a ha’pennyworth of feeling for you.”

“I know, Olver, I know; can’t you leave me alone? I’m not well, I tell you; it isn’t the moment to come baiting me.”

“There’s another woman he wanted....”

“You shan’t speak of her!” screamed Daisy.

“Oh, yes, I will,” said Olver, seizing her by the wrists. “Do you call to mind what you once told me, that you saw them together, and it seemed a week wasn’t enough for all they had to say? Where are they now. Three miles apart, yet they haven’t seen one another for six months,—from the time the Downs were green to the time the Downs are white. And do you suppose he’s left her for a moment in thought, or she left him? Not they. They used to slip together to the Kennet, those two, and they’ve been suddenly divided. And you whine to me because you’re unhappy. You say you’re not well. Not well! You! Who cares? You could whelp a litter and be none the worse, and you can stand a bit of unhappiness just as well as you can stand your baby. I’ve no pity for you. But Nicco,—he’ll break,—he’ll die inside.”

“Don’t, Olver, don’t; what’s the good of torturing me now. What can I do?”

“What can you do? You can clear out, can’t you? Go and have your baby in a ditch, somewhere where Nicco can never find you again,” he said brutally.

“Where would be the good of that? She’s married herself, Miss Warrener is, and I love Nicco, I keep on telling you; I can’t give him up,” cried Daisy, confused and hunted to the last extremity; and she thought of something she could say to Olver, something which would either silence him or else force him to throw down all his cards upon the table, “Whose fault is it, anyhow, that Nicco had to marry me, to save me from the shame his own brother brought upon me?”

“You think you can trick me like you tricked him,” cried Olver, horrible with rage. “Why don’t you say the shame Peter Gorwyn brought on you? You might be a little nearer the mark.”

“Peter Gorwyn?”

They faced one another, all civilisation gone from them. They struck blindly at one another, keeping nothing back.

“I saw you, oh, I saw you, the day of the Scouring.”

“I loved Nicco, I do love him; I had to have him!”

“You love him?—you’re killing him.”

“He couldn’t have got Miss Warrener,—not with a brother like you. Do you hear? ’Tisn’t me that keeps him from her; it’s you, you, you.”

“Me?” shouted Olver.

“You, did you never think of that before? It doesn’t matter whether my baby is your baby or Peter Gorwyn’s baby. It’s you that spoil his life for him, you and your mother, you mischievous dolt, and your dirty blood in him. He’s tainted, and he knows it. ’Tisn’t me. I came long after; I’m just an extra. ’Tis you and your mother destroyed him, from the day he was born.”

She clasped her hands suddenly to her side and fell back on to her chair.

“You’ve done for me,” she groaned.

The door opened and Lovel stood upon the threshold. Olver ran to him, touching him all over with his hands, reaching up to pass his hands even over his brother’s head.

“Look at her, Nicco; she’s tricked you, the brat isn’t mine, it’s Peter Gorwyn’s, and she says ’tis I that kept you from Miss Warrener. Why don’t you kill her, Nicco? and I’ll go right away if it’s true; I love you better than she does; you shall have Miss Warrener.”

“What’s all this?” said Lovel. He put Olver’s passionate fumbling hands aside, and went over to Daisy. “You’re ill,” he said in a practical voice; “What is it? has Olver hurt you?”

“You heard what he said,” she replied, looking up at him with terrified and pain-racked eyes.

“Never mind about that. Are you ill? Let me help you up.”

“She’s tricked you, Nicco,” cried Olver, fawning round him.

“Hold your tongue, Olver; she’s in pain. You poor fool, why didn’t you tell me? Heaven knows if I can get to Marlborough through this snow with darkness coming on. Lean on me, I’ll take you upstairs. Lean on me; never mind anything else.”

Olver was pulling frantically at him.

“Is it true, Nicco? is it me? Oh, my poor Nicco,—first me and then her,—what can I do?—but I’ll do something,—I’ll find something to do,—oh, my head, my heart.”

“The pain, the pain!” cried Daisy.

“Lean on me,” said Lovel, putting his arm round her.

“Gorwyn’s child!” screamed Olver in a frenzy. He followed them to the foot of the stairs, where he stumbled and fell on the lowermost step, still calling incoherently after Lovel, who was persuading his wife up to her room, saying meanwhile, “Lean on me, Daisy, I won’t let you fall, don’t be afraid, it’ll all be over soon.”

The word was quickly passed down the village street that Daisy Lovel’s time was come, and that Lovel begged the kindness of some charitable woman to remain near his wife while he rode to Marlborough in search of the midwife. “There’s a chance for somebody,” said one woman, “to see the inside of that house for herself.” “And there’s a come-down for Gipsy Lovel,” said another, “to have to beg for one of us to go into his place. Where would he be if we all refused?” “Her time come already? and she married,—let me see,—four, five months, is it?” said a third. But in spite of these and other scornful remarks, volunteers were forthcoming, and even those who had lagged most behind, or who had recommended that Lovel be left to suffer now the penalty of his years of unneighbourliness, watched enviously the departure of Mrs. Blagdon for the house of mystery and evil legend. They saw her received at the door by Lovel, drawn in and swallowed up, as to their imagination Daisy herself had been swallowed up on the day of her wedding.

They continued, however, to observe Lovel’s house for some time, glancing at intervals between the lace curtains which decked their own windows, and saw a light spring up in the room they assumed to be Daisy’s, and a gigantic shadow passing to and fro upon the blind. Evening had come, swiftly to be followed by night; the snow had begun to fall again in large flakes; very soon the street was white, unbroken by footmarks, since every soul was within doors. The women idly watching between their curtains saw Lovel emerge from his house, close the door behind him, and pass down the alley between two houses to the shed where he kept his horse. They saw him emerge again, leading the horse; they saw him swing himself into the saddle and ride away, his coat collar turned up high against the snow, tall and spare as he disappeared silently into the thick dusk. The women said, “He’s off to Marlborough to find the midwife. Things can’t be going,” they added with relish, “as well as they should.” The men only growled, “He must be crazed to think he can find the road to Marlborough on a night like this; he’ll break his own neck and his horse’s legs.” But the women had a curious faith in Lovel’s efficiency.

Few village confinements were honoured with so much interest. The darkness in the street was now intense, heightened by the snow that continued to float down in large, soft flakes; only the little yellow lights in the windows broke it, all on the ground-floor level but for the significant exception of Daisy’s window, whose lighted rectangle on the upper storey threw its beams out against the falling snow. All was silent in the Lovels’ house; ever Mrs. Blagdon seemed to have fallen into the clandestine habits of her hosts, for she had not once run out across the street in an interval for a moment’s gossip with a neighbour; only the shadow passed upon the blind, enormous and suggestive, to show that any life stirred within the house. The snow fell thicker; the few black holes left by the hoofs of Lovel’s horse had been long since blotted out, and Lovel himself had disappeared into the night as completely as though he had no intention of ever coming back. Hours had passed, suppers were finished and cleared away in all the little lighted kitchens, still the good wives were reluctant to move upstairs to bed, while careful to conceal their reluctance from the men. And Mrs. Blagdon, when she finally threw up a window in spite of the steely cold, to call out in an irritable and impatient voice, “Anybody seen anything of Lovel?” was answered by a dozen voices in negation.

“How’s things, Mrs. Blagdon?”

“Turned round the wrong way,” came the reply laconically.

The street fell back into its silence after the small disturbance. Women who had been through the experience gave a moment’s pity to Daisy. Gorwyn, the smith, knocking out his pipe against his hearthstone, reiterated the opinion that Lovel would not be seen again that night. Peter, his son, stirred uneasily. “Is it all up with her, would you think, mother?” But Mrs. Gorwyn was contemptuous. “Lord, no; a solid girl like Daisy’d stand a deal more than that.”

Country news, that most unaccountable traveller, spread even to Starvecrow in its isolation. Mrs. Quince was full of it,—she who towards Clare had kept herself so very prim and respectfully reserved. “You will remember, madam, the girl you saw in the attic bedroom here, Daisy Morland by name?”

“I remember perfectly, Mrs. Quince; what of her?”

“You will remember she was stitching at some baby-linen,—she was married to that good-for-nothing Lovel,—Gipsy Lovel, they call him,—a fortnight later,—a matter of three weeks before you were married yourself, madam.”

“Yes, Mrs. Quince?”

“She was brought to bed of a son in the early hours of this morning, madam,” said Mrs. Quince importantly.

“Really. I hope she is well?”

“Well enough; these country girls make nothing of it. Lightly born as lightly come by, I always say. Yet at one time it was a question whether they could save the baby.” Mrs. Quince added some details. “Yes, madam. Her husband had to ride to Marlborough and brought the doctor out a-pillion, and how he could ha’ done it with the night as black as pitch, and the snow falling, and the roads hedge-deep in snow, is what the folk are all asking themselves. They saw him start, but no one saw him come back, but sure enough when they went to unbar their doors this morning there were the tracks of a horse up the street. A fine boy, they say. It’s fortunate he hasn’t taken after his Uncle Olver.”

“Yes,” said Clare.

“It’s my opinion, madam, I don’t know if it’s yours too,—that people like that have no business to get children. ’Tisn’t fair, as a matter of conscience, when you don’t know what dark blood you may be handing on. Anybody has only got to look at the Lovels to know there’s no good in them,—well, they ought to restrain themselves, that’s what I say.”

Seeing that Clare did not reply, Mrs. Quince resumed after a moment, “There always were things about those Lovels that weren’t natural. Now here’s another thing: how did he ride from King’s Avon to Marlborough and back on a night like last night, if something unholy wasn’t in league with him? No other man in the village could have done it, and there’s not many that would have tried. No, let the baby go, they’d have said, and the woman too, if need be. And he’s always out on those hills; if he had to go after sheep there would be some sense in it, but he just goes straying alone when most men are glad enough to keep their fireside. He’s been seen on the top of White Horse Hill, in the middle of a blizzard fit to cut you in half. And I have heard it told, that after he’s passed by, the Grey Wethers have been found uncovered; yes, even though they were at the bottom of the deepest drift there they’ll be, sticking up black in the middle of the snow.”

“You can’t believe everything you’re told, Mrs. Quince.”

“Well, that’s as it may be, madam. All the same, I stick to it that there is something unholy about those Lovels; it’s easy to say the younger one is daft, but there’s nothing daft about Nicholas,—far from it. So why does he look so dark and queer? and why must he pass on his sly Egyptian blood to an English girl? if he must get children, let him get them on one of his own sort, that’s what I say.”

Here Calladine came in.

“Secrets?” he asked in his most urbane manner, seeing Mrs. Quince become silent in the midst of garrulity.

“No,” said Clare. “Mrs. Quince was telling me that Lovel’s wife has had a son, and that Lovel had to go to Marlborough in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor.”

“Dear me, that’s a daring, uncomfortable thing to do,” said Calladine, smiling in a patronising way.

“Yes,” said Clare, looking at him. “Not many people would have cared for the job, I think.”

Calladine laughed negligently.

“You always had a weakness for your poacher,” he replied.

“Would you be wanting me any more, madam?” enquired Mrs. Quince.

“If Lovel’s wife is in need of anything I can send her, please let me know, Mrs. Quince.”

“Yes, madam. Very good of you, madam.”

When the housekeeper had left the room, Calladine said, “I never question your actions, as you know, Clare, but do you think it judicious to encourage these people? The woman was married not very long before ourselves, yet she already gives birth to a baby; the man is well-known as an undesirable in the whole neighbourhood.”

Clare went up to him. “Oh, Richard,” she cried gaily, “are they worth talking about any longer?” She pushed him down into his armchair and knelt at his feet. “What are we going to do to-day, tell me?”

“To do?” repeated Calladine in surprise. “Why, what is there that we could possibly do on a day like this? What a restless spirit it is—always crying out to be up and doing—when I am quite content if I may sit and look into your eyes.”

“That’s very pretty, Richard, but it doesn’t mean much; don’t you ever want to be out, moving, riding, anything! anything but sit cooped indoors day after day with books?”

“I confess I haven’t much desire to be riding into snow-drifts on this particular morning,” said Calladine, glancing at the white-and-leaden prospect out of the window.

“And you wouldn’t allow me to do so either, if I had a mind to?”

“Such a wild child!” said Calladine fondly, stroking her hair. “How fortunate that you should have a staid, elderly husband to look after you.”

“How do you think I looked after myself for nineteen years, then, Richard?”

“Heaven knows,” said Calladine in mock dismay; banter with Clare was a form of conversation he particularly enjoyed. The morning promised to pass agreeably; there was nothing he liked better than for Clare to kneel at his feet, as she was doing now, sitting back on her heels, while he looked at her fresh youthfulness with that fond and tender glance of his, and rallied her gently, or caressed her with the courtly phrases she had heard from him alone among men. “How did you look after yourself?” he repeated. “You always escaped from old Martha Sparrow, and even the poacher cannot always have been at hand for a ready rescue, and in any case he is scarcely my idea of a knight-errant.”

“No,” said Clare, “he hasn’t such pretty manners as you, Richard.”

“Now you’re laughing at me,—are you, or aren’t you? I never know,” and he caught her to him and began flecking her face and hair with quick kisses, but desisted to say more seriously, “You’re so exquisitely a woman, Clare, so deliciously a child; I realised that you were both from the day you first came to visit me here.”

The phrase had a vague echo of familiarity for Clare; “so exquisitely a woman”; she felt sure that she had heard him say that, or something very like it, before; and she thought with the hardness that was becoming habitual to her where he was concerned, that from no woman would he demand anything further.

“What a toy I am to you, Richard,” she said idly; “what a toy you like to make of me.”

“The most exquisite toy that ever came into the life of a sad and lonely man,” he said, with a return to his old manner, and he took her hand and began to play with the bangle on her wrist. He handled her much as he would handle his terra-cotta statuettes, and for a while she endured it, but presently sprang away and went to stand at the window where she might look out upon the prospect of shining snow.

“Always looking out, Clare? what liberty do you see out there? you think I ought to let you go, little caged bird, but you would soon perish,—your pretty limbs wouldn’t stand the cold,—better stay happily where you are, believe me,—don’t fret,—come back to me,—let me whisper how precious you are,—come back to our lovely idleness.”

“But I don’t like idleness, Richard; no use pretending I do; you should not have married some one so restless as I.” His hands were upon her shoulders; she wanted to shake them off.

“Did the poacher ...” began Calladine.

“Ah, leave Lovel alone,” she cried; “what impels you to speak of him this morning? Leave him alone, with his wife and his baby; they can very well look after themselves without any interest from us.”

“But, Clare, Mrs. Quince was speaking of them; it’s only natural that my thoughts should continue to run in that direction; and even you yourself....”

“You’re fascinated by the subject of Lovel,” she said, whirling round on him, “now, aren’t you? own to it. You always bring him in: the Downs, the circus, and now his baby,—everything’s an excuse for bringing in Lovel. And why? Is it because he took me out of the circus-tent that night? is it because I rode with him? why not speak out what’s at the back of your mind?”

“But, Clare, Clare! why so fierce and challenging suddenly? there’s nothing at the back of my mind.” (“There is,” she thought, “and you too great a coward to face it out.”) “Come now, don’t let us quarrel and we won’t speak of Lovel if it offends you,—will that satisfy you?”

“It’s of no importance whether we speak of a man in the village or not,” she said, turning away and hunching her shoulders.

They went back to sit by the fire, a bulk of hostility unspoken between them. Calladine felt peevish; his indolent, graceful, vaguely amorous morning had been spoilt; and spoilt by what? by the presence of Lovel. “You’ve never yet shaken off that lean rogue,” he broke out once, sudden and querulous after a spell of silence. They both sat staring into the fire, separate as they could be. They had not previously spoken of Lovel, not directly, not insistently; only to range round him with that nagging, niggling hesitation that seemed to pull at Calladine. But now his presence blocked every other road of conversation; he got in the way, he was near, he could not be got rid of. Almost, he was in the room.

Calladine looked at Clare; fair and slight, delicate even, but so unafraid. A touch, and she was instantly up and all-daring. She kindled at a spark. What was it that she and Lovel had in common? the same apparent frailty of body, the same flame of spirit,—Calladine had all the lyricism to clothe his perceptions with words. He had apprehended Lovel; on the rare occasion when he had seen him, he had apprehended him fully, to his own disquietude. And he apprehended Clare and their resemblance, with pain and resentment. They were two fine and vulnerable things, he thought; vulnerable and brave. But he thought it with only half of his brain, the lyrical, romantic half; with the other half he was peevish and irritated.

If only they were not so silent; Clare had never faltered or complained. Only she had wanted to go out; she had looked out of the window with a kind of homesickness. He was always catching her eyes at their straying, and being made aware how far removed she was from himself. But this, again, had been with half of his brain; with the other half he had known that she was his wife and that he had got her under his roof. And he had not allowed his lyrical self to call her a prisoner.

What if she were to escape? He would be without persuasion or authority.

“You stay with me out of apathy,” he cried. “If once your fancy changed, you would be gone.”

Clare, who had not been thinking of him, turned a mild glance of slight attention on him. He was glaring at her, frightened and angry.

“Yes,” he continued, “I don’t hold you; you’re kind to me, and you indulge my game of pretence. But you’re not really here. You’re indulgent to me as if I were a child,—‘yes, dear, very nice,’ between your own, grown-up preoccupations. But you ought to remember that I am your husband,” he said.

“When have I forgotten it?”

He sulked. It was true she had not forgotten it. He had no reproaches against her; she had been patient, gentle.

“I don’t hold you,” he grumbled.

It was a long time since she had seen him like this; usually he was assertive and complacent. How slight a thing it took to disturb him! His complacency was only a façade, a painted hoarding propped up by struts,—theatrical, like everything else about him. But she really bothered very little with him, now that she had found him out.

“Oh, yes, Richard,” she said, to pacify him and to be done with the argument.

“But I say no,” he cried, hitting his fist on the arm of his chair. “You’re for ever looking out of the window, and sometimes when I speak to you, you answer beside the point. I married you to get a wife, not a woman languishing like a captive in my house.”

She laughed at that, quite amusedly, and he felt he had been foolish. Still he would not abandon his point.

“That fellow would only have to beckon ...” he grumbled.

“Lovel again?” asked Clare.

“You enjoy saying his name.”

“I do not,” said Clare quietly.

“No,” he said, staring at her, “perhaps you do not.”

Perhaps she did not. Perhaps the very name was pain to her. But he must go wrangling on at her.

“Lovel wouldn’t keep you indoors, perhaps you think.—He would let you out into the snow,—take you out into it himself perhaps.”

She only looked at him. He went on, more judicial now; deliberate, less blatantly bad-tempered.

“Yet, after all, I don’t know why you hold such a good opinion of this fellow Lovel. He sticks to no trade,—he gets a country girl into trouble and has to marry her,—not a very creditable record, it seems to me.” He was leaning back in his chair, with his finger-tips together. “And, judging by his stock, he has no right to beget sons,—better if he did not associate with women at all,—such people should be allowed to die out.”

“So Mrs. Quince was saying. Perhaps he feels the same himself,” said Clare in a contained voice.

“It looks like it! a child born after four months of marriage. I am bound to say, my dear, your suggestion isn’t very convincing. But there, what should you know of the lusts of these country young men? Animals, merely. Forgive me if I seem self-righteous. I feel strongly,—very strongly.” He leaned forward and patted her. “You can understand that I don’t like to think of my Clare contaminated by such company.”

“You mean Lovel?”

“Most certainly I mean Lovel.—Why do you look at me so darkly, Clare?”

“Did I look at you darkly? I didn’t mean to. My thoughts were far away.”

“And where....”

“Ah, Richard, mayn’t I have my thoughts to myself?”

“By all means, Clare. I hope, my dear, that no one has ever accused me of being a tyrant. Of course your thoughts are your own.—But you don’t resent, do you, the things I have been saying of Lovel?”

“I am only tired of the whole subject.”

“Yes,—of course,—naturally,—I quite understand that. Mrs. Quince is an old gossip. I must tell her that it really doesn’t interest you to be informed every time a woman in the village has a baby. It doesn’t does it?”

“No, of course not,—but don’t say anything to Mrs. Quince, I beg you.”

“But I can’t have my wife bothered by my old gossip of a housekeeper. I daresay she meant it well, thinking you were interested in Lovel.”

“Richard, please,—let us leave Lovel now,—I shall begin to scream if I hear his name mentioned again, I warn you.”

“Clare. You try to joke, but the idea of saying that wouldn’t come into your head if there were not some truth in it.”

“Well, I told you I was tired of the subject.”

“You are talking now like an irritable woman.”

“Am I? But I am a woman, and not a man, and therefore I daresay as irritable as all other women.”

“You mean that men can be every whit as irritable,—myself, for example.”

“Now you are putting words into my mouth that I never said. Is it a guilty conscience, Richard?”

“You persist in joking when I want you to be serious!”

“Oh, Richard, what a childish conversation. Instead of sitting here and talking, let us....”

“Well, what? Let us what?”

“Nothing, I’ve thought better of it.”

“Let us go out, you were going to say. Always the same folly! Have you any idea of the depth of the snow? Out, indeed!”

“I never said it.”

“No, but you thought it.—Ah, if I say that, you will ask again if you mayn’t have your thoughts to yourself. There are moments when I don’t know how to deal with you, Clare.” He knew his own injustice, but his querulous jealousy pricked him on. “Any other woman would be content to sit by her own fireside this bitter day with the man she had married so short a time ago.”

“Four months,—getting on for half a year.”

“I see,—you have found the time long. If you entered a little more into my interests, instead of having your own thoughts to yourself so much, my dear, perhaps you would find it pass quicker, and it would be more companionable.”

Clare thought that he looked at her almost with hatred. She was herself too indifferent to be interested either one way or the other.

“I shall be glad when this accursed snow is melted and gone,” he added, “and you will perhaps be a little less restless.”

At that moment Mrs. Quince came in, looking perturbed.

“There is Olver Lovel downstairs, madam, asking to see you,—I didn’t know what to say,—he seems so bent upon it,—but he looks like a scarecrow, that he does, with his coat torn and his hat stove in, and bits of straw all over him as though he had spent the night sleeping in a barn.”

Clare rose.

“Where is he, Mrs. Quince?”

Calladine started forward with a detaining hand.

“No, Clare, you can’t see this man,—let me speak to him first,—at least it’s not right, not safe, for you to see him.”

“And he says he must speak to Mrs. Calladine alone, sir,” Mrs. Quince put in.

“Of course I shall see him,” said Clare.

Calladine grew agitated. “Mrs. Quince, you need not wait; please leave the room. Now, Clare, understand: it is against my wishes that you see this man. Let me go down and find out what he wants, and then if I find that he is quiet and reasonable I will allow you to interview him in my presence. He has probably come to beg, in which case I can give him a few shillings as well as you can, and send him away.”

Clare faced him. “Please let me pass, Richard; I am sorry to do anything against your wishes, but I intend to speak to Olver,—and alone.”

“Let me make myself quite clear: it is not only against my wishes, but, since my wishes fail to touch you, also against my orders.”

“I am sorry, Richard, but I mean what I said.”

He blustered; she remained quiet; in their first encounter he was no match for her.

“You disobey me deliberately, then?”

“This is a case in which I must use my own judgment.”

“You will not expect me to receive you back into my favour afterwards.”

She smiled a little.

“Really, Richard, I am afraid I must take the risk of that.”

“Go, then,” he said, stepping dramatically aside, “go, in direct defiance.” Still he did not quite expect her to flout his authority, and remained amazed when she passed him and went swiftly out of the room.

Left to himself, he made a movement to follow her, but drew back. Let her go, to her Lovels and her secret life: he had never really held her. Let her go, to the summons which had come, and to which she had so instantly responded. He himself, from the moment Olver Lovel’s name had been pronounced, had dwindled to nullity; he had ceased, on the spot, to exist for her. All these months, she had lived with him, a stranger, away from her kind. And he recalled Mrs. Quince’s description of Olver,—“he looks like a scarecrow, that he does,”—this emissary from Nicholas Lovel to his, Calladine’s wife.

Calladine strode up and down the room. She was downstairs now with Olver; what was he saying to her? What was in the future, haunted by the presence of Lovel as the past had never been? How should they ever get rid of Lovel now, standing between them? That uncomfortable presence of Lovel in the past, at which Calladine had pecked and nagged, was nothing to his dominion over the future. Surely he had been mad not to take Clare’s acquaintance with the poacher as a matter of course? mad to harass her as he had harassed her that morning? By his own folly he had created the spectre, the giant, of the situation. He strode up and down, hitting fist against palm in his vexation. Then he grew afraid; what if the poacher should not restrict his poaching to game alone? What if he should entice Clare by the occult powers with which the countryside credited him? Occult powers, or human powers, it was all one. Calladine felt his helplessness; he was weak, wordy, he could be set aside. They would set him aside, those two.

He was an ill-used man. Self-pity nearly brought tears to his eyes. Life used him ill: first the woman who had fooled him, now Clare. Clare’s kindness to him had been a dalliance, while she had nothing better to do; it had evaporated at the mention of a name. He hated her, he hated Lovel, he hated the Downs and the snow. Glittering and cold, without compromise; he did not understand the Downs and the winter, but Clare and Lovel understood them. What was Olver saying to Clare? Calladine felt his life finished; and through his perfectly genuine anguish he did not fail to perceive the romantic value of his situation. He fell into a chair, and remained there with his legs extended as he gazed despondently on the floor before him.

Clare would tell him nothing. He foresaw that, and his foresight was justified. She came back, immeasurably far removed from him. He wanted to ignore her return, to remain stiff with dignity, but it was not long before his curiosity weakened him. “Well, you are not very communicative. I see that you have no desire to make amends for the distress you have caused me. Was the poacher’s message, then, too sacred,—too personal,—to be imparted to me?”

Clare’s eyes, when she turned them on him, were narrowed with pain.

“Richard, must you ask me questions now? I have come back to you; I ask you only to leave me to myself.”

But that was precisely what he could not do.

“You ask a good deal, don’t you, in asking that? I see you white and shaken, yet I am not to know the cause. You ask a good deal of my forbearance, indeed. I am not to know what messages another man sends you. I am not to know what is going on, nearly under my nose, but kept away from me. I am to be defied by my wife, and then kept in ignorance by her. This is the state of affairs we have come to in one short morning! What has happened to us? it bewilders me.... I insist upon knowing,—I will know,—has that half-wit come to you with a message from his brother?”

“No,” said Clare.

“How you have to force even that one monosyllable from your lips! What, he came on his own initiative? Clare, you are not speaking the truth.—Yes, I am sure you are; I beg your pardon. You distract me by your coldness. Clare, forgive me, I scarcely knew what I was saying.”

“Don’t touch me,” said Clare, recoiling, “for pity’s sake don’t touch me now.”

“I am a very unhappy man,” said Calladine, falling again into his chair and taking his head between his hands. “I am indeed an unhappy man,—what am I to do with my life?”

He remained for some time with his head sunk between his hands, then, glancing up to see what effect his attitude might have had upon Clare, he found her gazing out of the window.

“I see,—you forget my very presence,” he said reproachfully, and his sense of injury was doubled. But because his distress was genuine, although he could not refrain from rhetoric, he followed her across the room in a tormented way, and tried to see into her face. “Clare, speak to me; I am not angry, only unhappy. There is something now in your mind which I do not share; you live in a half-hour which is secret from me.—Or have you always,” he cried suddenly, “lived in hours I knew nothing of?”

Mrs. Quince peeped in through the door.

“Ah, that’s good,” she said in a relieved tone; “I wasn’t easy so long as I thought Mrs. Calladine was with that scamp,” and she retired.

“Even the servants, you see, Clare, are concerned for you.”

“Mrs. Quince, far from being concerned,” Clare said, returning briefly to a consciousness of Calladine and of the house that held her, “is full of delight.”

“Clare, these bitter words from you! you are changed indeed, or am I seeing you as you are for the first time? I begin to look back at these four months as at a long delusion; I am utterly bewildered. You are withdrawn to an unbelievable distance from me; I feel it, yet I cannot say what has taken place. This morning, we were close to one another; we were, as it seemed, enclosed by our little room, leisured, snug, sheltered; now, I am striving to reach you, and am held off.” His words beat without meaning against Clare’s isolation; she could not emerge at all from the tumult of the terrible scene she had endured from Olver. She looked, indeed, at Calladine, intently, as though she were trying to bring herself back to the importance of his world, but her eyes were empty.

The day dragged away; Calladine continued to clamour fitfully. He could not leave her alone, and, though she clearly suffered, he, perverse, must torment her. By adding to her pain, he added to his own, but could not desist. She answered him very little; a negative, an affirmative now and then, was all he could get from her; for her part, all that she wished was that his voice might cease, so that she might have a lull, a silence, alone with her own mind. Yet it seemed to her that she had, indeed, a silence at the core of her being, still and inviolate against his ineffectual clamour, like the stillness in the heart of a cyclone, where birds poise and sing. At this core, this kernel, this patch of peace, she dwelt apart; Lovel was there, and so was Olver, Olver with the urgent hands and fanatical eyes, passing from Lovel to her and from her to Lovel, almost crushing them up against one another by the force of his urgency, Olver’s determination was like a menace, becoming almost malevolent by virtue of its very violence. He overwhelmed, he terrified her; she had nothing but weak refusal; she had tried to push him away with hands that had no strength in them. She had covered her eyes, but he had forced away her hands; she had shut her ears, but he had screamed past her defences. It was easy to remain deaf to Calladine’s whining; it had been impossible to shut out the ferocity of Olver’s attack. And yet, in spite of the din, she was aware of that core of silence, in which she and Lovel were, with Olver rushing between.

She and Calladine, Lovel and Daisy, there they were, the four of them, all separate; and Olver, like a firebrand, a trail of fire, working between them. They might have had some control, the four, but for this crazy creature, obsessed by the one idea, not to be reasoned with. He was the incalculable element; he made the others helpless, taking their intentions out of their hands and throwing them away.

The danger of Olver,—what if he should see Calladine? What if he should irrupt into the room and shout irreparable words before she had time to stop him? The danger of Olver,—what had he said to Lovel? what to Lovel’s wife? But Calladine and Lovel’s wife alike remained insignificant; she and Lovel were the two full of meaning, shut up with the wild, charging Olver in their core of silence.

Vaguely somewhere, she was sorry for Calladine, but he was insignificant; she could not pause to consider him; where she and Lovel came together, he faded into that poor wisp drained of blood, that he had dwindled to on the evening of the circus fire, when she and Lovel had stood together on the embankment. They shed him; he slipped off, and only his noise reached them intermittently, scarcely troublesome.

Daisy herself was less unreal than Calladine; Daisy knew suffering too, Clare supposed; in a clumsy, common way she knew it; blundering, but human; yes, she could be sorry for the other woman.

But they must be sacrificed, the two, Calladine and Daisy, if matters came to a head; sacrificed to the blazing reality of herself and Lovel.

Would Olver come again? Would he leave her alone now? Would he give her a chance to forget the words he had spoken? some of them remained, rang in her head, brassy, like beaten gongs; fell on her like big sparks from an anvil, burning. It had been a strange experience, to hear Olver voice the passion that had upreared itself, always mute, in Lovel.

Olver came again. He came like an avenging angel, inspired, the crazed creature, by the urgency of his message. Like a reproachful angel he came to rebuke her, grotesquely disguised in his scarecrow travesty; the beauty of his selflessness shone through the ramshackle of his appearance. She scarcely knew whether to find him pathetic or alarming; she wanted to pity, she could only be disturbed; he disturbed her to the darkest places of her soul. The fixity of his idea, the strength of his purpose, his devotion, his anger, raised his simplicity to the plane of nobleness. She could not answer him; she was abashed before him.

She was afraid of him, his image pursued her, his upraised hand denouncing her, his eyes and tongue pouring scorn upon her. At moments he seemed like fate itself, like a thing she could not escape from. She never knew at what hour of the day he would come, so all day, sometimes for two or three days on end, she waited, dreading and longing for his coming. She could have refused to see him, but had not the strength; but when she must crush Calladine’s protests, then she had strength in plenty.

The snow lay deeper than ever, after another heavy fall, upon the Downs, but although still a prisoner her restlessness had left her: the life she had wanted came now to her from without. Olver brought that life; he brought tumult, anguish, but it was life that he brought, besieging her. And although he was not Lovel’s envoy, still it was straight from Lovel that he came. His eyes, as they flamed on Clare, an hour earlier had been filled with Lovel; she could fancy Lovel’s image still lingering in them. And after he had left her, it was to Lovel’s presence that he would return; he would hear Lovel’s voice and see Lovel’s hands, that so haunted her. Once she broke her silence to ask about Lovel, “What does he do, these days of snow? does he get out? stay at home?” and Olver answered, “To-day he has been twisting new snares, and last night he brought home a lamb that still lies by our fire.”

She knew that an end must come; beleaguered, she knew that. She had pushed life away, but it had followed her, even into her retreat. It was useless; Calladine was not life; his need of her had not been life. He was a shadow, a man of pretence, sufficient to himself, with his own pretences for company. It was only the true solitaries, the really lonely people, like Lovel, who had absolute need of their chosen loves. The strong, clamping loves, that fastened on to one another, to lose their hold only when they lost their hold on life; the unalterable, ordained loves. She could not justify the argument; her selfishness towards Calladine remained unjustified. But she knew that that would not weigh with her; she and Lovel would reach one another when the day came, even through a stone wall.

Still she could not justify it. She tried to, perfunctorily. She sat frowning, and saying the words over to herself. Selfishness, duty. They remained mere words; she could not feel them in her blood, as she felt her need for Lovel and Lovel’s need for her; they were words pitted against instinct. Was it love, that need? Was it no more than that ordinary miracle, love? She thought that it was more. They had the Downs as a bond between them; the Downs, and all nature, of which Lovel seemed the spirit, the incarnation. He was the darkness of the Downs, their threat, their solitude, their intractability; she was their light, their windiness, their sunlit flanks, their springiness of turf. United, they formed a whole. There was an essential significance in Lovel, as there was an essential insignificance in Calladine.

Olver seemed to know these things; he had an untutored insight. Calladine seemed to know them too, but that was less surprising; with his subtle, lyrical mind he might well be expected to apprehend, and apprehending, to drape in wordiness; to give a name; to illuminate blind impulse by giving a name. Poor Calladine; she watched him, detached, as he rambled from discovery to definition, tormenting himself by the beauty of his own phrasing. At moments he viewed them, herself and Lovel, as a spectator, losing himself in the romanticism he wove around them; recalled to the fact that it was his own wife of whom he spoke, he relapsed into the gloom and terror of his pain. For he lived in terror, impotent terror. And Clare watched him, living herself in her hours with Olver and in her consciousness of Lovel.

There was the little round mirror she had given to Olver. He always brought it with him; he told her, chuckling, and tapping its bright surface with his finger, that he could see her in it even when she was not present. She did not believe this, but still she half believed it. “Look into it now,” he said, thrusting it under her eyes, “and you will see Nicholas.” She shrank back, afraid; he could not persuade her to look into it, he could not even deride her into looking into it. “You don’t believe me, yet you won’t look,” he said, “but if you don’t believe me, why then won’t you look?” He was for ever daring her to look into it, to find the image of Nicholas. She would not; she did not believe in the magical properties of the mirror, yet nothing would induce her to glance into its queer convexity. “I watched the circus in this, the night Nicholas took you out of the tent,” he said, and she wondered whether he knew how bound to Lovel she had felt herself that night; “I watched Nicholas’ wedding in this; I looked in this at him and Daisy sitting in the kitchen. Look into it now,” he said, offering it to her again: “maybe you’ll see Daisy nursing her baby; maybe you’ll see Nicholas twisting snares; maybe you’ll see him riding up on White Horse Hill, alone, in the snow.”

“Do you remember what I told you once?” he said to her another time, “that Nicholas could bring you out to him, even at midnight, if he gave his mind to it?”

She wondered how long this strange period would last; she was not even impatient; the core of peace and silence within her lay so certain, so quiet, that she dwelt already as it were serene in the fulfilment of herself and Lovel.

Calladine came to her door to find it locked against him. He shook the handle. “Clare! it is I.” A wild winter night; the wind blew along the passage, lifting the loose matting on the floor, the gas-jet on the stair flickered and below the well of the staircase was dark. “Clare!” said Calladine again, shaking the handle.

Her voice within answered him, faint, shut away.

“Yes, I am here; I am in bed.”

She was there! the house contained her at least; she had not fled.

“Let me come in, Clare.”

A long pause, and then her voice again.

“I cannot, Richard.”

“You have locked me out?”

“I am sorry, Richard; I can’t let you in.”

He stood irresolute. Then he started shaking the door, frightened by its wooden resistance. Still she did not come to open, she remained hard to him, did not even pray him to desist. He ceased his useless shaking and began to plead with her, tears in his voice, humiliating himself. She made no answer. He went away, down into the sitting-room, where the embers of the fire still gleamed red between the bars. “I gave her everything,” he whispered, looking round upon the comfort of the room. Upstairs, she lay in her bed, soft and sweet and indifferent as he had always known her,—lost to him. He went over to the window and looked out; the masses of the clouds flew before the wind, so that the stars seen between the rifts seemed to be rushing across heaven. Starvecrow lay beneath them, small and lonely. A hatred of the place overcame him. “I shall take her away,” he muttered; “we will go to London.” And he saw her a fleeting figure, hurrying down straight narrow London streets, her footsteps that were used to the short turf ringing forlornly along the pavement. He pitied her in the midst of his anger and frustration: surely in London she would droop and pine. But she must be the one to suffer now; it was her turn; he had suffered enough. He could not run the risk of leaving her among these open hills, in league with the Lovels,—even now that crazy boy, that wild scarecrow figure, might be frisking beneath the windows. His wife, linked with those dark people,—so linked, that she was and always had been a stranger to him. Misery drove him to superstition: there was a kinship between the Lovels and the country, witchcraft and legend, the crazy boy, the sarsen stones, the ancient sacrifices, Lovel the vagabond poacher, the wayward shepherd, his immunity from cold or fatigue,—all these things ran together in Calladine’s unhappy head.

And Clare, what place had she among them? she was the country in its loveliness, the running brooks, the soaring birds, the sheep-bells, the dew, the distance, the manifold music.

He would take her away. Next day, he told her so, challenging her refusal. And although she neither refused, nor, indeed, made any answer, he insisted on the point, growing noisy in his insistence. “We shall leave this place, do you hear? We shall go, we shall take the railroad to London.” But London must be an empty sound to her, he thought, whose world was the Downs. “The city of London,” he emphasised, seeing the streets, the squares, the endless houses,—a maze of streets, in which she would lose herself, seeking in vain the way out. He looked at her with hatred; there, in London, where he would feel himself at home, he would at last get the better of her, be revenged upon her for all the pain she had made him endure; there, she would be the bewildered stranger, and not he; perhaps she would even cling to him for reassurance, and he would mock at her in her distress, and spurn her, over and over again, until she crept broken at his heels.

Then, seeing her so pale and fragile, he was remorseful, and fell on his knees beside her, crying, “Forgive me, Clare.”

She sat with him after dinner in their room. He was not restive, that evening; his panics overtook him only periodically; sometimes he appeared to regain all his old confidence. Olver had not troubled Starvecrow for several days, and Calladine readily forgot. He was standing now by his bookcase, lovingly shifting the volumes; his touch slipped like velvet over the frail old leather; delicately he fluttered over the pages. Clare could even find it in her heart to envy him, life to her came so rough and violent, to him so veiled and mellowed, always, so to speak, at second-hand. He murmured to himself over his books, or was it to her that he addressed his murmurings? how real was her presence to him? was she more real than those fugitive terra cotta nymphs of his? was she perhaps less real? as lovely, but more troublesome? a nymph that would not stay there quiet on her stand, but whose draperies were blown by the wild wind from outside, and whose feet stirred mutinous towards escape? Still he murmured over his books, without that uneasy glance which meant that he was afraid of losing her; he had forgotten, for the moment; it was providential how easily he forgot, his excitability easily roused, and almost as easily abated.

But as for her, an oppression was on her, an exaltation. She rose. “Richard, I am going to the door to look at the night; don’t come; it’s cold outside.”

He was startled, but he had known her do this before, and he had no desire to leave his books or the warmth of the room. “Take a coat,” he said. She went up to him and kissed him lightly. He patted her shoulder with affection, and watched her cross the room to the door. “Graceful ... graceful,” he murmured to himself in appreciation, turning again to his shelves.

Clare passed downstairs to the hall. She moved as though her feet did not touch earth. With a fur cloak thrown round her, she opened the door and stepped out into the night, closing the door again behind her. The Downs were there, white in the starlight. Overhead, in a black sky, blazed the constellations, not yet sunk from the splendour of winter: Orion, low in the west, the splendid Plough, and Sirius, single and more brilliant than the rest. Clare passed down the dark path, swept clear of snow, to the little gate; at the gate the dark shape of a man came forward to meet her; it was Lovel.

“I knew you would be here,” she said without surprise.

“I have not been before,” he answered.

“No,” she replied, “I knew that.”

There was a little silence.

“Will you come with me now?” he said.

“What, out on the Downs?” she asked, trying to see his face through the darkness.

“Well, we belong there, don’t we?” he said patiently.

“Then what has kept us apart, I wonder?” she said. She wondered genuinely; their union seemed so large and simple. “Yes, I will come,” she added then.

“I have tried not to come to you, Clare,” said Lovel. “The child is not mine, you know,” he went on.

“I know; Olver told me. But what does it matter? Shall we go?”

He followed her through the gate, and they took the track up on to the Downs.

Three days later Calladine rode into King’s Avon, turning in at the Manor House gates at the slow walk which had been his pace for the whole three miles of his journey. He rode slackly and without interest, letting his horse stumble; even the instinctive check on the reins seemed to have deserted him. He gave his horse to William Baskett, who ran out from the stables, and, laying his gloves and crop on the bench in the hall, trod wearily into Mr. Warrener’s presence. The old man was surprised and delighted to see him. “My dear Calladine,—my dear Richard, fancy your riding over in this snowy weather,—why, I thought you scarcely stirred out of doors. And what brings you?” He peered closer. “Dear me, there’s surely nothing the matter?”

“Clare has left me,” said Calladine. The phrase had been in his head for three days now. It was a relief to him to pronounce it at last aloud. “She has gone away with young Lovel.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Mr. Warrener. “Left you? gone away with young Lovel? The shepherd fellow? But why? where have they gone to? what for?”

Calladine raised his hands and let them fall again with a gesture of hopelessness,—the hopelessness of explaining to Mr. Warrener. Yet in a way he relished lacerating himself with the explanation.

“Clare and the shepherd fellow,” he said, “are lovers. Yes, it is as I tell you. They have been lovers for many months, perhaps for many years. They were in the habit of meeting on the Downs,—I don’t know how often,—frequently,—perhaps every day. I can’t tell. Since Clare has been married to me they had not, so far as I know, met at all. She has only seen Lovel’s brother,—the simpleton. He has come over to Starvecrow to see her. I don’t know what he has said to her. I can only suppose that he engineered their meeting. All I can tell you is that three evenings ago she went out, as she said, to look at the night, and has not since returned.”

“Three evenings ago!” exclaimed Warrener. “But I knew nothing of all this.”

“No,” said Calladine wearily, “I gave strict orders that you were not to be told. I thought she would come back, you see. But as she has not come back, I cannot keep it a secret from you any longer. We must take some action, I suppose, if you think it necessary. Or shall we leave them to themselves. If any one is capable of looking after her, Lovel is the man. And he knows the Downs,—they both know the Downs,—surely the Downs wouldn’t hurt them?”

Mr. Warrener took no notice of this pitiable cry wrung suddenly out of his anxiety.

“Of course we must search for them,” he said, frightened and bewildered and angry. “But,—really this is a most extraordinary story,—how do you know she has gone with young Lovel? Clare!” he said, indignant, “whom I trusted to wander about at will,—to deceive me in this fashion!—but she never came to any harm, whilst she was under my care,—no, not until you were responsible for her. Upon my word, sir, you’ve fulfilled your charge very badly,—what excuse have you to give to me?”

“You let her grow up into a wild thing,—the blame’s with you as much as with me,—and as to responsibility, she’s my wife even if she is your daughter.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Warrener, relapsing into his customary mildness, “it won’t help matters if you and I start wrangling. But tell me now, what makes you so certain she has gone with this ... his name positively sticks in my throat,—this shepherd fellow?”

“What makes me so certain? What do you suppose I have been doing these three days?” said Calladine querulously. “What do you suppose my state of mind has been? I knew Clare was safe, in one sense, I know she was with Lovel. Yes. His wife came to Starvecrow after him; she had guessed where he was going. Oh, a pretty interview I had with her—I have Clare to thank for that. She came crying to the door, and Mrs. Quince let her in, so Mrs. Quince, at least, guesses the whole story. She brought the woman up to my room, and left her alone with me, and I saw her smirk as she went out of the door. A pretty business.... She cried to me, this woman; she sat in Clare’s chair and cried. She owned up—a long tale—how she had got Lovel to marry her and how her child was neither his child nor his brother’s; I really don’t know what else—a long tale. She talked very extravagantly—said she was dying for love of him—and how he had never touched her,—a lot of nauseous detail. She kept on saying that he was decent,—decent, decent to her,—that kept on coming back,—and that she was sorry now,—she was being punished for what she had done. He was civil to her always, she said, but as cold as winter, and now he had gone. There was nothing left for her now, she said, but to stay looking after his people,—his old mother and his mad brother,—that was her idea of making amends. We went out together and looked all over the Downs for Clare and Lovel; she sobbed and cried all the time. She wanted me to raise a hue and cry, to put the police on their trail, but of course I would not do that. ‘If they want to go,’ I said, ‘let them go with as little noise as possible.’ But I looked for them myself, and if I had found them I would have besought Clare to come back. She was with me nearly all the time, this dreadful woman. I kept sending her away, but half an hour later there she was again. She brought her child with her, wrapped in a shawl. She said she felt like drowning it,—a shocking thing to hear a woman say. Saxon fair it was, and I believed her when she told me Lovel had nothing to do with it. She has been with me almost uninterruptedly now for three days; I kept her at Starvecrow because I didn’t want the story trumpeted over the whole village. Certain that she has gone with Lovel, indeed! Of course I am certain. Besides, I found the tracks of two persons’ feet in the snow—a man’s and a woman’s.”

“Well, why didn’t you follow those tracks?” asked Mr. Warrener, who had been staring at Calladine all through his recital.

“You may be sure I did, and they led me to the top of the Downs,—knee-deep in some places. Then snow began to fall again and the tracks were blotted out,—I lost them,—I fancied the Downs and the snow were conspiring against me with Clare and Lovel. Lovel’s wife grew frantic when she saw the tracks blurring; she began running round and round in a senseless circle. There was I, up on the height with that common woman, she having lost her husband and I having lost my wife. That is what your daughter, sir, has exposed me to.”

“Is that all you think about?” said Mr. Warrener.

“Heaven knows it isn’t!” cried Calladine. “I think horrible things,—I think of Clare suffering from the cold, and then I think of her close with Lovel, and upon my soul I don’t know whether to wish her dead or alive. You don’t understand, Mr. Warrener, the passion they have for one another. I suppose I knew it, a long way back, but I shut my mind to it. It seemed preposterous. I put it away. And then, when it began to come closer, I did not know how to fight it,—I knew how strong it was. And Clare was like a little trapped thing all the while; gentle to me, but always looking out of the window. I tried to tame her; she pretended to be quite tame, but all the while she kept that poised look about her,—ready to spread her wings.”

“You seem to have a good deal to say about it all,” Mr. Warrener observed.

Calladine was silent; he felt rebuked.

“I have been crushing down my thoughts for three days,” he muttered then, sulkily.

“But what are we to do?” said Mr. Warrener. He took out his big handkerchief and began to mop his forehead, then, remembering that the day was cold, he replaced it in his pocket. “Is it snowing now?” he asked irrelevantly.

“No,” said Calladine. “It is bright and frosty, and there is no wind; the wind has dropped ever since the night that Clare went. I used to think the wind made her more restless, ‘Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne,’ you know, ‘me rendra fou.’”

“But what are we to do?” said Mr. Warrener again. They were two helpless beings, to confront such a problem. “At all events, she is safe enough with young Lovel; I believe he is a capable sort of creature; he won’t let her come to any harm.”

“Curse him,” said Calladine, resentful that the legend of Lovel’s efficiency should have percolated even to Mr. Warrener’s secluded room.

“We must go out and look for them,” said Mr. Warrener. “Come, Calladine,” he said, rousing himself, “you don’t seem able to take any action. Bestir yourself; we must go out and look for them.”

“Must we?” said Calladine without interest. “But I don’t think it’s any good, you know. I have a superstitious feeling about it; there was something intangible about Clare. I never got hold of her,—she was my joy, she tinkled about my house, in and out of my rooms, but it was like having a linnet in a cage. You know how the men go out and snare the larks under nets on the Downs; well, it was like that. She didn’t mope; no, never; but I think she was only waiting for the day when she should fly away.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Mr. Warrener. “Don’t encourage such ridiculous fancies, Richard.”

“I’ve seen her,” said Calladine, “looking out of the window, looking out of the window....”

“Come,” said Mr. Warrener again; “if you won’t come with me I must go alone.”

“And the man too,” said Calladine, obstinately; “he was always on the Downs; he wouldn’t bind himself down to a master; he slipped free.”

“Are you coming?” asked Mr. Warrener, standing up. He cast a glance at his writing-table. “Fancy Clare....” he said with a sigh. “She was a help to me, Calladine, you don’t know. I made a sacrifice in giving her to you. But I thought it was for the child’s happiness; and she hadn’t a mother. I missed her more than anybody knew. You never realised how much she helped me; why, look here....” and he showed Calladine a thick note-book filled with Clare’s handwriting. “She had an instinct for archæology,” he said, “and she wrote a beautiful hand—clear and pretty both.”

“You make it sound like an epitaph,” said Calladine bitterly.

“Heaven forbid,” said Mr. Warrener, a little startled. “She’s safe enough, never you fear. All we have to do is to get her back and perhaps we’ll find your fears were groundless,—a burst of wildness, only,—she was accustomed to liberty, you know,—perhaps it’s no worse than that,—lovers, you said,—but oh, no, I can’t believe....”

“You and I, Mr. Warrener,” said Calladine, fixing the old man with a gaze full of meaning, “have perhaps lived a little too remote from life. Clare is alive, Lovel is alive; you and I are left behind.”

“But all the same....” said Mr. Warrener, greatly troubled, “all the same.... Lovers, you said. Oh, no, surely not,” and he looked embarrassed, uncomfortable, as at an indecency.

They went out together. They went on foot, with no very definite scheme of action in their minds. Vaguely they intended to make their way up on to the Downs, on to the topmost height if possible, and from there to scan the rolling country. They went side by side, Calladine long and spare, Mr. Warrener, round, short and bespectacled, and as they went they tried to disguise their anxiety from one another, and to pretend that they had gone out for no more serious purpose than to recall a troublesome child from an escapade. But there were periods of silence between them, broken with a jerk by Mr. Warrener with brisk questions, “Now in what direction did she ride for choice, Calladine?” or “If the fellow is a shepherd, he must have a hut up on these hills.” “Yes, I have visited that: it was empty,” said Calladine, forced into a morose reply.

They took the road out of the village, the only road cleared by the snow-plough, and presently struck up into the hills, climbing with caution, for they were afraid of sinking suddenly into a drift against a bank. They climbed, prodding with long sticks before them, a long wearisome climb, their feet sinking over the ankle at every step into the soft snow; by now they had the excuse for speaking very little, for their energies went all on their progress. “I have spent my time like this for the last three days,” said Calladine, grimly.

It was noteworthy that neither of them considered for a moment that Clare and Lovel might have moved on to another part of the country; they took it for granted that they had remained among the Downs.

No paths were to be seen anywhere, only the rolling white hills, broken by the sky-line beech-clumps. No sound; neither the tinkling of water, nor the quivering of larks, nor the quaver of sheep, nor even the wind; only the hush of quiet snow lying spread. It was a stillness that grew as they climbed; a stillness, a shroud. There was the glitter of the snow, and the black clubbed trees, and the white sky, and the silence.

It occurred to them that they might get lost, for all the hills looked much the same, and the landmarks were all covered up; the White Horse, the Grey Wethers. Still, Calladine was contemptuous of that; and as for Mr. Warrener, he plodded on with an unrepining, pathetic obstinacy.

At last they came to the top, and stood on White Horse Hill, two puny figures scanning the horizon. “There is Lovel’s hut,” said Calladine, pointing it out. “We had better go down to it,” said Mr. Warrener, and they began the descent, which was almost as trying as their climb, for they had to hold themselves back, the snow being blown into deeper drifts on that side of the hill.

The great scoops in the flank of the hill forced them to follow a circular route which lengthened their road. The hut seemed to stand always equally far ahead, and never to draw any nearer; nor had they much hope of finding either Clare or Lovel within it. Mr. Warrener, now that he had gained a few hours of experience, was beginning to share Calladine’s hopelessness; before they started, it had seemed comparatively simple an undertaking to go out and search and shout for Clare over the Downs. Now, although he called her name tentatively on approaching the hut, the quilted silence swallowed up the small echo of his voice. Yet it was a bell-like name to call, “Clare! Clare!”

Calladine let Mr. Warrener go forward and peer into the hut, and he felt a sudden tenderness for the old man. “If,” he said to himself, “Clare should never return to me, Mr. Warrener and I must keep house together,” but the idea of Clare not returning gave him a pang which eclipsed the amenities of the prospect with Mr. Warrener, leading a scholar’s life, and he was ashamed of the glimpse that had opened out on to a life so congenial, so secure.

Mr. Warrener turned in the doorway and beckoned.

“They have been here,” he said.

Calladine drew near and looked. Yes, they had been there. The hut was poor, a shepherd’s shelter, with a rough table arranged on a couple of boxes, and a thick pallet of bracken on the floor; warm enough, no doubt, and even snug, with the paraffin lamp burning and the door closed against the cold. Mr. Warrener and Calladine looked in silence. A horn mug stood on the table, beside a loaf of bread; two sugar-boxes served as stools. A couple of blankets were thrown over the bracken; a bag stuffed with bracken did for a pillow. There was nothing else.

“My God,” said Calladine, staring at the pallet, “they lay there last night,—they lay there!” He looked round the pitiful cabin, and a groan was forced from him. “He brought her here!” he said, “and I who gave her everything she could desire,—comfort, even beauty, refinement....” He sat down and buried his face, and touched perhaps the bitterest moment he had yet gone through. “How much she must have loved him,” he said, raising a suddenly haggard face to Mr. Warrener.

Mr. Warrener was deeply perturbed and distressed. Such things were altogether beyond his experience and understanding.

“Hush,—don’t take it so much to heart,” he said, confused, but meaning to be kind, and he touched Calladine on the shoulder with a gesture singularly awkward. “Now let us think what is to be done. Shall we remain here, and trust to their return at nightfall? It is true that we could not, all four of us, spend the night in this hut, but probably Lovel knows the way,—he can take us all home safely.”

“You seem to have a curious confidence in the fellow,” growled Calladine.

Mr. Warrener blinked in his mild fashion.

“Yes,—I don’t quite know why,” he said, “except that I’ve seen him about the village,—he seemed an alert, romantic kind of creature.—Forgive me, I see that pains you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Calladine, ironical.

“We must wait,—there is nothing else to be done,” said Mr. Warrener, reluctantly.

“No,” said Calladine, rousing himself to a sudden determination, “I will wait, but you, Mr. Warrener, must make your way home while daylight lasts. You will only have to follow our own tracks in the snow. Indeed, I should prefer it,” he said, seeing the old man hesitate, and gently he took Mr. Warrener by the arm and urged him out of the hut. A hard cruel sun was already setting red behind a clump of beeches. The white sky became suffused with crimson in the west; on the rounded tops of the hills the snow flushed to pink. But it was a hard, cruel world that they saw, the hard red of the snow where the sunset did not catch it. The line of the beech-clump curved already across the slowly sinking sun, and presently hid it altogether from sight; the tops of the hills lost their flush, and only a few red bars lingered still in the sky.

“What a desolate spot!” exclaimed Mr. Warrener, impressed, “and what a spot,” he went on, “for a shepherd to study the courses of the stars, for such has been the tradition of shepherds since the days when the known world was not one tithe of the size we now learn it to be. Think of that, Calladine,” said the old man, warming to his subject, “those early shepherds on the hills were more conversant with the cycle of the heavenly bodies than with the distribution of their own planet. A fine tradition among shepherds—for what else have they to do? They don’t read in books, but they read in the heavens through the long, lonely nights; and observe, Calladine, that in winter, when the pleasures of the earth are less, the heavens in compensation treble their magnificence. I don’t believe that a man who spends his nights alone in the open remains similar to other men. He’s soaked in the sense of space; and young Lovel....”

“Yes, yes,” said Calladine impatiently, “but there is no time to be lost if you are to reach King’s Avon before dark. Follow our tracks; there are no other tracks to confuse you, for it snowed a little this morning; indeed, there is still snow about in the air.”

“I don’t like to leave you alone in this lonely place,” said Mr. Warrener, still hesitating.

“Doubtless Clare and Lovel found no fault with its loneliness last night,” Calladine replied harshly.

“My dear Richard,” said Mr. Warrener, vexed at his son-in-law’s harping on this theme, “I am sure you distress yourself unnecessarily. Clare will be able to reassure you,—and she is a very truthful child,” he added, with a certain pleading pathos, as though to justify his upbringing of her.

“Where, then, did the man sleep?” said Calladine, turning on him. “Supposing he gave Clare the pallet, where did he pass the night himself? Tell me that.”

“Why, I don’t know,—sitting up, I suppose,—he could lean his back against the wall,” replied Mr. Warrener.

Finally he consented to go, and set off, Calladine watching him until after trudging up the hill he topped its crest and was lost to sight. Calladine then, a prey to such loneliness as he had never dreamt, returned into the hut to wait. Twilight came, the long, cold, late-winter twilight when the world seems dead. The last vestiges of colour faded out of the west. Such sharp shadows as there had been, merged into a greyer, universal shadow; the hard black and the hard white turned to grey, vast and mournful; the sky was all grey now, and the dusk heavy with impending snow. The quietness and the poverty of the hut settled down round Calladine. He had examined its few poor resources, fingering the utensils he found in the little cupboard on the wall, the tea-pot, the canister of tea and sugar, the rasher of bacon put ready on a plate; but now he sat listless, with hanging hands, and not so much as a sound came to make him raise his head. He did not know how long he sat there. The darkness deepened; soon the black night was again over the Downs, vaulted; the big golden stars, and the dim huge shapes of the hills. He was without sensation, numb, having the consciousness only of his extreme solitude. So numb was he, that he was scarcely aware what he waited for. He simply sat on, in complete darkness now, feeling neither hunger nor cold, forgetful almost of his sorrow, patient only like a man condemned to an indefinite suspense.

When he heard the sound of a voice singing out on the hill, he raised his head and waited. The voice drew nearer, singing a cheerful song; it trilled and carolled, as in an exuberant lightheartedness. To Calladine it came with a strange effect, this voice singing out in the night, unexplained, bearing down upon the hut, frivolous and rollicking. Suddenly it sounded quite close, outside. The door was torn open, a figure carrying a lantern appeared on the threshold, and Calladine beheld the grinning face and battered hat of Olver Lovel.

The boy carried parcels in his arms, besides the lantern swinging from his wrist. He appeared in excellent spirits, grinning broadly, skipping as he stood on the threshold of the door, with little excited skips from foot to foot. He seemed scarcely able to contain his high spirits and his excitement. When he saw that the hut was already occupied, he gaped stupidly, then burst into peals of laughter. Calladine, remaining seated, looked at him without a word. He perceived nothing startling in the advent of this apparition, apathetic as he was, and at the same time strung up to the most improbable occurrences. It seemed to him quite natural that Olver should stand shouting with laughter in the doorway; he saw nothing grotesque in the encounter of himself with the crazy boy out in this hut on the hills. Clare!—this was the note to which Clare had re-tuned his life.

“Mr. Calladine!” said Olver, ceasing from his laughter. He came forward and put his parcels and his lantern down on the table. Its rays illuminated the little hut. “So you were waiting for them, sitting here in the dark, were you?” he observed.

“Will they come?” asked Calladine.

“Oh yes, they’ll come,” replied Olver easily. “But they won’t let you stop here, you know,” he added. “No, nor me either,” he pursued, coming closer to Calladine and speaking confidentially. “They’ll put us both out into the snow, get-yourselves-home-as-best-you-can. They won’t care. They won’t notice us, scarcely. They’re in a dream. Nod to me, perhaps; give me a pat, like a dog. Good Olver; he brings our food. But do they eat it? they seem like they don’t need food.”

“Have you seen them, then?” said Calladine.

“Seen them? Lord bless you, yes; and seen you too, wandering round with Daisy. I was behind you, many and many a time, but you didn’t turn.”

He began now to unpack his parcels, bringing out a loaf of bread, a tin of milk, some eggs, and finally some raw meat in slices. Calladine watched him in silence. He disposed of everything in a business-like manner, fetching two plates out of the cupboard, laying the table, putting ready the tea-pot and the canister.

“You might well have lit the lamp for them,” he said reproachfully to Calladine.

He lit the little paraffin lamp himself, and the hut was further irradiated by its yellow glow. The hut made now a patch of warmth and light among the cold, dark hills; a box of light, like a star in the blackness of space. Calladine felt the warmth creep through him, as though he were admitted to a hint of the sufficient and radiant secret of those lovers. The poverty of the shelter disappeared now, in the golden warmth of the light from within. And he felt that he, and not they, was the pauper.

Olver meanwhile had set the meat to fry over the lamp. It frizzled as he turned it with a fork, and he crouched over it, humming his song. “You seem very well contented,” said Calladine.

Olver looked up, having forgotten Calladine’s presence.

“I am contented, because Nicholas is happy,” he replied.

“Simple enough!” said Calladine.

“But she is happy too,” said Olver, sitting back on his heels and staring at Calladine.

“He is only a mad boy,” thought Calladine to himself.

Olver sang. He sang an old song, of a girl drowned in the mill-pool because she had lost her lover. The wistful beat of the ballad came back at the end of each verse; it droned on, with mournful persistence. At last Calladine could bear its monotony no longer, and asked, “When will they come?”

Olver shrugged. “Who can tell?”

“Where are they?” Calladine asked.

Olver shrugged again. “Who can tell?”

Calladine remembered how often he had asked Clare, “Where have you been? where have you been?”

He remembered that her answers had never left him any the wiser; he had never come near to what he really wanted to know.

What was it, indeed, that he had really wanted to know? the whole secret of her being, to be explained in a dozen words?

He said to Olver, “It is night, it is cold; have they lost their way out on the hills?”

Olver laughed at him. “Lost? They?”

“They are only human!” cried Calladine, afraid. He got up and stood over Olver. “Tell me, they are human, aren’t they?”

Olver laughed again.

Calladine went to the door. He opened it and looked out; the cold met him, and the stars in the blackness. “Clare!” he cried. “Clare!”

“I am going mad,” he said to himself. “I am going out of my mind.”

Looking back into the hut, he saw Olver still on his knees on the floor, prodding at the meat over the lamp. He went back, bent down, and cried close to Olver’s ear, “What are we doing here? they are keeping us waiting.”

“We don’t count,” replied Olver indifferently.

He began his song again. He had taken his mirror from his pocket, and was squinting into it, at the reflection of the hut; on each beat of the measure, he nodded down towards it.

“Her hair was tangled in the reeds.

Her hair so gold and gay,”

he sang.

“Would you like to look into my mirror?” he asked Calladine.

An idea took him; he scrambled to his feet.

“They’re all afraid of my mirror,” he said. “She wouldn’t look into it, for fear of what she might see there. But you shall look. Look into it now, and you’ll see them; you shall see them as they were in here, last night.”

Calladine pushed him away; made him stagger against the wall of the hut.

“You would see them! you would see them!” cried Olver, delighted.

Neither of them noticed that the door had opened, and that Lovel stood in the hut.

“Nicco!” cried Olver.

Calladine wheeled round. Clare came into the hut, and her face shone out like Lovel’s, both golden in the light, both arrested in the midst of their carelessness.

Lovel spoke to Calladine.

“This was the only place we had,” he said, “couldn’t you leave it to us?”

Clare looked at Calladine; her face wore that oblique, fugitive look which he had known, and loved, and dreaded.

She turned to Lovel, and they swayed towards one another as though something drew them.

“We had better go,” she said, inviting him.

“Yes,” he replied, drifting idly on the stream of her will, of their common will, one with her.

She gave him her hand, and in the gold light they hung briefly, transient creatures of eternal flight. The curtain of night and stars stretched behind them, in the rectangle of the open door.

“The scenery is set!” cried Calladine hysterically, pointing with his hand.

The rays of the lantern streamed out towards the snow, gilding a path up the whiteness, quickly lost into the dark.

“They need no shelter,” cried Calladine.

The hills were outside, waiting, and the stars, silent.

“Why linger?” cried Calladine to Clare and Lovel.

They faded into the night, noiseless and swift. Calladine ran out of the hut, he ran up and down, he cried “Clare! Clare!” and the hills answered him. He came back into the hut, where Olver, dancing, held the mirror up to his eyes. “Look! and you shall see them.” He dashed the mirror out of Olver’s hand; it smashed upon the ground. “You will never see them again, now,” cried Olver, “you will never see them again.”

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Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.