“It’s not a white-faced thing like you that’s the match for a man like him,” she added.
Her companion watched her, fascinated. She felt small and poor in the presence of Susannah’s bold womanhood. The angles which the wear of life and work had begun to accentuate strengthened, by contrast, her untamed generosity of line. Her red lips were drawn back a little from her even teeth, and her hair, tousled by contact with her pillow, burned in hotter colours in the glow which came from the grate.
She had repelled Catherine so completely, that only at this moment did she strike her as a creature of possible attraction, something more than a mere sordid, sexless influence. But, with the warm light and some undercurrent in Susannah’s voice and talk, there came to the younger woman a new view of her companion. This throb of revelation was still quick in her when Susannah spoke again.
“Yes, you may wait,” she said slowly; “you may sit and wait—and you’ll know something more at the end nor you do now. Have I lived here for nigh upon three years under the old man’s roof for nothin’? Is Heber my own cousin for nothin’? D’ye think because I haven’t got a white face an’ soft ways that no man has ever looked at me? D’ye believe that when Heber comes home it’s uncle that he comes for?”
She rose to her feet, and as she did so she shook her head, and her rolled-up hair fell and hung below her waist. She picked up the horn comb that clattered down upon the hearthstone.
“Look!” she cried, holding out the tangled mass. Her arm was at full stretch, and as the ends of hair slipped away from between palm and fingers, the sleeve of her coarse night-smock slipped back too and her thick, round arm showed through the sleeve as a patch of the white moon through the drifting of dusky cloud.
It began to dawn on Catherine that she was more than the sport of her own evil luck; she was a pawn in the hands of Heber and of this strange woman, who was making her, in spite of herself, feel her almost brutal fascination. What could she do in such a trap? Even she, with her timid, simple experiences, could guess that Susannah loved her cousin, and her heart quailed at the bitter thought which was assuming a certainty; it was revenge only that had prompted the shepherd to snatch her from the man who had supplanted him, while she had supposed, in her folly, that he loved her still; it was a double revenge that Black Heber was wreaking on herself and on Saunders. The blood ran to her face as she remembered his kisses at the end of their headlong ride. He had but sought to make her humiliation more complete. How meekly she had followed him out of the door at Pencoed! She had distrusted herself all her life; and now she must despise herself too, as she sat, a deluded fool, in front of Susannah, who knew all, and was mocking her because of the knowledge.
When people have been a long time in learning some elementary truth, the lesson, once made plain, takes complete hold of them. Catherine had never yet attempted to act for herself and now she saw that she must awake from her passiveness and free herself, once and for all, from the web in which she was taken. As she looked at Susannah she pierced beyond her into a new sequence of ideas. She had been hunted into a corner because she had been too ready to run. All the people she had known were so much stronger than she was that she had given up her own will to theirs without a struggle. Her mistress at the farm, Mrs. Job, Heber, and now Susannah; none of these suffered themselves to be dragged about by circumstances and by others as she had done. She was having hard measure from them all and it was time that, independently of them all, she should choose her own life. Only intense physical exhaustion kept her from running out of the house, yet again, into the night, where she might be alone with her biting mortification. The same roof should not shelter herself and Susannah.
Perhaps a shade of pity smote the elder woman at the sight of her white cheeks and her heavy eyes, dark with weariness. She took her by the shoulder.
“There,” she said, “come you in here and lie down or you’ll be dead afore morning.”