But she never felt with him the sense of strain that she felt with Calladine. It seemed to her as natural to meet Lovel upon the Downs as it would have been to meet a flock of sheep, and it never occurred to her either to mention or to conceal the fact to her father. Calladine, on the other hand,—she knew that when she got home, some obscure instinct would impel her to say, “Father, I rode with Mr. Calladine.”
They had allowed their horses to follow their own course, which in that open country was possible for miles, and Clare now perceived that they were being carried in the direction of a group of Grey Wethers. She did not at all want to go to these particular Grey Wethers with Calladine; but when she tried to head her pony away he immediately said, “Do let us ride on as far as the Grey Wethers, Miss Clare. We have never been there together, and I have a fancy to go there with you.” Clare gave way; it was not worth hurting his feelings, perhaps, for a whim. They rode on accordingly until they came to the strange derelict stones, where, at Calladine’s instigation, they got off their horses and sat down side by side on one of the stones. Clare wondered what the object of this pause could be; then, looking at Calladine, she saw that he was nervously twisting his fingers together, and appeared by the agitation of his manner to have something on his mind which he was trying to say. She was not much surprised; she had often seen him break out under the influence of some unexplained emotion, and waited quietly for what was to come. She was not much interested either; but if it did him good to speak, then, poor man, by all means let him speak his fill. Finally, she prompted him, almost with mischief, “You seem full of disturbing thoughts, Mr. Calladine?”
“I have something to say to you,” he began. “An explanation, more than a confession. What do you know of me, after all? Very little, beyond that I am a stranger settled in these parts, living a lonely life in a remote farm-house with one old servant and a groom. You know that I have no regular occupation; that I read the classics in a desultory way; dabble in archæology, and interest myself in the local customs and topography. You know that my leisure is unlimited, and my means ample. You appear to take me for granted, but then I never attributed to you an inquisitive mind. Have you ever wondered where I came from, and why? have you, above all, never despised me a little for my idleness of a dilettante while all around you you saw other men work for their livelihood?”
“Perhaps I have despised you a little for that,” she said frankly. “As for the rest, no, I don’t think I have wondered. I don’t see why you shouldn’t lead the life that pleases you best.”
“Nevertheless,” he said, “I should like to give you my explanation, if you will be patient enough to listen. I loved a woman once,” he said, in a low mournful voice, as though he were disinterring the memory of the dead from his very bowels, and while he spoke he kept his eyes averted from Clare and held his unseeing gaze upon the clump of beeches on the high skyline; “she was wholly a woman, yet every great quality of woman she lacked; I mean to say, that in every mood of capriciousness and grace she was as wholly and divinely a woman as any woman who ever enchanted man and coloured the loveliness of his days, but under the test of all graver issues her fluidity turned to falseness and she slipped between my fingers. I never held her; no, though I held her in my arms she eluded me; even while I thought to possess her, her soul slid away from me in some new protean shape, and danced and laughed and mocked my pursuit. Oh, she was a will-o’-the-wisp dancing across the marshes of my life. For my life was indeed a marsh in those days; I sank in quicksands; I struggled out on to a tussock; I trusted myself again on what I took to be firmer ground, I sank once more, I was sucked back at every step, I was tempted to let myself sink for ever from sheer weariness and despair. But she,—she was at home among the treacheries and miasmas where she had led me; that light, vain soul could skim where I could only sink. Do you wonder,” he said, letting his eyes travel slowly round the clean sweep of the Downs, bare of all softness, and bringing them at last to rest upon her face, “can you wonder that I came to repair my life in this old, hard country? You may believe me or not, as you choose, but I got that image of the marsh so firmly fixed in my mind that to this day I can’t bear to walk across a bit of swampy ground, or even along a muddy lane. You have water here, in your country, that’s true, and plenty of it; but it’s straightforward water: running rivers, and dew-ponds up here on the heights.”
“It’s true,” she said; “’tis an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are are bleached bones by now, dry and clean; there’s no decay about them. Why, I think that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”
“And mine too,” he replied, considering her; “and if anywhere the uneasy dead return from their sleep,—though I am not saying that I believe it to be so,—it should surely be hereabouts, for in the last century there were enough tales current of witches and wise men, and similar fascinations of the simple, to raise the longest-dead of old Britons from his grave. But I scarcely think the local folk are much troubled with such ideas. They come more readily to you and me, for I am a stranger, as strangers are reckoned in country districts, where the years only begin to count as they pass into centuries; the space of time for an acorn to grow into an oak; and even you, who have been here all your life long, are not native born. The spirit of this country does not come to either of us as a natural right. We have learnt it, and so must remain always more conscious of it than those to whom it is as native speech.”
She looked at him with the faintly puzzled expression of one who is out of his depth.
“Yes,” she murmured uneasily, looking down at the ground, and kicking a lump of chalk into powder with the toe of her shoe. She deeply resented this association of herself and him as strangers to the country; Lovel would not have spoken so!