Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

“My dear,—my dear young lady,” he said, amending the endearment into that conventional phrase, “it is only because you are, or soon will be, so very much of a woman that I besought your promise. Come, solemnize it without any further delay; swear, not by the Christian God, but by the Grey Wethers themselves, by their age, and their mystery. You will have the advantage of me if you can devise an oath more potent or more occult.”

He laid her hand, which he had not relinquished, palm downward upon the stone. The stone was cold to her touch, but Calladine’s hand pressed over her own was by contrast dry and burning. She swore as he had commanded her to do, half in derision of his fancifulness, half still in the lurking alarm she was too proud to betray. He appeared to be satisfied, and released her, though not without reluctance at letting her hand go, and for a moment he wished he had never taken possession of it, when he noted the alacrity with which she took it back, and the surreptitious rub she gave it on the side of her riding-coat. “So that is how she feels about my touch!” he said to himself, but only a greater gentleness stole into his manner as he thanked her for her compliance and held her stirrup for her to mount her pony. She sat easily, boyishly, in her saddle, looking down on him, and a certain melancholy, that was not without its solicitude on her part, and its wistfulness on his, overcame them both in reaction to the overcharged scene which had taken place between them.

“I don’t want you to be unhappy,—indeed I don’t,” she said, “Mr. Calladine; and please do not think it impertinence on my part to assume that you are. I know of course that I am too young to pry into your affairs; I haven’t the wisdom necessary; in fact I haven’t any qualification except sympathy, and I do ask you to believe that I have that. We have been friends for such a long time,” she said, looking down at him as though she felt a passing though true impulse to come closer to the bitterness of his spirit.

His hand resting on her pony’s neck, he looked up with a rueful gratitude, by no means displeased that she should use the words “wild” and “bitter” about him, or treat his sorrows with so much veneration. He had not the heart to break her illusion of her own kindness with scornful words, but gave her a smile, which cost him a greater effort than he would have cared to acknowledge, and which he hoped would be adequate to reassure her. She smiled back at him, brightly; and with a touch of the heel put her pony into motion. He watched her ride away, along the ridge of Down, her slight figure swaying easily to the pony’s walk; and presently he saw her break into a canter, and heard the beat of the pony’s hoofs on the hard turf, until she was carried out of sight and hearing over the curve of the hill.

It was so characteristic of Nicholas Lovel to keep away from the Scouring! Clare thought how the rest of the villagers must dislike him for his detachment. Not that he cared what the villagers said, beyond wishing that they would leave him and his affairs alone as far as possible,—a vain hope. Clare knew quite well that she could never have inveigled him into making friends with her but for their very early friendship when she was a child and he little more than a boy, when, in fact, he could not fear a rebuff from her, and, meeting her on the Downs, he had told her how to ride her pony, how to read the signs of the weather, and a dozen scraps of country craft which she had assimilated with great respect for his wisdom. They had drifted into a curious, desultory intimacy. Because they knew each other only in this detached way,—etherialised, as it were; stripped of the ordinary routine of friendship;—because she knew nothing of his life, and he nothing of hers; each knowing only the other’s Down-life; each admitted only into the other’s solitude, a part of that solitude rather than an intrusion; because they were really strangers to one another,—there existed between them a complete ease and understanding. All formalities were absent; they never thought of greeting one another when they met; they never thought of talking except when they could continue the current of their thoughts aloud. When they sighted one another upon the Downs, they simply converged until their horses fell into pace side by side. Often their first remark, spoken after long preliminary silence, was without context or explanation, like a bubble rising to the surface from what had been going on within their minds beneath. To be together was like being alone. Clare never talked to Lovel about her father, or about the Manor House; Lovel never talked to her about his difficulties, or about his pursuits, legitimate or illegitimate. At times their talk was purely practical, when he would show her how to cast a fly, or how to throw a sheep for shearing, or how to twist a rough basket out of osiers; at other times it was all theoretical, and there was no puzzle, discontent, or aspiration they would not touch on or thrash out. Quite abruptly, sometimes, he would break off and leave her. She never thought of asking him, next time, why he had done so, any more than she would have thought of asking the breeze why it had dropped. There were weeks together in which she never saw him at all; he came and went in her life like the rover that he was. When they passed each other in the village, they gave no sign of recognition; they had never alluded to this, yet each knew that the other was amused by the tacit convention. She knew, of course, where he lived, though the site, appearance, and actuality of his dwelling seemed to her singularly unimportant. Half way down the village street stood a house, small, but very massively built of grey stones, quarried, in point of fact, barbarously from the monoliths that had been the constant resource of the local builders. The front door, when it stood open on to the street, showed to passers-by a long dark passage, like a tunnel, at the further end of which opened suddenly the light and glow of the square walled garden, with its brilliant green turf, its one dark cedar, and its patches of sunlit flowers. The front door was surmounted by a porch, resting on two round columns; along the architrave of this porch was painted in neat black lettering the name: Nicholas Lovel. It might have seemed curious to a stranger that no further indication should follow on to this superscription; there was nothing to inform the ignorant whether Nicholas Lovel was by trade a farrier, a joiner, a shoesmith, a tailor, or even the keeper of an inn; whether one might enter by the open door, and, taking one’s seat at a table within, rap against a glass and call loudly for the landlord. But strangers were few and far between, and among the habitual population of the village the circumstances of the Lovels had been threshed out so often that you might have imagined the topic would fall upon wearied ears. There were few trades to which young Lovel could not turn his hand. He could plough a field,—and in straight furrows, too,—he could build a rick, and thatch it when it was built, he could repair a waggon or repaint a gig, he could get the better of a horse-coper at his own job, or of a pedlar at his own chaffering, he could cure a sick ewe and bring back to life a weakling lamb, he could cane a chair and twist up a basket of osiers in less time than it takes to tell, he could snare a rabbit and slip under the very nose of the keepers, he could drink most men under the table and walk most men off their legs, and amongst the girls of the village there was not one who at one time or another had not set her cap at young Lovel, and got from him in return neither a civil nor an uncivil word. Yet for all these, and other, accomplishments, there was no one trade which he regularly practised. Any man might call him in for a stray job, whether as a farm-hand, a carpenter, or a shepherd, and many were the bribes which had been offered to induce him to accept regular employment: he declined them all. Gipsy Lovel, they called him in the village; whether on account of his name, his looks, or his vagrant practising, was not defined, probably all three. In appearance he was dark and lean; his Roman features bronzed to a polish, so tightly his skin seemed stretched over his bones; and with the brown corduroy breeches of an ordinary yeoman he usually wore a dark red shirt, which accentuated his already outlandish appearance. In speech he was reserved and sardonic, as might be expected by those who knew,—at least by report,—the circumstances of his life at home. Except by report, none could know them, for no one was ever invited to cross that most inhospitable of thresholds.

And further, there was Nicholas Lovel’s younger brother Olver, by the kind-hearted given occasional employment on odd jobs of carpentering, house-painting, and the like, for he was skilful enough as a workman, and could be trusted to carry out his directions with the fidelity of that kind of brain commonly known as “simple.” He might have passed as a good-looking youth, with tight, chestnut curls and eyes of a curiously pale blue, rimmed with black round the iris, but for the oblique and cunning expression that was apt to cross his face like a cloud drifting across the moon, and the slight hint of deformity that clung about him,—a deformity so indefinite, that it was impossible to say precisely where it lay, whether in his neck being slightly sunk into his shoulders, or in his head being slightly too large for his body, or in his hands being slightly too well-formed, too sensitive for the hands of a workman, or in his tread being slightly too catlike for one of his build and bulk. He had in the village the reputation of slyness, a sudden shrewdness, that was disquieting and therefore repulsive in one whom mere simplicity would have entitled to the charity of all men. From this reputation of cunning the legend had grown in the village, as such things grow always in that fertile virgin soil of ignorance, the legend had grown into a variety of sinister shapes, all ornamented with copious and more or less picturesque detail: Olver Lovel’s grandmother had been burned for a witch; his mother, who was kept in such seclusion now by the severity of Nicholas, was a witch also; Olver himself practised wizardry; he went out of his mind when the moon was full; he was mortally feared by all animals,—this indeed was true, and a matter of common knowledge;—he controlled his evil impulses only through fear of his brother, but if his brother were to be taken away, then God help them all! These were only a few of the things that were openly uttered about Olver Lovel. Nicholas himself was not above suspicion. He had the same eyes as his brother, of the palest blue with those curious black rims, and the effect in his dark face, with his black hair, was certainly very strange. But people did not fear Nicholas as they feared Olver. Nicholas was a straight-forward man, reserved and uncompromising because his pride had so much to suffer, and no doubt his endurance too, living as he did between his two unusual relations; they had, on the whole, a good deal of sympathy and respect for Nicholas. It was no life, they said, for a young man. But who could help him? He would let no one near him, either literally or figuratively; pride was the hardest defence to deal with. A harsh young man; but he had much to put up with. And if he was harsh towards himself and forbidding towards other men, let them at least do him the justice to say that towards dumb beasts he had the gentleness of a woman for a child; ay, and the instinct too: the quick kind touch, and the certain remedy.

The villagers thought him lonely,—even lonelier than he actually was, for they knew nothing of the friendship between him and Miss Warrener. They knew, certainly, that he sometimes went fishing with her down to the Kennet, but they thought nothing of that, for any young lady might be expected to take a man to carry her rod and landing-net, to fix her bait, and to deal with her catch. It wasn’t likely that even Miss Warrener would care to dabble in a mess of worms, or to get her fingers covered with scales, slime, and cold blood. No, nor to have the troublesome job of killing a pike, who of all the animal creation surely clung the most tenaciously to life. What they did not know of was the Down-life shared by Clare and Lovel; for on those splendid, solitary heights they could meet and meet again, unobserved by any save the sheep, the larks, and the circling hawks, indifferent to the pacing side by side of the two horses over the bitten turf. Various were the avocations which took Lovel to the Downs, and if occasion required he would call on Clare to lend him a hand, ordering her about, and she, meekly, followed his directions as an apprentice. She had even been in his shepherd’s-hut with him all day during the lambing season, when a blizzard swept across the hills, and he had his hands so full with his poor ewes that must be tended and sheltered that he had no time left for niceties to spare Clare’s feelings. With set teeth she had helped him that day, and had counted his brief comment at the end as a well-earned reward. And she had ridden away in the evening with her head held down against the driven sleet, and her pony’s mane blown right across his neck with little lumps of ice in the rough hair, and behind her the yellow light that shown in the window of Lovel’s hut had grown smaller and more distant, and she had known that during the whole of the night and of many days and nights to follow he would keep the vigil attendant upon his trade, and would lay on the straw beside his little paraffin lamp the poor weak new-comers into so unpropitious a world.

In all seasons and weathers she had known the Downs with him, and like sailors at sea they had accepted the bad with the good, without thought of avoidance. Like all English country people, they disliked extremes of heat as well as extremes of cold; a high summer’s day, when the heat winked along the ridge of the hills, held for them none of that poetic quality it holds for the idle. Their point of view was sober and practical; if feed grew short, they hoped for rain; if the corn in the lowlands were flattened by rain, they hoped for fine weather; it was simple. If the day were a holiday,—that is to say, if Lovel had taken no job,—then they were as content as any other idlers to lie soaked in sun upon the most exposed flank of upland they could find. They would pull the long grass to nibble it down to the juice at the end, or Lovel with a blade of grass drawn taut between his thumbs would shrill the empty air with strange whistlings, or they would tease the ants and small insects by walling them in with a circle of miniature chalk cliffs. Their laughter spread with the song of the larks as fresh and clear as water, and the great spaces lay all around them with the cloud-shadows chasing one another down and over the slopes, and creating in their overhead passage the perpetual variety of mood and colour of the Down-country.

Down-country, so temperamental; in halcyon days bright and blithe; candid in its well-being, wholesome in its wind-cleaned delight; yet keeping in the valleys and sweeping folds the deeper shadows which gave it tone like the soberness of some latent melancholy. Upon the heights it would receive the sun, and glitter and rejoice like a woman in love, but the cup of the valleys was deep with a greater richness, with remembrance, and foreboding. So, although simple and large in outline, the country,—to Clare and Lovel personal, not inanimate,—was not simple with a shallow or trivial simplicity; not the simplicity of ignorance or emotional poverty; but with a wisdom that still had the courage to be gay,—the reckless gaiety of the profoundly tragic. No monotony was possible over that landscape of sunburnt tan, of blue distances, and stains of a lowering purple. No monotony, no sentimentality; the moods all visible at once over the range of country, all definite and certain of their intention, whether the naked sunburnt heights, or the brooding plunge of shadow.