His whole life was dominated by this great matter. It had become personal and he wrestled with his difficulties by day and night. Medora was one of those women who have a marvellous power of influencing other judgments. She had a fatal gift to waken dislike and distrust of another person in the mind of a third. She had already created aversion for Ned in the minds of several women; now Jordan, despite his own reason, felt himself beginning to hate Dingle as heartily as Medora appeared to do. He fought this emotion for a time; but found it impossible any longer to maintain an impartial attitude. He told himself that it was only false sentiment to pretend farther impartiality. Justice demanded antagonism to Ned in the future—not because Medora had once been Jordan’s whole hope and desire and was now herself unhappy and friendless; but because, as an honest man, Kellock could not longer be impartial.
His views of life were changing; his orderly mind was beginning to suspect that strong action might be necessary. Justice was the word most often on his lips; and yet knowing that he loved Medora, he was intelligent enough to perceive that inclination might be deluding him and making apparently simple what, in reality, was complex. For a time he hesitated; then came a day when he met Medora by appointment and felt it impossible to stand outside her life any longer. She, indeed, forced his hand and made it clear that she was going to take definite steps for her own salvation.
Medora, on her way to Priory Farm one Sunday afternoon, had arranged to meet Kellock at the ruins of the building that gave the farm its name. Here they would be safe from any interruption.
The fragment of masonry crowned Mr. Dolbear’s orchard on the summit of the hill that fell into Cornworthy. Here, heaved up against the sky in its ivy mantle, stood the meagre remains of an old priory, one of the smaller houses of the Austin nuns, founded by the Norman lords of Totnes.
It consisted of a great gateway with a roof vaulted, ribbed and bossed, and a lesser entrance that stood to the north of the first. They pierced the mass and bore above them a chamber, of which only the floor and ruined walls remained. It was reached by a stair, where stone steps wound in the thickness of the wall and opened on to the crown of the ruin fifty feet above. The space aloft was hung with polypody and spleenwort in the chinks of its crumbling mortar, and ivy knots seemed to hold the mass together. A whitethorn had found foothold and rose above the central block of stone. Through a ruined aperture facing east, one might see the orchard sloping to the valley bottom and Cornworthy’s scattered dwellings, ascending on the farther hill. The picture, set in the grey granite frame of the priory window, revealed thatched houses grouped closely, with land sweeping upwards on either side, so that the hamlet lay in a dingle between the breasts of the red earth. The land climbed on beyond the village and threw a hogged back across the sky. Here were broad fallows and hedgerows where the leafless elms broke the line with their grey skeletons. To this exalted but secret place, Medora and Kellock were come. He had indeed been there some time when she arrived.
“If you sit here,” he said, “you’re out of the wind.”
“We’re safe now,” she answered. “And ’twas like you to put yourself about and tramp all this way. But I’ve got to be terrible careful, Jordan, for if my husband thought I’d any friends working for me and thinking for me, I don’t know what awful thing he’d do against me. Nuns used to live here in past ages,” she continued. “Oh, my God! I wish I’d been one of them. Then I should have spent my days in peace and be at rest now.”
“Sit down and let’s use our time as best we can,” he advised.
“Time—time—I want for time to end. For two pins I’d jump out of that window and end all time so far as I’m concerned.”
“You mustn’t talk or think like that, or else I shall fear I can’t be any use. I tell you, before God, that my life’s all centred in you and your troubles now. I shan’t have no peace till you have peace.”