Only in winter that ever-present reminder of tragedy fulfilled itself. In summer and in autumn it robed itself in peacock colours, blue and bronze, a sorrow as sumptuous as the sorrow of a queen. But in the winter the splendour was gone, only an austerity like stone remained; grey disillusioned Downs, shaven by the winds, shelterless, inconsolable. Then came the snow; and up here, where no trees but the beech-clumps broke the white, where no hedges strove with their little maudlin pretence of security to lessen the rigour of the country towards the softness of man, here no flinching availed; grief was naked as joy had been naked, to be met and fought with, until that despondency should pass and the heights leap out once more into the sun of spring, with only the reverberations of the storm rolling still about the valleys.
Lovel, who resembled the Downs themselves both in his exuberance of spirit with the threat ever-lurking, and in his despair, which was so extravagant and so profound when it overcame him that it seemed he could never again lift himself out of the slough,—Lovel who for all his thought and his reading had never looked into himself or named what he would have found there,—Lovel who could no more control his moods than the Downs could forbid the sun to burnish their gold-brown slopes or the blizzard to rack them with a hell-ride of gale and sleet,—Lovel came upon Clare standing in the sun knee-deep in a dew-pond on one of the highest ridges of the Downs.
Her patient pony, well-accustomed, strayed and browsed near at hand; he snuffed the dry thymy turf; he plucked with disdain at a tuft of grass fit only for sheep-pasture. This was not horse-pasture, this bare beggarly brown turf up here in the glitter of the sun, beneath the exposed and unsheltered windiness of the sky. Open country, open country; no higher peaks to climb; miles of open rolling country on every side. The clean and airy liberty of open country under a blue-and-white heaven. Clare stood in the circle of the dew-pond holding her skirts picked up above her knees. She was laughing; she had seen first the ears of Lovel’s horse prick up over the rim of the hill, then she had seen Lovel himself, not looking to find her, then the shoulders of his horse, breasting the sharp climb, then the complete slim silhouette of horse and rider and two dogs at heel. And she had hailed him; a shout of laughter mingled in with his name; she had hailed him. At the top he had drawn rein, shading his eyes against the sun, and looking down he had seen her, standing down in the bowl of the dew-pond. He had caught her in the act of hesitation, afraid lest she should venture out of her depth. Capless, she stood in the dew-pond, holding up her skirts, and her white legs disappeared just below the knee into the water. She laughed up at him, holding her head a little on one side in the way he knew well, which gave her a fleeting and elusive appearance, so that her mouth and eyes seemed to slant upwards with a fugitive and sylvan air, which materialised but rarely,—or when, as now, he caught her at an angle,—but which always hovered there, not always willing to be revealed, but ready to glance out at the right summons, to whomsoever should hold the shibboleth to produce it.
He drew rein, looking down at her, and her pony whinnied a recognition, and strayed loose to join Lovel’s horse.
“Not deep!” he called to her.
She ventured a few steps further.
“You have seen it empty,” he rallied her.
“Do you know the secret?” she asked, stopping. The water, disturbed by her advance, rippled round her knees.
“Very few know it,” he replied cryptically.
“Ah, but you, Lovel, you know all those secrets. How do they puddle the clay? How, to hold the water? I am sure you know it, Lovel! Are you a dowser, too? they say so, in the village. They say you can pace over the country until the hazel-twigs jump in your hand. Is it true?”