Wheeling her round, he held her against the rough side of the shaft and bent his face to hers; she felt his lips crush on her own till she could have cried out with pain if she had been able to draw breath. When he let her go her breast heaved, and she stood with lowered head holding her hand across her mouth.
"Now we'll get the cows, my lass," said Glasson quietly, "and take'n home, and then you shall ask me to step in."
* * * * *
During the short, fierce courtship that followed Vashti saw very little of Willie Strick, though she heard he talked much of emigrating, vowing he would disappear in the night and not come home until he had made a fortune. All of Vashti's nature was in abeyance save for one emotion—a stunned, yet pleasurable, submission. It was not until several months after her marriage that she began to feel again the more ordinary and yet more complex sensations of everyday life. If she had to the full a primitive woman's joy in being possessed, she had also the instinctive need for possessing her man utterly, and James Glasson was only partly hers. It was borne in on her that by far the larger side of him was his own, never to be given to any woman. Ambition and an uncanny secretiveness made up the real man; he had set himself to winning his wife chiefly because the want of her distracted him from his work and fretted him.
He bent the whole of life to his purposes, without any parade of power, but with a laborious care that gradually settled on Vashti like a blight. When she realized that no matter how rightly she wore her little bits of finery, he no longer noticed them, realized that she was merely a necessity to him as his woman—something to be there when she was wanted, she began to harden. He still had a fascination for her when he chose to exert it—his very carelessness and sureness of her were what made the fascination, but gradually it wore thinner and slacker, and a sullen resentment began to burn through her seeming submission.
The Glasson's cottage was tucked away in a hollow of the moor, only the chimney of it visible from Perran-an-zenna, and Vashti began to chafe under the isolation, and to regret she had never been at more pains to make friends among her own sex.
As summer drew to its full, Vashti watched the splendid pageant of it in the sky and moor with unappreciative eyes. If anyone had told her that her soul had been formed by the country of her birth and upbringing, she would have thought it sheer lunacy, but her parents were not more responsible for Vashti than the land itself. The hardness and bleakness, the inexpressible charm of it, the soft, indolent airs, scented with flowers, or pungent with salt; above all, that reticence that makes for lonely thoughts, these things had, generation by generation, moulded her forbears, and their influence was in her blood. Even the indifference with which she saw arose from her oneness with her own country, and in this she was like all true Cornish folk before and since—they belong to Cornwall body and soul. The quality of reticence had become secretiveness in James Glasson—he took a childish pleasure in keeping any little happening from the world in general and Vashti in particular, and the consequence was that, in her, strength was hardening into relentlessness.
One market day she was returning from Penzance—a drive of some eight miles, accomplished in the cart of their nearest neighbour—with a paper parcel on her knee, which she kept on fingering under the rug as though to make sure it was still there. At the neighbour's farm she got out, thanked him, and started to walk the remaining mile over the moor, with the precious parcel laid carefully on the top of the basket of household goods. It had been one of those days when the air seems to have a misty quality that makes it almost visible—a delicate effulgence that envelops every object far and near, blurring harsh outlines and giving an effect as though trees and plants stood up into an element too subtle for water and too insistent for ether. The cloud shadows gave a plum-like bloom to the miles of interfolding hills, and inset among the grey-green of the moor the patches of young bracken showed vivid as slabs of emerald. Lightly as balls of thistledown the larks hopped swiftly over the heather on their thin legs, the self-heal and bird's-foot trefoil made a carpet of purple and yellow; from the heavy-scented gorse came the staccato notes of the crickets, while in a distant copse a cuckoo called faintly on her changed, June note. As Vashti rounded the corner of the rutted track and the cottage came into view, she paused. The deeply sloping slate roof was iridescent as a pigeon's breast, and the whitewashed walls were burnished with gold by the late sunlight, while against the faded peacock blue of the fence the evening primroses seemed luminous. Even to Vashti it all looked different, transmuted. Her fingers pressed the shiny paper of the parcel till it crackled and a smile tugged at her lips. After all, it was not bad to be young and handsome on an evening in June, to be returning to a home of her own, with, under her arm, a parcel that, to her, was an event. Vashti had bought that thing dear to the heart of the country-woman, a length of rich black dress silk; she meant to make it up herself, and though her stitches were clumsy, she knew she could cut and drape a gown better than many a conscientious sempstress. And then—then she would take her place as wife to the most discussed man in all that part of Penwith and hold up her head at Meeting. Even James himself could not but treat her differently when she had black silk on her back.
She went through to the outhouse, which James used as a workshop, and tried the door. It was locked. "James!" she cried, rattling the latch, "James!"
She heard him swear softly, then came the sound of something hastily put down and a cupboard door being shut. Then Glasson opened the door a few inches, and stood looking down at her.