“Thanks, Dick, thanks.”
“There is too much damned trafficking in matrimony in this world. I shall never forget old Hogarth’s preaching. Unless God and the heart are in the thing, the bond is but a pledge to the devil.”
Jeffray looked Wilson straight in the eyes.
“I am glad to hear you speak like this, Dick,” he said; “it strengthens me.”
“And I am glad, sir,” quoth the painter, “that you are one of the few people who can tell the truth.”
Meanwhile Bess had been watching and waiting in Pevensel for Jeffray’s return, eager to show him the brooch that Dan had given her—a cross within a circle of gold studded with emeralds. The brooch had proved to her that her memories of the past were not mere dreams begotten out of restless fancy of childhood. Perhaps old Ursula was not her aunt, and perhaps Dan and the forest-folk had no blood communion with her, as she had been taught to believe. Once she showed the brooch to Ursula, watching the old woman’s wrinkled face keenly the while. The crone had peered at it with some uneasiness, working her toothless mouth and fidgeting at her apron-strings with her fingers. She had asked Bess how she had come by the bauble, and, being told that it was Dan’s present, she had held up her hands, turned her back on the girl, and refused to utter another word on the matter. Ursula’s attitude puzzled Bess. She went solemn-eyed through the early days of June, thinking of Jeffray and the past, and wondering what would happen in the future.
Twice she had quarrelled fiercely with Dan since he had given her the brooch, and it was only by grappling her passions down that she could keep her hands from shedding blood. Silence and an attitude of meek submission went sorely against the temper of her soul. It was only the dire necessity for dissimulation that held her quiet under her husband’s bullyings. For bully her he did after the fashion of a great, clumsy savage, proud of his own huge strength and the prerogatives thereof. It pleased the oaf to fancy that he was taming Bess as he would have tamed a bad-tempered filly; that he was breaking her spirit, and fastening his bondage upon her with the masterful complacency of a lord and a possessor. Like a great ape he would grin and mock her, tweak her hair, pinch her arms, twit her with his triumph, and gloat over the passivity that seemed to flatter his strength. Now and again Bess’s anger would blaze up in hot revolt, a passion-play that lent a charm to the brute pride of conquest. He believed that he had tamed and subdued the girl, not suspecting that he was only stacking the pent-up fire within her heart.
It was not till Jeffray had ridden on three successive evenings to the yew valley that Bess was able to slip away from the hamlet to meet him. It was a still evening in June, the grass knee-deep in the golden meadows, the scent of the white may heavy on the air. The voices of the birds alone broke the deep silence of the summer woods. The black spires of the yews and their massive limbs were streaked and eyeleted with the flooding gold of the western sky.
Jeffray came first to the trysting-place, feeling like a man who has drunk a bumper of sparkling wine. He tethered his horse deep in one of the thickets, and went and stood in the entry of the Hermit’s Cave, a rough chamber cut in the rock, with a low doorway and a mere slit of a window. The air was damp, pungent, and refreshing. Below lay the pool covered with white water-weed, where the old recluse of yore had drawn his water and kept his fish. There was still the outline of a cross cut in the wall of the chamber, and a broken bench of stone jutted out beneath the window.
Richard straightened suddenly as he leaned against the rough jamb of the doorway, and stood listening with a smile hovering about his mouth. Some one was singing in the yew wood—an old country song, simple and full of pathos. The mellow and half-husky voice rose and fell amid the shadows of the trees.