Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

“It does not matter,” said Lovel: if he got angry Olver would cringe, and whine the more. “Give me the candle, I will see to it.” He took the candle from Olver’s hand, and Olver’s strange eyes gleamed on him in its light with questioning timidity. The grandfather’s clock ticked loudly out of the dark recesses of the passage. “I hope you have kept the fire going,” said Nicholas, opening the door into the living room. Olver followed at his heels with the dogs.

The living-room was dark and low, lit redly by the logs in the open fire-place, and because there was neither paint nor paper on the walls the great stones of the masonry were visible. The eye looked down instinctively to find a floor of hard-trodden mud,—and was disappointed, for the floor here, like that of the passage, was formed of flag stones. There was little furniture: a centre table, which served for meals, a few chairs of cane and wood, a tall dresser reared against one wall, containing on its shelves the crockery for everyday use, and a shelf above the fire-place, on which stood a row of china fruits in bright, shining colours,—this comprised the sum total of furniture and decoration in the whole room. Lovel scarcely noticed what was in the room and what was not; he liked the stone walls, and would not have them covered up, but them he liked for the sake of their tradition and of the quarry from which they had come.

He now set the candle on the table, and got from out of the cupboard under the dresser a loaf of bread, some cheese and butter, and the necessary knives and plates. He did this menial work mechanically; he had long ceased to expostulate with his brother, or to induce him to mend his neglectful ways. He supposed, when he thought about it at all, that till the end of his life he would continue to serve and provide for his mother and his brother. He was their provider, their protector, their victim, their master, and their slave; that was his function, and he did not complain against it. A servant he would not get, even could he have paid the wages ten times over, because of the tattle carried to the village. He saw, then, in the simplicity of his mind, no other course open to him than to perform all the duties himself.

He set aside upon a tray a cup of tea, when he had made it, and a bowl of gruel for the bedridden old woman upstairs. This he gave to Olver, telling him to carry it up carefully, and stood himself at the foot of the stairs holding up the candle for a light. He heard the door open above, and his mother’s querulous voice. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how long she had been waiting for her tea, and of what she would have said could she have known the cause, and have seen the two figures of himself and Clare standing in the sunlight on the Downs. This radiant vision of Clare crossed his heart in a flash; it hurt him. Had his mother seen them? he never knew himself the true extent of the powers he must not allow himself to think about, because he was afraid of them. Gipsy Lovel, he knew they called him in the village....

Olver came down again, and still his eyes sought his brother’s face to find whether he had been forgiven. His brother’s servility and excessive devotion to himself exasperated Nicholas. He sat over his supper tossing bits of food to the dogs, and trying to pretend to himself that Olver with his searching eyes and anxious face was not sitting opposite to him in mute beseeching, hanging on to his looks and gestures. Nicholas despised himself for his churlishness, but to-night his home, his brother, were violently intolerable to him. He could not breathe, he was being stifled; he rose nervously and kicked the logs into a blaze; in the middle of doing this he swung round.

“Why do you follow me so with your gaze?” he asked impatiently.

“You are angry with me, Nicco, for having forgotten the supper, but indeed I thought only of you, and you are all I have in the world.”

Lovel said, not unkindly, “Well, you wasted your anxiety: I am better able than most to look after myself. I am not angry any more,” but in spite of his words he still felt that the house oppressed him, and that a restlessness, usually kept under control, was gnawing at him. He knew well whom to blame: it was Clare, who appeared to him the personification of all he had abjured. He had had Clare for two hours before his eyes, the sight of her stirring him as the wind stirs a bell, and now in the place of Clare he was returned to the monotony of his sad home; in the full determination not to think of Clare he crossed over to the fire where his dogs already lay sleeping, filled his pipe and lighted it, and forthwith began to dream of nothing but Clare as he sat gazing into the heart of the red ashes.

She was so little known to him; he liked to picture,—yet his bashfulness made of it a fearful pleasure,—the ordering of her room, of her clothes laid neatly in drawers; he thought of her ribbons; he knew that in the evenings she discarded her gauntlets and her cap and wore soft coloured silks—he had heard Martha Sparrow say so. He had never seen her in these; was never likely so to see her; he trembled at the thrill of so seeing her: her arms would be bare, her throat rounded and white, with red corals up it. Yet he was not sure that he desired to see her thus, save as an experience, for thus the difference between them would be most emphasised; when he met her upon the Downs, and their ponies fell into step side by side, then she was at her closest to him, seeing the heavens and the hills with the same eye, knowing the same things as he knew, reading the signs of the weather, picking up the same landmarks familiar to them both; but such was the tremulousness of his mind that he wavered between the preference of knowing her at her closest, or at her most remote: the one caressed him infinitely, but the other mystified and tempted him, and made his pleasure into a rapturous pain. What hope had he of ever beholding in the flesh that wraith which his fancy evoked? he, Lovel, sitting over the fire with his two rough dogs and his mazed brother, and at the end of a day’s shepherding, while she dined at the Manor House with her father in the warmth of lamplight and the quiet dignity of pervading scholarship? She was gracious enough to him when they met on the hills; there, the closeness of their age and pursuits made them forgetful of their other disparities; the same rain made them both wet, the same wind ruffled their hair; but with her nod of farewell, kindly though it might be, they were instantly severed: he sank, she rose, and drifted out of his reach. He was indignant that an accident of fortune should be the mean occasion of parting them, an accident of fortune, not of birth, for by lineage the Lovels, although so fallen, had, in the pride of their Egyptian blood, no comparison to fear. Then he remembered that a deeper irony kept him apart from any woman. He had before him constantly the sight of his mother and brother to uphold him in the resolution that with the three of them the race must end. Such blood must not be carried on. But because the primitive instincts were deep and intractable in him, the renunciation roused his anger; his animal birthright was to beget sons, and he rebelled against the chance that cheated him of it; and in the same train of thought came the image, whose lovely audacity appalled even while it enraptured him, of his children and Clare’s; he saw their strong limbs and heard their laughter, an image vivid and actual, and—he swore to himself—of a wholesome inspiration. He must see and think no more of Clare! But as he came to this conclusion, Olver, who had been squatting on the opposite side of the hearth, stirring the ashes and shooting furtive glances from time to time at his brother, said, “There came for you a message while you were away, from Mr. Warrener, to know would you go up to the Manor House to-morrow, to fix shelves for his books. William Baskett came with the message, and says, Mr. Warrener is impatient, and though the books have been stacked up on the floor for over a year, must needs have the shelves ready to-morrow now that he had at last taken the idea into his head.”

“I cannot go,” said Lovel moodily.