Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

She took the road which led out of the village on the western side and which presently ceased to be a metalled way and dissolved into one of those broad green tracks that all over the Downlands of England mark the course of the ancient paths. She had a good three miles to walk, but her numerous small parcels of groceries and haberdashery were not heavy, and her mind was occupied with the account she had heard of Lovel. She could think it over at peace while it was still fresh in her memory; at Starvecrow, Mrs. Quince would hustle her, and she would not have time to sort her impressions until she went up to her attic for the night, when she would be too tired for anything but sleep. It had been clever of her to refuse young Gorwyn’s suggestion, although it went sorely against the grain with her ever to decline any man’s company. Still, she had done well; this was the very place to think out ways and means, with the peace of evening falling and only the distant bleatings of sheep to disturb a body’s thoughts. So Lovel was moody, was he? something had gone wrong, and according to her shrewd and simple creed nothing could go wrong enough to provoke moodiness in a man who had no crops or beasts of his own to worry about except his dealings with a woman. Had Miss Warrener given him the cold shoulder at last? she wouldn’t wonder, and was maliciously glad that Lovel should have met at last with a match in his own hoity-toity ways. That would show him, what it felt like. But she perceived that, although she had hitherto only congratulated herself over his discomfiture, it was in reality full of danger, for where was the danger to equal the danger of a reconciliation? She must, she saw it now, shoot her dart before Lovel and that hussy could make it up. But how to meet him? how to get so soon after this expedition, an afternoon’s leave from Mrs. Quince? Besides, there was the circus soon visiting King’s Avon; she didn’t want to imperil her chance of getting leave to attend that with her father and mother. She paused, cogitating, her finger pressed against the side of her nose. She looked around for inspiration. Nothing but the emptiness of the rolling country oddly broken by a few stray barrows and tumuli; a little farm half-hidden in a clump of trees; a water-mill slowly revolving with a recurrent flash from the setting sun; a hay-stack standing in a wattled enclosure by the side of the track. “As well look for an idea as for a needle in a bundle of hay,” she muttered to herself. The very thing! the very idea she wanted! Glancing cautiously round to see that no one was in sight, she bestrode the hurdles and thrust into the dusty depths of the haystack the most urgent and necessary of Mrs. Quince’s many commissions. She would get a sound rating for her forgetfulness, but she would surely be sent back next day to King’s Avon to repair the negligence, and then, if she could not contrive to find Lovel, might she be called a fool for ever after! Chuckling over her own ingenuousness, she hurried on her way. She had no eye for the beauty of the late summer evening, that so dusted with gold the hills that they might all have been one rolling field of standing corn, but hurried on, her mind full of her own small and artful schemes, and dwelling with relish on the thought of Clare and Lovel estranged within a stone’s throw of one another in the village she had left behind her.

Her gauge of Mrs. Quince’s irritability had been very accurate. The other parcels duly handed over, Mrs. Quince had demanded her thread, of which, she declared, she had not a morsel left in the house. She inveighed against Calladine, who was so impatient that he daily enquired when the new curtains would be finished, but she inveighed still more against Daisy, who, she exclaimed, must be bereft of all ordinary sense to forget any item of so careful a list as she, Mrs. Quince, had herself prepared. Well, there was no help for it: back Daisy must go, and that no later than to-morrow, for besides the curtains there was all the mending to be done, and if she got a corn or a blister tramping the extra six miles she would only have herself to blame.

Daisy made no complaint. She was beginning to feel herself a match for them all, for if she could outwit Mrs. Quince, who was a woman, how much more easily would she be able to outwit Lovel, who was only a man?

Accordingly she started out on the following day, ostensibly penitent but inwardly triumphant, and slung down the hill, leaving on its height Starvecrow with its blown thorn trees and Calladine swinging his pick in the garden. The only thought which pre-occupied her, was where to find Lovel, for as she knew, his occupations took him in many various directions, and he was just as likely to be driving a herd into Marlborough to market as watching sheep on the Downs. Olver, however, she could be tolerably certain of finding in the village, and he, at least, might know his brother’s whereabouts. On the way she retrieved the packet of thread from its hiding place in the stack, since she was too thrifty a soul to waste her own money in buying a new lot from the shop, and as she climbed rather laboriously back over the hurdles, she saw Lovel himself riding idly towards her up the green track.

He was alone; he had not seen her, for his head was sunk and he rode with loose reins as a man profoundly dejected, not caring whither he went. Daisy stood watching his approach, superstitiously encouraged as to her ultimate enterprise by her initial good luck. Not only would no time be wasted, but she would be spared quite a mile’s walk, for they were a good half-mile out of the village. How slack he rode! had she not been a woman in love with him, she would have pitied him. His horse slunk along as dejected as he, with drooping head and careless stumbling foot. They came up the track towards her at a walk, the reins swinging loosely from side to side, but even though he sat so lackadaisical in his saddle she noted the easy give of his body to the horse’s gait, and the light touch of the hands that would tauten to an instant check should the animal start or shy. Shy indeed it did, as Daisy stepped suddenly out from the side of the track to intercept it, and Lovel was startled into instinctive vigilance, raising his eyes under the brim of his wide hat to see what stood in the way. But not so much life as even an expression of annoyance crept in his mournful eyes as he saw Daisy; he lifted his hat civilly, and would have ridden on, but that she detained him.

“Not so fast, Gipsy Lovel, when I’ve walked all this way from Starvecrow on purpose to see you.”

She tried to make her tone arch rather than threatening; it was her habit to coax men rather than to coerce them. She might have known that no woman, not even Clare, could coax Lovel when he was in the opposite humour, but the manner was too habitual for her to discard. “Won’t you get off your horse,” she said, “and sit down on the grass beside me while I say what I have to say to you?”

She sighted the hay-stack, out of which a section had already been cut, and thought in her cheap and common mind that if only she could get him to rest there with her, leaning back against the warm dusty hay, she would find greater ease in bringing him round to her point of view, for she was a staunch believer in the influence of physical comfort upon the tempers of men. “See, here’s a nice place,” she invited him, but with a cold patience he surveyed her from the height of his horse and begged that she would say her say with the utmost possible brevity and allow him to pass on.

The corners of her mouth began to go down ugly and sulky, as the first obstacle thwarted her on the path which had hitherto been so surprisingly smooth, but she hastily lifted them again, for it would not do to let ill-humour creep into their relations.

“Oh, well, I’ll begin,” she said as brightly as she could, “and if you feel like coming down from your grandeur half-way through, just stop me and I’ll give you a breathing-space.”