Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

She turned as though to make her escape; before her was the room with its walls of rough stone, its rafters, shadows and cobwebs, behind her was Lovel in the doorway and the dark passage beyond him, with Olver crouching in it. She stared round her, and was met everywhere by silence. “I don’t like it!” she cried in shrill terror. Lovel continued to look at her without speaking. “Mother! dad!” she cried, “I want to go home!” She rushed to Lovel and beat her hands against his chest. His physical contact recalled her, and she began to sob. “Nicholas, Nicholas,” she sobbed, “I love you, I don’t understand.” She sobbed against him.

He stood still, hard and carven, while the waves of her panic broke over him. Presently a loud tapping sounded overhead, and she raised her face, mouth moist and wide open, to listen. “What’s that?” she uttered. “My mother,” he replied grimly. “Then she is alive?” breathed Daisy, her common curiosity coming back to her, and she felt suddenly important, since she was about to see,—redoubtable privilege,—the legendary figure of the village witch. Speaking over his shoulder, Lovel said, “Olver, go you and tell her I am bringing Daisy up in a moment,” and she heard Olver shuffle off, and knew the mysterious suggestion of hearing footsteps mount an unknown stair, and the voice of an unvisualised person speaking in the recesses of an unknown house.

“Must I go up?” she said to Lovel, between fear and desire.

She wondered when she would have the chance of pouring into the ears of one of her confidential friends the account of her first entry into the old woman’s room. Not that she could be so very old in years,—not more than sixty or sixty-five, Daisy hazarded,—but her bedridden condition and the squalor of rugs and coverings under which she croaked and feebly moved lent to her an appearance of almost fabulous age. Dirty and tattered, a heap on the bed in the corner of the dark room, her grey locks straggled about her face, her shaking fingers crooked themselves at Daisy, and her mouth mumbled out unintelligible phrases, in which the words, “A hard son to me, Nicco ... a hard husband ... you’ll see,” alone detached themselves with any significance to the bride. She was herself too much overawed to speak, but stood close to Lovel, who, forbidding though he was, was yet the only familiar landmark in the whole of that house. For his part, he said nothing, not a word to help Daisy out of her fear or her embarrassment; he stood there, and had he not appeared so utterly indifferent she would have said he seemed resigned; he stood there waiting while his mother mumbled out her accusations,—how many years was it since she had had the opportunity of doing so save to Olver?—willing to wait although scorning to justify himself; and it was clear that he cared no more for his wife’s opinion than he did for his mother’s or anybody else’s, but had within himself a reserve of some unknown, unexplained quality, whether pride, or contempt, or self-communion, or all three, but which in any case left him invulnerable and as though he could close his ears at will when he did not choose to hear.

But although even through her fright Daisy was thinking of the succulent story she would make out of this first glimpse of the old woman, the closing incident was one she would not retail. No, she would not tell any one that when the mumble had finally died away, the mumble and the bursts of laughter, she would not tell any one that as she and Lovel had started to move towards the door the old woman had raised herself up on her extraordinary mountain of sacks and pillows, heaving herself up under all the rugs, and pointing an accusing finger at her daughter-in-law, had cried in an access of malevolent amusement, “Big already, my lass, and on your wedding-day!” She would not tell any one that. She could not, even had she been willing, have described the effect that the old woman’s words, uttered in such a tone of discovery and delight, produced upon her. Hitherto she had not thought very much about her condition; it was an inconvenient consequence that often overtook girls of her class when they had omitted to behave with too self-righteous a prudery; and in her own particular case she had been able to turn her “trouble” to excellent account. But with that witchlike cackle a whole future of foreboding rushed up at her, a whole revelation of mischievous malignity. The cackle and the wink—Gorwyn knew her secret; did Lovel’s mother know it too? she was credited with sly powers; did Lovel’s brother know it? and would they sit for years upon their knowledge until one day it should hatch out, sudden and disastrous? Or had Lovel told them both that the child was Olver’s child? Olver would accept that, surely; he had the memory of the scene in the barn to convince him. What had Lovel told them? she would never dare to ask him, and his inscrutability gave her no hope of discovering by chance.

And then she had been astonished to find how gentle he could be towards her. It was true that he was stern in his injunctions,—no tales of his house to be carried about the village, he said, and poor Daisy saw her one consolation evaporate,—but in his personal dealings with her he was uniformly gentle. Distant always, never relaxing, never easy; but kind with a kindness that wrung the very heart of her love for him. It was as though he pitied her, and was kind to her as he would have been to an animal; although she thought bitterly, there would have been more of love and less of duty in his kindness towards the meanest animal. She could not cajole herself with the idea that anything but duty lay beneath his kindness to her. He was equally gentle, she observed, with his brother Olver, and with his mother, never betraying by any sign his repulsion or his impatience; and Daisy thought sometimes with terror that she herself might be as repulsive to him as the old woman must surely be, but never would she know it, for he would never allow it to appear. And at moments, loving him, she could forget herself sufficiently to be sorry for him in his loneliness and his unrelaxing self-command.

She began to know the full significance of suffering. Before very long she was suffering, in her blind, ignorant way, down to the bone. For discomfort she had bargained; for a hard life of work, since she knew that the business of keeping the house and its three inmates would after her marriage devolve upon her, she had bargained also; for Lovel’s severity she had bargained, and with an obscure sense of justice and fair play she had been prepared to accept without complaint these things that she was voluntarily bringing upon herself as the price of securing Lovel for her own, for her husband; but for the torment of his kindness and his proximity she had not bargained. The work she had envisaged with a practical eye; that was within the reach of her capacity, but the emotional problem had altogether eluded her anticipation. She had thought, if she thought at all, that once she had got Lovel safely over that ticklish business of marriage, she would have consummated her supreme ambition. She had not understood that then and then only would her problem truly begin. It had been easy, pitifully easy, to trick Lovel into marriage, easy to play upon the double string of his dejection and his sense of honour; he had allowed himself to be conducted through preliminaries and ceremony alike with the same cold, trance-like indifference; that had been easy for her; but how to dig through to the man beneath that blameless mask? “Nicholas, will you take me to Bath some day, anywhen you’ve time? I’ve never seen a bigger town than Marlborough,” and he would answer, kindly, always kindly, but like a man who might well be dead before the day for going to Bath arrived, “I’ll take you to Bath, my dear,” and she would sidle up to him and say, “That’ll be a treat for you too, Nicco?” and he would acquiesce, and at the same time, on some murmured excuse, would put her gently away.

She waited hungrily all day for his return in the evening. His presence exasperated and tortured her, but his absence left her in a perpetual fret, swallowing up what she had anticipated as the principal trial of her days, the sinister companionship of Olver and the old woman. Now that she knew her way about the house,—knew the full squalor of the old woman’s room,—had grown accustomed to the croak and the pointing finger,—no longer started at Olver’s sudden laughter in the dark passage,—she was not so much oppressed by them; but Lovel, Lovel, was always what she wanted and what she could not have. At first she had restrained herself, not knowing the temper with which she had to deal, but, seeing him so kind, she slackened her restraint, and her affection slopped increasingly over him. He could not be in the house but what she must waddle after him, pawing at his hand or trying to entice him into some friendly phrase. “You like having your house kept by me, don’t you, Nicco? You like getting hot meals, don’t you, darling?” and often she whined, “I love you, Nicco!”

It was not in her to suffer in silence. When she craved too strongly for him to touch her, she would take his hand and hold it against her full, warm breast. She would sit at his feet in front of the fire, as Olver had been used to do, and lean her head against his knee with sentimental sighs, for she quickly learnt that although he might ignore her he would never repulse her. In the kitchen, when she did this, Olver sat at the centre table squinting into his little mirror at the reflected group of his sister-in-law, his brother, and the red glow of the fire. He was content to sit doing this by the hour, but Daisy could not endure it; she clambered to her feet,—for she was rapidly growing more clumsy in her movements,—and went about the room finding small unnecessary tasks to ease her discomfort. Sometimes she turned noisily on Lovel: