Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

But although she rode up to the White Horse, and down again to the Grey Wethers, and round by Lovel’s hut, and skirted most of the valleys where there was likely shelter and pasture for sheep, she saw no sign of Lovel. She was again angry with him for not being there, nor did the fact that he followed many trades besides that of a shepherd do anything to soothe her annoyance. She came back, entering the village on the farther side to avoid passing his house. She felt as though something whose value she had never realised while she still possessed it, had gone out of her life; and here again she found cause for anger with Lovel.

But she could not remain angry with him for very long together. She wondered what he was doing; whether he missed her as much as she missed him; whether his mood had passed by now into a sulky childish obstinacy that was determined not to make the first advance, but that, if it were dragged out of its corner, could be willing enough to be coaxed into making friends. Clare smiled fondly as she thought how well she knew him. She thought that she had only to meet him face to face for laughter to spring into his eyes,—laughter both at the relief of their reconciliation, and at himself for his past foolishness.

In the meantime she fell to dwelling upon his occupations, and recalling all the gossip she had ever heard on his account, the stories of his skill, and of his almost miraculous cures performed upon ailing animals; of his breaking-in colts in record time; of his more illicit career as a poacher. There was something in her which enjoyed this train of thought and the pictures it evoked. She liked to think of Lovel moving as stealthy as a cat through the woods at midnight, a snare in his hand and a game-bag across his back. She liked to think of him thus alone with the woods, the night, and the slinking animals, his foot cautious upon the leaves; she thought that he must be happy thus. She even liked to think of him bending over his victim, and of the warm, smoking blood spurted over his hands. Although he hunted them, he had a kinship with the animals. When he crouched, motionless as a hare, at the approach of a keeper, he, the hunter, was suddenly on the animals’ side more truly than the keeper, who was there to protect them. There was something ridiculous in the idea of a keeper protecting the animals against Lovel; even the rabbit squealing in the noose must know that only by chance was Lovel out for its capture,—an enemy of superior force, merely, rather than anything so utterly removed as a man.

All this dwelling upon Lovel, which sent her absent-minded about the house and garden, did not bring her any nearer to making her peace with him. She was now no longer angry, but sore and puzzled, and she was sure that he must be unhappy too, although she knew that even after their reconciliation,—ultimately inevitable, to her mind,—he would never own to this. The necessity of this reconciliation seemed to her so simple and so obvious that she never thought of questioning her pride. Daily she rode upon the Down, and daily as she returned disappointed she contemplated in greater detail the possibility of sending, after all, a second message to Lovel. She could even send it in her father’s name. But he would not come. She was convinced he would not come. That was not the method to adopt. She must take him by surprise; she must startle him; appear suddenly before him, so that he would smile before he had time to remember his grievance, and, having once smiled, it would be too late to resume a severe face.

In the midst of this pre-occupation, she almost forgot Calladine, that theatrical man, and the excitability of his manner recently towards her. She had not seen him again, for which she was thankful; she could not have met him without embarrassment. The idea of marriage was incongruous and slightly absurd. She belonged to herself, and to herself only; and the suggestion that Calladine or any one else should wish to capture her was not serious but merely laughable. It had not occurred to her that he, as well as Lovel, might be unhappy on her account; such a thought would have distressed her exceedingly. It was entirely without thought of Calladine, save for an occasional fleeting hope that he might not have chosen to ride in the direction as herself, that she roved over the Downs in search of Lovel. A fortnight passed before she found him. She could, doubtless, have met him long before by simply walking down the village street, but that would not have been at all to her purpose, and she had in fact been at pains to avoid any such encounter. At the end of a fortnight, having ridden up to the White Horse, from where the widest view was to be obtained, she discerned a long way off, up by the clump of beeches on the horizon, a flock of sheep accompanied by a shepherd. Unhesitatingly, even gaily, she started off in his pursuit. She was happy to think that their long estrangement was drawing to its end. She skipped in her mind over the preliminaries which must be got over before they could take up their friendship again on its old easy terms. She, with a mind impatient of all but essentials, would preferably have dispensed with these preliminaries, explanations, upbraidings, and possibly abuse. She wanted to waste no time; there were so many things she wanted to tell him; she wanted to tell him how her pony had gone lame from picking up a stone in his shoe; she wanted to tell him again of the melancholy effect produced upon her by her visit to Starvecrow; she wanted to ask him to splice her trout-rod and come with her one evening down to the quiet pool of the brook. Her eagerness grew with the seething of these small schemes as she urged her pony across the grass. She was approaching Lovel by a devious way, going down into the valleys, where she would escape his notice, until she could strike directly up the hill and top the crest suddenly before his eyes. Her own eyes sparkled over the precautions she was taking. She thought that she had now gone far enough along the low reaches of the valleys, and set her pony at the hill; they mounted the long, steep incline, like going upon an adventure.

On the breeze came the tinkling of the sheep-bells, as the flock moved cropping.

She had calculated her distance well, for when she finally reached the top of the hill, she found that she had exactly hit off the flock of sheep cropping beside the clump of beeches. Close by them lay a bundle of osiers, hastily thrown down, and several wattled hurdles, with fresh osiers threaded into them for repair; a knife, the sun shining on its strong, curved blade; and a small bundle tied up in a red pocket handkerchief. There were all these signs of the recent presence of the shepherd, but he himself was nowhere to be seen. Clare looked round in perplexity. The sun was strong, the breeze fresh, the grasses glittered and curtsied, the shadows of the clouds bowled down the hills and ran up the opposite side, the view was broad, but it revealed no Lovel. With all that open country lying spread out, he must have taken refuge in the small beech-wood,—watching her, perhaps, from behind the trunk of a tree. She was almost amused by this childish game of hide and seek, and in any case was determined not to be baffled by him now that she had come so far; she could not now turn and ride away in acknowledgment of defeat. Swinging herself off her pony she knotted the reins loosely and let it turn away to snuff the grass, while she herself entered the little wood, brave though tremulous, her optimism ebbing as her obstinacy increased. The tree-trunks were not very close together, so that she could look through the clump from one side out to the other; she often went into these clumps of beech, and lay down on the bare ground, looking up the smooth grey trunks, watching the sun glint its shivered rays through the branches, and listening to the wind among the leaves; she had even been into them with Lovel, and he had knocked the warts off the trunks and carved them into frightening faces with his knife to amuse her.

She paused with her hand upon the tree. “Lovel!” she cried. “I know you are here, don’t hide from me; come out, Lovel!” There was no answer, and after a little hesitation she went deeper into the wood. She saw him then; he was not hiding, he was standing there perfectly motionless, in the midst of a small clearing in the trees, standing very quiet, like a man who after a long pursuit sees himself finally brought to bay. He was looking straight at her, as though he knew the direction in which she would come.

Now that she was confronted with him, a little of her self-confidence went; he had, for a long fortnight now, inhabited her mind only, and her vision not at all; and in her mind their meeting had run always on the lines she devised for it, but here she had Lovel himself of untested inflexibility, to trip the running of her programme. She gazed at him beseechingly, but he still stood, in an attitude of expectant resignation, waiting for her to open the attack. It came into her mind that even now she might turn away, without a word spoken, having learnt all that there was to be learnt from a single look. Instead, she went up to him, saying “Lovel?” and upon an impulse she held out her hand.