She said nothing. But there was a constant throbbing and seething in her aching head, above the turgid eyes. If Pamela could have foreseen, could have guessed, she might have been more temperate, more gradual. But she was sublimely unconscious.
On those autumn nights the heavy rain drove down from the hills and swept the sad common and beat against the thick walls of the farm. The wind skirled across space, and the cider-press creaked and moaned. Gainah let the press out to the villagers if they cared to make cider. They paid her so much an hour for the use of it. This was one of her economies.
Jethro would sit and sprawl and blink at the fire like a well-fed, thoroughly satisfied, and sleepy dog after a day in the covers. Now and again in the course of the evening he would get up, stretch his arms, shake himself, fling back the doors, and look deep into the black night. He was such a hearty, open-air being that he seemed to pant at intervals for draughts of that strong wind down his throat, for an angry splutter of the shot-like rain in his eyes.
When the wind blew in, Gainah, her back creaking and cold with rheumatism at the merest draught, would say with acerbity:
“You come from Hartin’, where they have no doors.”
The rustic sarcasm was quite lost on Pamela. She regarded the old woman as antiquated, dirty, and even slightly half-witted. All her attention centered on Jethro.
When he walked across the room she watched him slyly. She admired him very much. He was so big and strong; so independent. The men of her acquaintance had always been under orders—Government clerks, and so on. Here was a man, savage in his strength, who had never been in bondage except to the great Earth. She admired him, but she didn’t love him yet.
Love! She would never love him; never. She didn’t want to. She prayed that the acrid taste of Love might never sear her lips again. And then she thought of the prison. And the cruel wall rose up before her blinding eyes, and her quick fingers dropped the pencil and caught nervously at her side.
Jethro would come back to the fire and sink luxuriously into the big horsehair-covered chair with the protecting ears. He would put out his foot in the thick boot and touch the glowing logs. His gun was in the corner just as he had left it when he came in tired and muddy from pheasant shooting. Pamela was afraid of the gun, but it pleased her. It was part of Jethro’s strength and masculinity. So were his careless clothes, and so was his blunt Shaksperean tongue. She liked a man to be frank, a little coarse even, when the man was Jethro. She once thought fancifully that she wouldn’t mind being beaten by a man like that.
She already began to regard him as her own possession. She felt a personal pride in him; the very hang of his homespun tweeds on his tough, spare body seemed eloquent of sturdy independence.