Ivy screamed.
“Scream away. No one ull hear. I’ve got you, and I’m damned if I let you go till I please.... To-morrow you’ll be on your knees, begging me to take you and save you.”
He clapped his hand over her mouth, and forced back her head, kissing her strained and aching neck till she screamed with pain as well as with fright. Her cries were stilled under his palm, her head swam, her strength was leaving her ... she was down on one knee ... then suddenly, she could never remember how, she was free, and running, running as she had never run before, her breath sobbing in her throat—across the field of the toadstools and sour grass, away from the shadow of Forges Wood, in the orchard, to see the gable of Worge rising against the pewter—grey of the clouds that hid the moon.
At the orchard edge she had the sense to stop and tidy herself. There was no longer any fear of pursuit—if indeed she had ever been pursued. She had dropped her shawl in the field, her blouse was torn open at the neck, her hair was down on her shoulders, and her face all blotched with excitement and tears. Also, a new experience, she was trembling from head to foot, and her shaking hands could scarcely fasten her blouse and twist up her hair.
“You beast!” she sobbed, as she fumbled; “you beast! You dirty gipsy!”
Then an unaccountable longing seized her for her mother—she longed to throw her arms round her mother’s neck and cry upon her shoulder. With a little plaintive moan she started off again for the house, but by the time she reached the doorstep the craving had passed.
10
For half an hour after Ivy left him, Jerry lay on his face in Forges Wood, motionless save every now and then for a quiver of his shoulders. Over him the boughs of the ash-trees cracked and sighed, under him the trodden leaves rustled creepingly. He felt them cold and moist against his cheek, with the clammy mould of nettles, weeds that were trampled and dead. His heart in him was dead—cold, heavy and sodden as a piece of rain-soaked earth. The fire in him was out—it had driven him mad and died. By his short madness, scarcely five minutes long, he had lost Ivy for ever. She was gone as the summer was gone from the woods, but, unlike the summer, she would never come back. A sour, eternal autumn lay before him, sour as the grass and toadstools of Forges Field, eternal as the blind, creeping force from which toadstools are spawned into fields and poor men’s hearts.
At last he rose to his feet, and stumbled off, plunging into the thickets of Forges Wood, through the ash-plats and the oak-scrub. Scarcely realising what he was doing, he forced his way out of the wood, through its hedge of brambled wattles, into the lane. The pewterish sky hung low over the hedges, and in its dull glimmer he could see the road under his feet. He soon clambered out of the lane, pushing through the hedge into the fields of Padgham. To eastward lay the thick, black woods of Furnacefield, and the cry of an owl came out of them, plaintively.