Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

“They say a lot of things in the village,” he replied laughing.

“Does it matter to you what they say?”

“Not when I’m up here,” he replied, tossing his head, and his horse tossed his head too, and the bridle jingled.

“Well, but tell me the secret of how they make the dew-ponds,” she persisted, kicking with her foot into the water.

“The secret would soon be a secret no longer,” he answered, putting her off. “And I never said I knew it.”

“Ah, but you do,” she said; and thought that those who knew the secret of the dew-ponds got their knowledge in a straight line of tradition from the earliest inhabitants of those regions. “Oh, I do envy you, Lovel,” she said, forgetting that she stood in water and stamping with her foot so that it splashed up round her, “I do envy you all the queer things you have got behind you,—they all seem to run into your fingers with your blood.”

He laughed again,—he seemed to be in a good humour to-day, and well he might be, with the bright grass glistening round his horse’s feet, and over his head the bright blue-and-white spaces where the kestrels hovered like little specks, and the green pattern of the fields far, far below. He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she were a nymph,—a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. The olive and the myrtle were alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat; the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both represented their own particular aspect of romance, each to the other. “Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.

It was some days after this that Clare received from Calladine an invitation to visit him at Starvecrow. Although she was immediately aware that she would not reply with a refusal, she felt a shiver of chill as though she had been beckoned in from the warm sunshine to a cold and cavernous place. The impression was alarmingly vivid both in generality and detail. She had met the groom coming up the short carriage-drive of the Manor House, and after reading Calladine’s note looked up at the gaunt, raw-boned animal that the groom was riding, at its ugly quarters, and long melancholy head; she looked into the basket in which Calladine had sent her an offering, and saw the trout lying on their bed of long grasses, neatly ranged, pointed nose alternating with forked tail. The gift seemed to her gruesome and faintly absurd; trout, cold, plump, and dead. Yet on the evenings when she had gone fishing with Lovel under the willows, the trout as they laid them in the long lush grass had seemed gleaming and iridescent, cool from the water, and together they had examined the scales on the meshes of the landing-net. Lovel had lifted up their gills with his fingers, and had compared them to the under-side of a mushroom. But these trout of Calladine’s were merely dead; their eyes protruded; their gills were closed. She glanced up at the groom, and fancied that a despondency clung about him as about his horse, an absence of joy; and then she thought that this gloom came upon Calladine’s possessions because he revelled in having it so; the very name of his house, Starvecrow!—had he taken the house for the sake of its name! had he bought this horse because of its starting bones and dejected droop? engaged the groom for his sallow, unshaven appearance and lank hair? dismal envoys that he might send in reminder from Starvecrow out into a cheerful world?

She turned slowly towards the house, carrying the basket of trout on her arm. She had sent back a message of thanks to Calladine with an intimation that she would visit him on the following day, and already the prospect of this visit was hanging over her, damp and chill. Listlessly, when the afternoon arrived she put on her muslin frock and her big straw bonnet, listening meanwhile for the sound of wheels on the gravel; she saw her own reflection in her mirror, saw herself cool and outwardly serene, but the picture gave her little pleasure. This with Calladine was one of the few appointments she had ever made in her free life, and it irked her curiously. From the first moment of her waking in the morning she had felt tied. Like a hobbled colt she wanted to kick herself free. That her afternoon should be restricted, ordained in advance,—in the midst of her resentment she had laughed at her childishness, had been ashamed of her egoism. What would become of her were she suddenly to find herself bound for life? She had been content to look after her father’s innocent wants; she had not shown herself selfish towards him; she could absolve herself from that charge; but then, he had not encroached on her comings and goings; she had given freely from love what she might have refused from duty. This appointment with Calladine was a duty; now she was tied; she could not take her pony or her fishing-rod this afternoon if the whim seized her. No, she must wait obediently for the arrival of Calladine’s gig; she must climb into it and sit meekly beside the sallow groom while he drove her to Starvecrow. Arrived there, Calladine would be waiting for her, and his pleasure would be her irritation. The appointment which had been a restraint to her would have been only a delight to him. A sulky child, she stared out of the window for the approach of the gig. She heard it now; the scrunch of the wheels, the clop-clop of the horse’s trot, and now it came into sight, the familiar high, ramshackle affair, gaunt horse and all, clanking up the carriage-drive and stopping in its abrupt, dislocated way in front of the door. Clare went down. Martha Sparrow was in the hall; she crooned over Clare in her lilac-coloured gown. “A flower come to life, my pretty child....” Mr. Warrener came out of his study; he saw Clare standing in the shadowy hall with Martha fingering round at her flounces; he pushed his spectacles on to his forehead. “Why, Clare, where are you going?” “To Mr. Calladine, father, I told you.” “Ah, to be sure, to be sure; well, he has all the luck; you’re a pretty thing to see.” She kissed him, laughed, sprang up into the gig, it started off clumsily, swaying from side to side, and the Manor House was lost to sight behind the trees.

The gaunt horse spanked along the lanes; Clare did not talk to the groom, who drove with a serious concentration which promised no unbending. She wondered whether all the servants with whom Calladine surrounded himself were as unprepossessing. She was often more than a little impatient with Calladine for his deliberate mournfulness; but, more especially since he had told her in so strange a manner the history of his life’s passion, she had tried to school herself into a reverent sympathy. She felt that she was very young and consequently ignorant, and that he was old, sad, experienced, and entitled to her respect. Instinctively she folded her hands in her lap, and sat demure. But in a moment she was again laughing at herself, and, although she tried to reprove herself for the levity, at him. The vexation of the appointment was lifting from her; her spirits rose, now that she was out in the lanes and could watch the caterpillars hanging from the oaks; she would not be affected by Calladine’s gloom, by his soberness, his measured smiles. Of what use could she be to him if she allowed herself to become as repressed in his presence as he was himself? Turning to the groom, she began to talk to him, persevering until she got a response, and even some growls of information about Mr. Calladine’s stable; as Clare uncovered her own knowledge, the man became less grudging, and presently as their argument developed along lines of expert interest he was impelled to say that Miss Warrener evidently knew a horse when she saw one. Clare laughed merrily, and valued the compliment extremely. What she knew, she replied, she had learnt from experience and from Gipsy Lovel,—for she was glad of an opportunity of pronouncing his name. Ah, that was a chap for a horse, he said; or indeed for anything that went on four legs; that was the chap to go to a horse-fair with; Miss Warrener would never be cheated if she had Gipsy Lovel to give her advice. He seemed to have a feeling about horse-flesh; no need to pull their mouths open or run his hand over their fetlocks. He, the groom, wondered that Lovel didn’t set up as a horse-dealer himself. He would guarantee that Lovel could take in most men in the county; yes, and the whole West of England, for the matter of that. Clare triumphed in his sudden loquacity. Even the gaunt horse seemed to be sharpening its pace,—though possibly that might be only because they were drawing nearer to Starvecrow. The groom laid the whip across its withers, and it broke into a sort of bundling half-canter which rocked the gig up and down and obliged Clare to cling on to her big hat; she was amused, because she thought that this was the effect of Lovel. They had come now to a particularly deserted tract of country, along the foot of the Downs; and, after climbing the slope a little way, they saw a group of buildings upon an eminence, sheltered,—if shelter it might be called,—by a thicket of wind-blown thorn upon the easterly side. Other trees there were none, nor any other houses within sight, nothing but the tan rolling of the Downs and the road that climbed the hill and was lost to sight over the other side. She descried Calladine there at his gate, waiting for her, exactly as she had expected to find him. “I hesitated between coming to fetch you myself, and remaining here to welcome you when you arrived,” he said, as he came forward to help her out of the gig.