The Project Gutenberg eBook, Grey Wethers, by V. (Victoria) Sackville-West

GREY WETHERS

By V. SACKVILLE-WEST

GREY WETHERS
THE HEIR AND OTHER STORIES
CHALLENGE
HERITAGE
KNOLE AND THE SACKVILLES

New York:
George H. Doran Company

GREY WETHERS

A Romantic Novel

V. SACKVILLE-WEST

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

GREY WETHERS. II
———
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CLAIRE

Ces fantômes charmants que nous croyons à nous...

Ils sont là, près de nous, jouant sur notre route;

Ils ne dédaignent pas notre soleil obscur,

Et derrière eux, et sans que leur candeur s’en doute,

Leurs ailes font parfois de l’ombre sur le mur.

Ils ont ce grand dégout mystérieux de l’âme

Pour notre chair coupable et pour notre destin;

Ils ont, êtres rêveurs qu’un autre azur réclame,

Je ne sais quelle soif de mourir le matin.

Victor Hugo.

GREY WETHERS

PART ONE

GREY WETHERS

Part One

More than half a century has now elapsed since the events which added a new legend to the hard ancient hills lying about Marlborough and King’s Avon. The last organised rustic Scouring of the White Horse of King’s Avon,—from which occasion these events may properly be said to date, although a believer in predestination might be found to contend that they dated, indeed, from the very births of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel,—that last organised Scouring took place more than half a century ago. The White Horse remains, the same gaunt, hoary relic; King’s Avon remains, secluded, tragic, rearing its great stones within the circle of its strange earthwork; the Downs remain, and every winter, now as then, shroud their secrets and the memory of their secrets beneath the same mantle of snow away from the speculation of the curious. But of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel no trace remains, unless indeed they have passed into the wind and become incorporate with the intractable spaces and uncompromising heights. A great many tales are locally told of them, all too fantastic to be set down in print; the chalky soil, so unpropitious to other crops, grew at least a rich crop of superstition, especially in an age and district when stories of witches and burnings were curiously mingled in the minds of the ignorant with the opening of barrows and the fable of British princes. So it is not surprising that the disappearance of these two persons should have given rise to a jabber of conjecture which rapidly came to be explained away by a variety of legends following the line of approved local tradition. It is not the business of print to enter into these conjectures or their interpretation. It is the business of print to set down, in as practical a manner as may be, the circumstances leading up to the final catastrophe,—or fulfilment, call it which you will, according to the point of view from which you approach it,—and to leave the reader to carry on the narrative for himself in the manner best suited to his own fancy and requirements.

A peculiar silence reigned over the village; no children shouted, and no young men or girls passed down the street with that exact air of energy and enterprise that youth alone can produce. Somnolence predominated; it seemed a village inhabited only by the aged, and by those sparsely; a small gaggle of geese quacked and pried with their flat beaks along the cobbles; but for them, the cats and the old men had the place to themselves. The cats slumbered, curled round in the corners of doorsteps, where the sun struck hot on the stone; and on a bench outside the Waggon of Hay the four old men sat in a row, leaning on their knobly sticks, and holding pewter mugs in their hands. Brown old men, brown of hide and brown of garment, so that it was difficult to tell where their clothes began or their hands and faces left off. Eight boots of similar pattern set squarely side by side on the stones; four heads of almost equal similarity nodded together over the pewter, sagely and immemorially, for it would be safe to say that those four old men of King’s Avon might have been at any moment replaced by another set of four old men out of another century, without a casual observer remarking on the difference. It was the day out of half a score of years when they were left in supreme sovereignty over the village. The Waggon of Hay became then what they considered it always ought to be, and what they chose to maintain it had been at that epoch of time called “when we were young,” a place of meeting sober and stagnant, undisturbed by the rude, hobnailed entrance of young men, calling for spirits in a tap-room where they should have been content with beer or cider. It was the day when they might sit at peace in their row on the bench, sure that no lout of a blunderer would stumble over their toes. It was the day when they might indulge themselves to their hearts’ content in gossip and politics, uninterrupted by the revolutionary opinions of their juniors. They could go back to the time when no railway disfigured the valley of the Frome, when the old horned breed of true Wiltshire sheep wandered upon the heights, and when no man dreamt of threshing his wheat save by flail, or of crushing his apples in any but a wooden press. They could recall without effort those days in the ’thirties, when, themselves but little older than the century, they had gone in bands with rude weapons to break up the new and hateful machinery in the farmers’ barns. They could tell again the tales of superstition, and the sights which their fathers’ generation had seen; and above all, most succulently, they could recall how old Mother Lovel had been burnt on the top of Silbury Hill for a witch, the bogey their mothers had used to frighten them with; and, nodding together, the four heads coming closer, whisper that Nicholas Lovel had all the black arts at his disposal, and had in a fit of rage put a curse upon his own brother, so that the lad no longer had his wits about him, but loitered around, the anxiety and disgrace of the village.

They had the whole day to themselves, in which to say over and over again the things they had said many times before, and, greedy, would have liked to have the evening too, but far from it, the evening of that day was worse than any other evening, for the young men returned, already uproarious and in their numbers, full of song and boastfulness, their boots white with the chalk of the Downs, and their broad hats stuck round with the grasses and sorrel that grew up there on those unfertile heights. The old men would collect together in a corner, remotely grumbling, watching the young men as they lounged against the bar, filling the tap-room with their ribald good-humour and their tobacco smoke. The old men disapproved of the young because they feared in them the jostle of the oncoming generation, but the young men merely laughed carelessly at the old, having from them no longer anything to fear. The young men, on the evening of that particular day, would be more than usually vainglorious, bragging of their exploits, growing with every glass more direct in their modes of expression and more hilarious in their laughter. It was the day when all prudery was thrown aside, when each girl must look after herself as best she could or would, when from the earliest hour of exodus from the village along the road to the Downs the band of youths and girls fell into two primitive groups of hunter and quarry, a scramble of catch-who-catch-can, an escapade of wholesome license over the slopes of the Downs. It is true that they started out armed with trowels and rakes, but even these implements of homely design were soon garlanded with vetch and campion torn from the hedgerows as the party went along, nor were these, the ostensible justification of the expedition, the true weapons of the day; the true weapons were the muslin frocks, the black shoes and white stockings, the ribbons, the sunbonnets, and the eyes and curls beneath the sunbonnets; and the leather leggings of the young men, their strong brown hands, their belted smocks, their insolent air. Impossible that a few wounds should not result from the marshalling of such an armoury. And while the girls on their return must needs carry away to their bedrooms the secrets of the day, evading the inquisitive eye of their mothers, who, not condescending to ask, although burning to know, remembered with a sigh similar feasts of their own youth, the young men might gather in the tap-room and between hints and guffaws convey to all who cared to hear that they were fine young men worthy of their sex and of a sound country tradition. It was perhaps from an unacknowledged flicker of envy that the old men frowned upon their honest coarseness, for occasionally one of them, forgetting his attitude of rebuke, would let out a cackle of enjoyment and appreciation, much to his own dismay, and much to the amusement of the youths, who would cry, “Hey, gaffer, don’t you wish you’d be with us? Don’t you, you old dog?”

But until this lusty return filled the tap-room with its uproar, the cats and the ancients of the village were left undisturbed. Both in their several ways made the most of their opportunity, the cats to sleep, since little boys who threw stones had gone with the party, hangers-on and peeping-Toms of the day, and the ancients to utter their sage words, to echo approval of one another, and to bury their faces deep in the pewter mugs, from which they emerged with beards dripping foam. A suck of the lips, a wipe with the back of the hand, a long “A-ah,” of contentment, and the mumble of anecdote flowed again upon its course. Sitting there in the sun was favourable to such occupations. Since the strenuousness of life’s work was over,—the early winter rising, the trudges after a lost ewe across snow-swept Downs, the unearthing of mangolds from the frosted ridge, the hours of scything swathe by swathe under burning midday,—what could remain better to do than to sit upon a bench in the sun, with companions who in colour and outlook were the very spit of oneself, to grumble against new-fangled notions, and to wet one’s gizzard with a long pull of ale, which, at all events, however ignominious to admit it, had not deteriorated in quality since one’s youth?

Amongst the four old men, he who carried perhaps most authority, if any difference could be said to exist amongst the ancient cronies, was John Sparrow, who out-topped them by a year or so of age. Not that this fact in itself constituted so marked a superiority; it placed the senior rather at a disadvantage, since there existed amongst the four a tacit competition as to which should outlive the other, and each within his own mind dwelt upon the day when a fresh mound should be turned in the neighbouring church-yard, and a shrunken row of three should sit upon the bench, and the new topic, surprising by virtue of its very novelty, be introduced among them, the topic of their missing member. Each probably knew his companions well enough to hope for little charity at their hands. It would be fine fun, to have John Sparrow, or Caleb Patch, or Timothy Cutbush, or Eli Sheppard, lying there silent and unable to protest, to pick to pieces at their leisure. No, the few additional years of John Sparrow were not precisely the reason of his weight of word. But Sparrow’s daughter Martha, called “my gal,” although she would never again see sixty, was servant at the Manor House, where lived the only gentry of the village, and consequently whenever Sparrow began his phrase, “My gal says,” his utterance was awaited with a certain degree of respect. The village was proud of its gentry; Mr. Warrener was a scholar, and Miss Clare a lady. Although she went everywhere alone, and rode her pony like a boy, her ladylikeness could never be in question. Hence it came about that John Sparrow’s quotations from Martha held a little flavour of high life, a very remote echo of fashion; nothing more vicarious could well be imagined, but to the fuddled minds of the other three it sufficed: John Sparrow was in touch with elegance. He did not much look like it, as he sat at the end of the row on the bench, the colour of a hayseed, having now deposited his empty mug on the bench beside him and drawn from his pocket a long clay pipe whose small bowl he was very carefully ramming with tobacco. His daughter Martha was altogether a different question; she wore a lilac print dress and an apron over it; her grey hair was partly covered by a cap; she had a sedate manner and shining old cheeks; she was clean and respectful. She had entirely ceased to live at her father’s house, having her own bare but immaculate attic bedroom at the Manor House, and periodically she allowed her father to come there to tea in the kitchen, where he sat very neat and intimidated and impressed, enjoying most that part of his visit when he was boasting about it to his cronies afterwards. Being without subtlety they betrayed every corner of their envy and curiosity, to which John Sparrow was not loth to pander. They had had a table-cloth, and cups and saucers—china, not tin—and Martha had put flowers on the table. After tea Martha had played the musical box, but in the garden he had heard Miss Clare laughing as she strolled up and down with her father. That young lady was getting to a marriageable age; and here John Sparrow’s recital, which began with veracity, was apt to go astray. He would make a feeble attempt to convey a sense of his privity to secret counsels by pursing up his lips, nodding his head, spreading out his hands, and suchlike indications, without actually committing himself to the indiscretion of words; but presently under the fire of questions, the “Come now, John, out with it,” and the final shaft of scepticism to the effect that he knew no more than they did themselves, he would invariably be led into confidences which had no bearing whatsoever upon the truth. Martha had whispered this, Martha had told him that, Miss Clare, he doubted, was not in truth the daughter of Mr. Warrener; or, if so be she was his daughter, then no daughter that he ought to own to, but rather should pass her off as his niece or his ward.... The other three accepted all such statements round-eyed, and the more they gaped the more inventive he grew. Their credulity was his undoing.

And as they drowsed and maundered, they saw Miss Clare emerge presently from the gates of the Manor House, with their glimpse of garden, lawn, and cedars, riding astride upon her pony, whose little hoofs came slipping and shambling over the cobbles, down the street, past the old men, and took the road out towards the Downs. The old men raised their heads at all this little clatter, and a greeting passed between them and Miss Clare; they touched their hats, she waved her whip to them and called out something which they were too deaf to catch, but to which they responded with the “Ay, ay” and the gesture of tolerant encouragement accorded by age towards popular youth. There was a mumble amongst them after she had passed, of unspecified vague approval, before the straggly old beards drooped again upon the chests, and the street resumed the quiet broken by that small disturbance.

It was not a very great wonder that the village should look upon its gentry as so exclusively its own. Its situation was such, that everything which took place within its enclosure was peculiarly focussed and self-contained. In the first place, it was isolated far from other villages, at the foot of the Downs, which loomed over it on three sides like a huge natural rampart, and in the second place it was entirely surrounded by an ancient earthwork in a complete and perfect circle. This earthwork was broken only at two points, to allow the road to enter the circle, and to leave it again on the opposite side. Within this little enclosed ring of thirty acres lay the village, complete with church, Manor House, and village street, incapable of expansion in any direction, unless it overflowed its boundary, which it had never done. A few outlying farms at a little distance were included, properly speaking, in the parish, but they were either too remote or too well screened by voluminous trees to distract the eye from the compact symmetry of the little town within the circle. Strangers to the country, coming unawares upon this singular encampment, were at first amazed; but presently there crept into their minds the sense that the whole country traversed by them had been, in a way, but the natural preparation to precisely such a mysterious and secluded patch of human habitation. They recalled the straight white road driven across the Downs; the pits of poor blanched chalk; the shaven clumps of beech, like giant ricks, upon the skyline; mounds and barrows; the perfect cone of Silbury Hill, which, rooted in its greater antiquity, had forced the Roman road to deflect from its course; the loneliness of the magnificent Downs; the primitive shapes surviving in the White Horses cut as landmarks upon their flanks. Above all they would recall those strange monuments of English paganism, the sarsen stones, hewn by Nature and transported by man to be the instruments of his superstition, left where they had fallen, singly or in rings, obscure in a fold of the Downs, or reared to accord with the eternal procession of the heavens in the gaunt majesty of Stonehenge.

The stranger would recall these stones as he followed the road through the gap into the circle of King’s Avon, for there in an ordinary field to the right of the road, just within the embankment, he would see, standing upright to the height of ten or twelve feet, a number of these stones, standing there with such apparent fixity and permanence that it was disconcerting to observe, on a closer inspection, an equal number of the stones fallen flat and half-buried in the ground. Their impressiveness grew, as the beholder began to realise from their symmetrical disposition that what he was considering was no less than the ruins of a temple. The village lay just beyond the field, and in the rough ground, near the field,—partly ditch below the embankment, partly undergrowth,—many more of the stones might be discovered, half-hidden by dead leaves and mosses, or even by tins and rubbish, and in one or two cases made prisoner, like some inarticulate Laocoon, by the serpenting roots of a beech overhanging the scarp. And as the stranger, after poking about among this tangle, proceeded along the lane towards the village, he would come upon other isolated stones, either embedded in the bank below the hedge, or used as a gate-post into a paddock, standing there patiently enough, towering above the gate and above the hedge, indifferent to the fate that had come upon it; and one, by the roadside, had been made to do duty as a milestone, and bore upon its face the distances to Bath and Marlborough in eighteenth-century script and Roman numerals. But, although the stones were now thus scattered and even totally removed for purposes of quarrying material, a patient observer might still piece together the design and dimension of the temple, standing once like Stonehenge in rings, when no human dwellings were there, in, as it were, a cup of the Downs, open to sun and rain. But this imaginary stranger would probably dwell rather upon the relationship between the stones of King’s Avon, and the stars that they had known unaltered, and the barrows humped upon the Downs, and the roughly-hewn flints turned up by the plough, the bones and antlers, and the stray tokens left, with very little fame, about the country, silent and enduring while religions perhaps slightly more enlightened because more charitable passed with the ages above their surfaces.

This paganism of England, he might have reflected as he made his way slowly from stone to stone, pausing before each and finding in each the same monotonous and uncommunicative austerity, this early English paganism, how bleakly different it was from the paganism of the South! Indeed, he might wonder whether to call his forebear pagan, which had a rich full-blooded sound, or, stripping him of garlands, to call him simply heathen. Here, in this flint country of the small northern island, no flowers and fruit had surrounded the sacrifice, no cymbals clashed, no grapes and plaited maize wreathed the horns of the victim, no songs accompanied the priest. A stone, a knife, and blood, red and grey, sufficed their ritual. This was no country to see nymphs in the streams and oaks, to hear the flute of a satyr in the beechwood. Yet there was a harsher dignity, beside which the Southern paganism was soft and ample, over-ripe with sweetness. It was a creed which would not concern itself with the fruits of earth; Demeter was not for it, nor lecherous Pan, nor a god clothed in the plumes of a swan. It would concern itself with nothing lower than the most majestic of human contemplations, the sun and the stars in their courses, so that after the lapse of centuries the upright stones still aspired to celestial communion when the gentle or the angry dawn broke over the rounded Atlantean shoulders of the Downs.

Clare Warrener rode idly along the leafy lane, her pony’s hoofs raising little grey puffs of dust. Nothing in particular occupied her mind, beyond the sight which she was going to see, and which for weeks now she had been anticipating. She had promised herself that she would ride on this day up on to the Downs, cast her eye over the festivity, and ride on again, with perhaps a slight resentment at this invasion of the hills; a resentment she knew to be absurd, since the rustic youths and girls at their celebrating had a better right to the hills than she had herself, they who were the descendants of shepherds and farmers, wresting for centuries a living from the poor stony soil. She loved in the hills their spaciousness, and their refusal to yield to tillage; at most they would grant pasture to the sheep crawling on their slopes, but for the rest they remained eternally, in the heart of an amenable and complacent island, the untamed spot—they, and the moorlands, and the hills of Wales and the North.

The shady lane which she had been following soon ceased to be bordered by trees and took an upward direction leading to the foot of the Downs. It became a steep white road mounting straight up the unboundaried slopes, with high banks on either side, and the winter rain-runnels marked in little zig-zagging ruts and pebbles. Some clumps of furze and a few thorn-trees grew on the lower reaches, but presently even these ceased, and the short turf was the only vegetation. Up here the air was pure and sharp; the grasses waved as they were blown by the breeze; in some places fires had left their blackened patches; a trail of smoke-coloured sheep moved cropping in the dip of a valley. Larks rose continually, soaring straight up into the air, impelled either by some impulse of their own or else disturbed by the sound of the pony’s passage. Clare rode with loose reins, letting the pony pick his own way among the pebbles. The road began to wind; it curved round a shoulder of hill, dipped into a hollow, rose steeply again, and all the time its direction was hidden round the next corner. At moments it reached a high point of vantage, whence Clare, looking down in the direction she had come, could see the low fertile lands, the farms, and the clump of trees pierced by the church-spire which was King’s Avon. But to north, east, and west, nothing but Downs, the great back of the south of England. She rode on. The pony climbed, his head down, his withers high. She felt the muscles of his flank moving warm beneath her leg; he climbed, strong and willing, and she put him at short cuts which entailed mounting an almost perpendicular slope of grass, for the pleasure of feeling him buckle to the effort.

Presently she heard voices and laughter borne to her on the wind. Before long she reached a kind of plateau of grass, the highest point of all, which commanded a wide view of both Downs and the chessboard landscape far below, crossed by the white roads like streamers from a Maypole; and at the further end of this plateau she saw scattered in pairs over the grass, and assembled at one point as a nucleus from which these couples had detached themselves, the youth of the village of King’s Avon in holiday clothes with wild flowers strung about them. She reined in her pony, not liking to interrupt their fun by drawing too near or seeming to admire them as a curiosity. She could recognise most of them at that distance; she picked out the red head of Daisy Morland, the long limbs of Peter Gorwyn, the sunbonnet of Phoebe Patch, the silly laugh of young Baskett, the straw-coloured shock of hair belonging to Job Lackland, the black strap-shoes and white stockings of Annabel Blagdon, who was the belle of the village, and, finally, prowling on the outskirts rather like a pariah dog, the indefinably misshapen form of Olver Lovel. Near by the group were set down the wicker baskets in which they had brought their meal, also the trowels, spades, turf-cutters, and hoes, apparently forgotten. The occasion of the expedition was rendered completely invisible by the sprawling of the persons seated upon it. This was none other than one of the famous White Horses, which on that day must be scoured, that is to say, cleaned of ten years’ accumulation of weeds and grasses; though it was said that less plantains were uprooted than matches made that day, and that the true business of keeping the White Horse duly scoured was performed by some sober shepherd with a pocket-knife, idling away the hours while his sheep moved slowly within his sight. Nevertheless the tradition must be maintained. Clare felt a slight wistfulness that she might not join in with the party, but she had been for so many years strictly forbidden to do this by an indignant Martha Sparrow,—“’Twould not be befitting your station at all, Miss Clare, indeed, to go with those rough louts of boys and hoydens of girls,”—that she had come to accept this ban as a law of nature, without question. She therefore sat her pony at a distance, looking on enviously at the clumsy fun in progress, watching the boys roll over and over down the slope and get up dusting themselves and laughing, or wrestling with one another on the grass and making a show of their superior strength before the girls, who laughed and applauded. She felt especially envious when she saw Job Lackland pick up his fiddle, settle it firm under his chin, and begin to play, the notes of the old-fashioned tune reaching her as clearly as notes struck on a bell, and she could see the sprigged waistcoat and cut-away coat which Job always wore on feast-days when he thought he might be called upon to play the fiddle. The others scrambled to their feet and began a country-dance, a sort of combination of a Morris dance and Sir Roger de Coverley, for they fluttered their handkerchiefs as they danced, and at the same time ran in couples up and down between two lines formed by the other dancers.

The muslin dresses and coal-scuttle bonnets of the girls, and the smocks of the young men, together with their fluttering handkerchiefs and their hands gaily clasped high as they turned and twisted beneath, made a coloured and merry patch on the top of the hill, like a lot of butterflies.

Job fiddled with increasing energy, and as he fiddled he tried to beat time for the dancers with his bow, so that every now and then he would miss out a bar while he waved his bow to re-establish order in the dance which threatened to become confused. At last they all fell exhausted upon the grass, and cider was passed round, and the old White Horse, who had been temporarily revealed during the dance, was once more hidden from view by the spreading frocks and sprawling limbs.

There were other preparations now in evidence, for to emulate the scouring of the greater White Horse of Berkshire the youth of King’s Avon indulged themselves in more or less organised games, which again were but a cloak to their braggart vanity towards the girls. A rude platform was erected on trestles on the flat summit of the hill, and towards this the whole company surged, leaving the white scar of the Horse once more exposed and placid upon the hillside. The direction of the games was in the hands of young Gorwyn; he beat a small drum to call his audience to order; he marshalled the competitors; he posted tow-headed Lackland with his fiddle to strike up a tune during the intervals.

The competitors stood in a group to one side, suddenly sheepish; the audience, which by now consisted almost entirely of girls, ranged themselves beneath the platform with the nudges and upturned faces of anticipation. Clare could only see the crowns of their hats and sunbonnets.

Half a dozen young men stood up on the platform, exposed to the jokes and encouragements of their friends; in their embarrassment they did not know what expression to assume; some scowled, some tried to stare with an indifferent gaze out over the distance, some sought the faces of their special friends among the audience and grinned awkwardly. All were in the same predicament as to how to dispose of their hands and feet; some stood stiff and erect, with arms folded severely across their chests; others thrust their hands down into the pockets of their breeches; others bent to fidget with a bootlace.

Some were for wrestling, others for the races; the bolder spirits, and the most admired, were for broadstick. Gorwyn himself, the broadstick champion of the village, was, as the last and principal event of the day, to challenge the winner.

Clare, growing interested, rode a little nearer; the young men touched their foreheads to her, some of the girls dropped a curtsy; her advance caused a little ripple in the crowd. Again she felt the slight regret that she might not mingle freely and on an equal footing with them; surely they were clean, English young men, honest enough if a trifle crude, and the girls were healthy and fresh in their muslins; but she was too simply a child to dream of disobeying Martha’s mandate. She sat her pony at her distance, looking on.

The first event was a bout of wrestling; not perhaps, a very scientific exhibition, but the rivals went at it with a will, good-tempered and full of zest, staggering about the platform, their fine, young-men’s bodies knotted together like a piece of ever-changing sculpture in a natural setting, not cooped into the dinginess of a studio or a gallery. Clare saw the shock heads imprisoned under an arm, or going to butt lowered like young rams; she could hear the deep breathing, and the muffled shock as limbs and torsos closed anew together.

And the audience of girls cried out and applauded, or uttered little screams when a fall seemed imminent; but the wrestlers themselves were silent, save for their heavy breathing; and the feminine cries and rustlings of admiration or dismay formed the natural accompaniment to the masculine concentration.

The wrestling over, the wrestlers descended to mix in with the girls, and the competition was eager and frank among the girls to get possession of one of these heroes and to keep him by her side for the rest of the afternoon. Only Annabel Blagdon, the belle, remained unexcited and scornful; she affected to despise the mere wrestlers: broadstick was the only game for her, as she had already advertised, and her smiles were reserved for some broadstick champion with his broken head. Therefore the wrestlers made for her all the more; made awkward advances towards her, neglecting the blandishments of the others which were lavished too cheaply upon them. But she scarcely answered; she knew her power, she knew and savoured the irritation of her sisters; she tapped her foot in its white stocking and black strapped shoe, and scorned the wrestlers for their undamaged skins, though secretly she could not help esteeming their broad shoulders and their narrow loins.

Job Lackland meanwhile had struck up a tune on his crazy fiddle, and made the air gay with his old jingling melody, until the tapping of Gorwyn’s little drum announced a fresh event; this was a race after a cheese down the steepest side of the hill, an all-but-perpendicular bank, round which the ordinary pedestrian would have skirted, but the lads started down it helter-skelter after the round cheese which was bowling down, bumping and jumping, after its send-off push. Some few of them kept their feet, others slithered down on their backsides, like boys on an ice-slide, some in their effort to keep upright tumbled head over heels; one, a wag, went down, rolled round in a ball, hands locked under knees, in a series of somersaults.

No one was hurt, and the girls peering after them over the top, laughed and danced in delight as the medley of arms and legs and bodies reached the bottom, and a scrum for the prize ensued. It was finally carried off by Olver Lovel, who, it was averred, crept in between the scrambling legs and fetched it away in a moment when the object of the race was forgotten, and only the fun of the scrimmage remembered.

No one quite knew in what spirit to take Olver’s success. It was too unpopular for congratulations to ring genuine, so most of the party turned aside and pretended to be busy with other things, sooner than betray their disappointment,—for they were kindly folk,—and to spare themselves the necessity of smiling to Olver. In fact, it was felt that a slight chill had been cast over the afternoon by the simpleton getting the better of the cheese.

As for Olver he was quite happy with his cheese, which was large and round, and beside which he sat at a little distance on the grass, occasionally patting it and stroking its smooth cool rotundity. Clare let her interest stray from the platform, in order to observe him; like most of the others he had put a wreath of sorrel and grasses round his hat, but whereas the others acquired thereby merely a merry-making, country appearance, Olver was made to look crazy and erratic, and twice as simple as usual. He sat now on the grass making a daisy-chain to go round the belly of his cheese; his legs were stretched out childishly straight in front of him, and his shovel hat with the waving wreath was bent down over his occupation.

Simple, thought Clare; but how quick and cunning were his fingers! that was no unmixed simplicity.

He reached out his daisy-chain to measure against the cheese; he was engrossed and took no notice of any one or of anything. She wondered whether Nicholas Lovel knew that Olver was up here; usually he kept his brother away from any gathering of the villagers, lest he annoy them in any way. She had already noticed that Nicholas was not of the party and smiled to imagine him as one of that hearty gang. She even wondered the more, so aloof did he keep himself from the rest of the village, that he allowed his brother to join with them. But she remembered then that he made laws for himself only, and did not expect others to keep them; he was too indifferent, rather than too tolerant, for that.

Clare thought that she would wait to see the broadstick contest, which apparently was about to take place, and that she would then ride away, for she knew that as the afternoon advanced, and especially as the discreet twilight arrived to throw its veil over the passions aroused by the prowess of the games, the party would become less rowdy, less athletic, and more sentimental, more inclined to break up into couples and to dispose itself thus about the grass, where no cover existed, but where privacy was guaranteed by a tacit convention that all wore blinkers. Clare remembered then,—what Martha Sparrow, gossiping, had told her,—that Olver Lovel sometimes made himself very unpopular by creeping up noiselessly behind some pair just as they were circling round the most critical stages of their courtship, either to shout loudly in their ears or else to tickle the backs of their necks with a straw, so that it had even been discussed in the Waggon of Hay whether he should be ostracised from the festival of the scouring. The threat of ostracism, however, had not been carried out. They were all too much afraid of Olver and of the tricks he might play in revenge on them, worse than shouting in their ears, or tickling the backs of their necks, or even than putting caterpillars up girl’s legs, which he had been known to do; and in a less degree they were also afraid of his brother Nicholas, not to mention the old mother, whom none of them had ever seen, and for whose continued existence they had to take Nicholas’ word for granted.

Perhaps this fear of the Lovels, and of the queer powers they were reputed to possess, weighed even more with the ignorant village folk than the rough, kindly pity they felt for Nicholas in the affliction put upon him.

Clare was eager to watch the broadstick play, which she had never seen; Martha had told her that those who had taken part were to be seen going about for days afterwards with bandaged heads, and even kept the bandage on for longer than they need, as a badge that they practised the old sturdy sport, and that he who carried off the honours was entitled to the respect of the men in the Waggon of Hay, be they natives or strangers passing through, and that there wasn’t a girl in the parish would refuse him her lips. Martha, quite carried away, had given her these accounts with enthusiasm. Clare had teased her, “I believe you remember a scouring when you were young, Martha,” and Martha had blushed and bridled, and declared she saw no harm in having once been as young as Miss Clare herself, and went on to relate that once she had been to the scouring of the great White Horse of White Horse Vale, where teams of the Wiltshire men met teams of the Berkshire men at wrestling and broadstick, so that it was not the little family affair of the King’s Avon White Horse, but a great celebration that lasted two days, and included roundabouts and side-show booths. But broadstick play was dying out, and young men were not so keen to get their heads broken as once they had been, which was a pity, for it showed up their manliness, in spite of what the parsons might say; that was Martha’s view.

Therefore Clare was especially anxious to see the play, for she thought she might never have an opportunity of seeing it again.

Just then she heard the trot of a horse on the turf behind her, turf baked so hard that it rang hollow. She did not turn round, but sat waiting for the horseman to come up beside her. “So,” she thought to herself, as a little expectant smile parted her lips, “Lovel has come after all to have a look at the scouring.” The trot slackened into a walk, and the head of a horse came alongside that of her own pony. A voice said, “Good afternoon, Miss Warrener,” and looking round she saw a man with iron-grey hair in the act of lifting his hat to her; but he was not the man she had expected.

“Mr. Calladine,” she said, smiling after her first little shock of surprise and disappointment.

“So you, too, have come to look on at the scouring,” he began. “Whenever I hear of a scouring in the neighbourhood I am enticed to watch it, and every time I go home realising that I have wasted my time. But, after all, as well ride here as anywhere else, and better, if I am to have the good fortune of meeting you.”

Clare was far too unpolished and simple to know how to reply to such compliments. She only blushed, was angry with herself for blushing, and stared the harder in silence at the party on the grass. Calladine saw her deepened colour, and savoured to the full its unconscious charm; he leant forward with a creaking of saddle-leather, his gloved hand resting with the bunch of reins on the peak of his saddle.

“Will you ride a little way with me? There is not much more to be seen here, and I fancy they have noticed us, and are getting shy. Ah, it’s too late, for here comes young Gorwyn to offer us a drink. We must accept it, I suppose, and only pray that ’tisn’t in a cup they have all been using.”

Young Gorwyn, the master of the ceremonies, the son and apprentice of the blacksmith, carried the cup of cider very carefully in his immense hands, like a child carries a nest, as though he were afraid of crushing it between them.

“Farmer Morland’s brewing,” he said, grinning foolishly as he offered it.

Clare drank; it was clean and sweet, pure apple-juice and sugar. She was then confronted by a difficulty with which she had no idea of how to cope: ought she to offer the cup to Calladine after having drunk from it herself?

She had always the uneasy feeling in Calladine’s company that more ceremony was necessary than in her dealings with other human beings, conducted with perfect and unthinking naturalness. But Calladine, who was so grave and courtly, and who looked at her so intently while speaking to her, and again so intently while she replied, seemed to exact a different standard of manners.

In this case, fortunately, he saw her unhappy hesitation, and solved the difficulty for her by stretching out his hand for the cup and draining it right off.

But Gorwyn was watching, and, kindled by the unusualness of the day, winked broadly as Calladine drank, and said heartily, “There’s luck to you both!”

“I hope so,” said Calladine in a low voice. He glanced quickly at Clare; she had either not heard, not noticed, or failed to interpret.

“Admirable, Peter!” he said in a louder tone, as he handed back the cup. “Tell Daisy Morland from me and Miss Warrener, that her father’s brewing, which I suspect she superintends, is first class.”

Young Gorwyn grinned again. “But you’ll stay to watch the broadstick, now you’re here?” he said eagerly, since to him it was the great event of the day.

“Well, I think perhaps broadstick is scarcely a suitable entertainment for a young lady,—eh, Gorwyn?” said Mr. Calladine. “Races, or even wrestling, but scarcely broadstick,—a rough game, and usually unpleasant to watch at the end. I think Miss Warrener and I will ride away and leave you to your sports.”

Gorwyn, who had at first looked astonished, opened his mouth to protest, then a look of contempt came over his ruddy face, succeeded by a sudden shyness; he mumbled something, and scampered back to his companions.

“Oh, but I wanted to see the broadstick,” began Clare.

“My dear young lady,” said Mr. Calladine, leaning sideways in his saddle towards her, “may I, for once, stand in the place of your father, and say that I am sure he would never approve of your witnessing this rough display, and indeed would be most grieved if it came to his ears that you had done so? May I beg you to have confidence in my judgment? Come, now, let us ride away together, and if you can obtain your father’s consent I will promise to escort you to some fair where you may see the game,—will that content you?”

Clare, greatly disappointed, was too young to question Calladine’s decision. If he said her father would disapprove, then he must be right; although, privately she thought that her father, mild and vague, would have no views at all on the subject. Obediently, however, she wheeled her pony after Calladine’s horse, and they rode quietly away along the top of the ridge. She was thinking how sorry she was that he had come instead of Lovel. She did not very much like Mr. Calladine, although she was kind to him out of goodness of heart, because she thought he seemed lonely; indeed, he never ceased talking to her about his loneliness.

He lived some way out of King’s Avon, right in the country; it must be, she thought, very lonely in his small farm-house in the evenings, so she sometimes persuaded her father to ask him to dinner.

On such occasions, not knowing how else to entertain her father and guest, she would play to them both such simple airs as she could command upon the piano, and sometimes would sing, accompanying herself, such little songs as she had picked up from Martha Sparrow or the country people. Mr. Calladine would come then and lean over the top of the piano, watching her in the candlelight in that intent way he had. She did not like this either; it was part of his elaborate and disturbing manner, but she had too much pity for him to ask him to desist. He seemed to like her singing; he always clapped his fine hands softly together and begged for more. On the whole, she did not much enjoy the evenings he spent at the Manor House; they were strained and difficult; or, at least, so she thought, although he appeared unaware of this, perfectly content, and in no hurry to take his leave. When he at last did so, Clare, whose country idea of hospitality involved accompanying her guest to the front door to see the last of him, was always slightly relieved when she watched him button up his greatcoat, climb into his gig, gather up the reins, and drive away into the night.

His horse paced now beside hers, and, riding with his beautifully light hands, he restrained its paces to suit her pony’s, all with that air of chivalrous deference which she found so subtly irritating. It conveyed that she was not able to take care of herself, but that he must do it for her, in a playful, tactful way, while allowing her apparent liberty, and she felt now that he had taken her away from the games as he might have taken a little girl. It made her inclined to start her pony off into a gallop, but she reproved herself, remembering that Mr. Calladine was very much older than she was,—he must be quite fifty,—and that it was kind and condescending of one so fine and cultured to desire her company. At the same time, she could not help contrasting his manner with Lovel’s; Lovel was often brusque and even rude to her; he lost his temper with her sometimes, and never apologised afterwards; it was all the more insolent in Lovel, for he was not the gentleman that Calladine was.

But she never felt with him the sense of strain that she felt with Calladine. It seemed to her as natural to meet Lovel upon the Downs as it would have been to meet a flock of sheep, and it never occurred to her either to mention or to conceal the fact to her father. Calladine, on the other hand,—she knew that when she got home, some obscure instinct would impel her to say, “Father, I rode with Mr. Calladine.”

They had allowed their horses to follow their own course, which in that open country was possible for miles, and Clare now perceived that they were being carried in the direction of a group of Grey Wethers. She did not at all want to go to these particular Grey Wethers with Calladine; but when she tried to head her pony away he immediately said, “Do let us ride on as far as the Grey Wethers, Miss Clare. We have never been there together, and I have a fancy to go there with you.” Clare gave way; it was not worth hurting his feelings, perhaps, for a whim. They rode on accordingly until they came to the strange derelict stones, where, at Calladine’s instigation, they got off their horses and sat down side by side on one of the stones. Clare wondered what the object of this pause could be; then, looking at Calladine, she saw that he was nervously twisting his fingers together, and appeared by the agitation of his manner to have something on his mind which he was trying to say. She was not much surprised; she had often seen him break out under the influence of some unexplained emotion, and waited quietly for what was to come. She was not much interested either; but if it did him good to speak, then, poor man, by all means let him speak his fill. Finally, she prompted him, almost with mischief, “You seem full of disturbing thoughts, Mr. Calladine?”

“I have something to say to you,” he began. “An explanation, more than a confession. What do you know of me, after all? Very little, beyond that I am a stranger settled in these parts, living a lonely life in a remote farm-house with one old servant and a groom. You know that I have no regular occupation; that I read the classics in a desultory way; dabble in archæology, and interest myself in the local customs and topography. You know that my leisure is unlimited, and my means ample. You appear to take me for granted, but then I never attributed to you an inquisitive mind. Have you ever wondered where I came from, and why? have you, above all, never despised me a little for my idleness of a dilettante while all around you you saw other men work for their livelihood?”

“Perhaps I have despised you a little for that,” she said frankly. “As for the rest, no, I don’t think I have wondered. I don’t see why you shouldn’t lead the life that pleases you best.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I should like to give you my explanation, if you will be patient enough to listen. I loved a woman once,” he said, in a low mournful voice, as though he were disinterring the memory of the dead from his very bowels, and while he spoke he kept his eyes averted from Clare and held his unseeing gaze upon the clump of beeches on the high skyline; “she was wholly a woman, yet every great quality of woman she lacked; I mean to say, that in every mood of capriciousness and grace she was as wholly and divinely a woman as any woman who ever enchanted man and coloured the loveliness of his days, but under the test of all graver issues her fluidity turned to falseness and she slipped between my fingers. I never held her; no, though I held her in my arms she eluded me; even while I thought to possess her, her soul slid away from me in some new protean shape, and danced and laughed and mocked my pursuit. Oh, she was a will-o’-the-wisp dancing across the marshes of my life. For my life was indeed a marsh in those days; I sank in quicksands; I struggled out on to a tussock; I trusted myself again on what I took to be firmer ground, I sank once more, I was sucked back at every step, I was tempted to let myself sink for ever from sheer weariness and despair. But she,—she was at home among the treacheries and miasmas where she had led me; that light, vain soul could skim where I could only sink. Do you wonder,” he said, letting his eyes travel slowly round the clean sweep of the Downs, bare of all softness, and bringing them at last to rest upon her face, “can you wonder that I came to repair my life in this old, hard country? You may believe me or not, as you choose, but I got that image of the marsh so firmly fixed in my mind that to this day I can’t bear to walk across a bit of swampy ground, or even along a muddy lane. You have water here, in your country, that’s true, and plenty of it; but it’s straightforward water: running rivers, and dew-ponds up here on the heights.”

“It’s true,” she said; “’tis an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are are bleached bones by now, dry and clean; there’s no decay about them. Why, I think that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”

“And mine too,” he replied, considering her; “and if anywhere the uneasy dead return from their sleep,—though I am not saying that I believe it to be so,—it should surely be hereabouts, for in the last century there were enough tales current of witches and wise men, and similar fascinations of the simple, to raise the longest-dead of old Britons from his grave. But I scarcely think the local folk are much troubled with such ideas. They come more readily to you and me, for I am a stranger, as strangers are reckoned in country districts, where the years only begin to count as they pass into centuries; the space of time for an acorn to grow into an oak; and even you, who have been here all your life long, are not native born. The spirit of this country does not come to either of us as a natural right. We have learnt it, and so must remain always more conscious of it than those to whom it is as native speech.”

She looked at him with the faintly puzzled expression of one who is out of his depth.

“Yes,” she murmured uneasily, looking down at the ground, and kicking a lump of chalk into powder with the toe of her shoe. She deeply resented this association of herself and him as strangers to the country; Lovel would not have spoken so!

“You and I,” he went on, for it caressed his soul merely to utter those words thus coupled, “tread at least as reverent intruders among the rings and barrows. We do not rest among them, as the shepherds do, simply for shelter against the winds and sleets. I came to them for healing; and you, even had you not been born with the capacity for awe,—as you were, oh, as indeed I know you were!—would have learnt it from that wise old man, your father. I have thought watching him at that delicate fingering of his shards, how he had dealt out to you the store of his scholar’s brain. To him, neat, tabulated, chronological, precise, but filtering through to yours in a strange jumble,—the painting of a bison on the wall of a cave, a man in thongs and bearskins sharpening a flint, slow glaciers crawling over England, kings buried on horseback in full panoply under a mound.”

“And did you find healing?” she inquired, catching on to the remark she could pursue with the least resentment.

“Oh, I found it, yes, I found it,” he replied, morosely, “if I may call that healing, which but exchanges one wound for another,—a poisonous wound, let us say, for a clean sharp one. Yes, I may call it healing, I suppose, for although my heart’s blood ebbs away through the fresh wound, there is no longer any gangrene in my system. I am purified; true, I may be dying, but at least I am purified. Yes, I found healing.”

“Dying?” she exclaimed.

“Oh, I spoke figuratively,” he replied with a toss of his hand; “don’t be afraid, Miss Clare, that in the course of your rambles you will come upon my body toppled down the side of a barrow,—though how should that distress you, indeed, beyond the ordinary shock of stumbling across a man recently dead? I am healthy enough of limb for a man of my age. Fifty, I am, you know,—old enough to be your father. It was kind of you to ask whether I found healing, and I am thankful to be able to tell you that I did find it; the winds of my first winter, which nearly blew my head off my shoulders and sent it bowling along these slopes, blew away my noxious thoughts. I told you I was led into miasmas; well, I brought them up here, clinging about me like a cloud, and the wind blew them away.”

“Yet you spoke of that woman just now with a good tang of bitterness,” she said shrewdly.

“Ah, well, I grudge the wasted years,” he returned, as though desirous of dismissing it thus lightly. “You may take my word for it, Miss Clare, that I have never bared that story to a soul except yourself; and probably should never have bared it to you but for some foolish, trivial reason I was anxious that you should hear it. Now that you have heard it you shall not be troubled with it again, I promise you. It is, moreover, an old story now; a score of years old, I should say, though I have forgotten the dates, and in the ordinary way of things I never think of it now. But people hereabouts have gossiped about me, I know, as was only natural, and lest any story should come to your ears, I prefer you to know the true one. You know it now; you know I am neither a prisoner escaped, nor a deserter from the army, nor a hunter of buried gold, nor any of the things which I have no doubt the village has credited me with, but simply a man once disappointed in love, as the saying goes, though Heaven knows whether those who coined that saying knew what they were talking about, or to what tragedy they were putting a name.”

“All that’s said for my benefit,” said Clare sturdily; “you do think on it now, and you haven’t forgotten the date; though maybe you will cease to think on it, since you’ve spoken it out; and it’s no longer simmering in your heart.”

He was gratified that she should so readily have caught that inflection in the voice which was meant to convey courage under sorrow, rather than forgetfulness after the passing of years.

“And should trouble come upon you,” he said very earnestly, “would you place your confidence in me? I ask it as a favour,—as a slight return. Whatsoever a duty a man might perform for you, will you call upon me and no other? You cannot know how happy your promise would make me. You are youth incarnate amongst these ancient hills.” He dared not say more, but continued to gaze at her with urgent and beseeching eyes.

“Why, I think I can promise that,” she said slowly, though puzzled again and perplexed by his earnestness. “I think one could place confidence in you, although you are so strange and unaccountable both in your ways and talk. I think you would be as vehement in your friendship as you seem to be in your thoughts. I think you would grieve very much,” she continued, examining him, “if you were to fail in carrying out a mission for a friend.”

“For you,” he interjected. “My service is not so freely placed at everybody’s disposal. You will have no rival claimant on my obedience.”

“Well, I will give you my promise,” she said, “though I would have you understand, Mr. Calladine,” she added with a childish importance, “that I am not in the least likely to make any call upon you. I am very well able to take care of myself, nor is any trouble, as you say, likely to come upon me.”

“Hush, don’t boast,” he cried, looking fearfully round, and half in mocking he added, “Who knows what sardonic spirits may be listening to your boasting? Anyway, you have given me your promise, and I should like you to seal it. Give me your hand,—not so reluctantly,”—for he had felt it struggle faintly like a caught bird,—“we are friends, you know,—and for one who professes to have confidence in me, I declare you give proof of having very little,—now lay your hand upon this stone, and I will put mine over it,—now repeat this vow after me....”

“No, no,” she said, frightened, and trying to draw her hand away; “it’s profane; that may be a sacrificial stone for all we know....”

“And so resent the invocation of a Christian God?” he completed for her with a laugh, but the extreme agitation of his manner underneath his laughter alarmed her. “Or is it of me, and not really of the stone, that you are afraid? Surely you cannot think that your own Grey Wethers would harm you? So it must be of me,—a bad beginning to your confidence! Why, before very long you will be giving the same promise to another man lest you should require defence against myself.”

“I was never afraid of any one yet,” she said, flaming up, “Mr. Calladine, and as a proof of it there is my hand; now do what you like with it. I think that you are very bitter and wild, but I am sure that you would not make the worse ally for that. And no woman would say less than that you were wild and bitter, if she had heard you talk the way I have often heard you talk; but that does not mean that I am afraid of you, for I am not, nor of any one in this world,” she repeated, challenging him to contradict her.

“No, daughter of the Downs,” he said with much gravity, still holding her hand in his own.

She stamped her foot.

“You laugh at me, Mr. Calladine; well, if you treat me as a child, why exact such promises from me as the one you have just asked for? But I am not a child; I am nineteen,” she said.

“My dear,—my dear young lady,” he said, amending the endearment into that conventional phrase, “it is only because you are, or soon will be, so very much of a woman that I besought your promise. Come, solemnize it without any further delay; swear, not by the Christian God, but by the Grey Wethers themselves, by their age, and their mystery. You will have the advantage of me if you can devise an oath more potent or more occult.”

He laid her hand, which he had not relinquished, palm downward upon the stone. The stone was cold to her touch, but Calladine’s hand pressed over her own was by contrast dry and burning. She swore as he had commanded her to do, half in derision of his fancifulness, half still in the lurking alarm she was too proud to betray. He appeared to be satisfied, and released her, though not without reluctance at letting her hand go, and for a moment he wished he had never taken possession of it, when he noted the alacrity with which she took it back, and the surreptitious rub she gave it on the side of her riding-coat. “So that is how she feels about my touch!” he said to himself, but only a greater gentleness stole into his manner as he thanked her for her compliance and held her stirrup for her to mount her pony. She sat easily, boyishly, in her saddle, looking down on him, and a certain melancholy, that was not without its solicitude on her part, and its wistfulness on his, overcame them both in reaction to the overcharged scene which had taken place between them.

“I don’t want you to be unhappy,—indeed I don’t,” she said, “Mr. Calladine; and please do not think it impertinence on my part to assume that you are. I know of course that I am too young to pry into your affairs; I haven’t the wisdom necessary; in fact I haven’t any qualification except sympathy, and I do ask you to believe that I have that. We have been friends for such a long time,” she said, looking down at him as though she felt a passing though true impulse to come closer to the bitterness of his spirit.

His hand resting on her pony’s neck, he looked up with a rueful gratitude, by no means displeased that she should use the words “wild” and “bitter” about him, or treat his sorrows with so much veneration. He had not the heart to break her illusion of her own kindness with scornful words, but gave her a smile, which cost him a greater effort than he would have cared to acknowledge, and which he hoped would be adequate to reassure her. She smiled back at him, brightly; and with a touch of the heel put her pony into motion. He watched her ride away, along the ridge of Down, her slight figure swaying easily to the pony’s walk; and presently he saw her break into a canter, and heard the beat of the pony’s hoofs on the hard turf, until she was carried out of sight and hearing over the curve of the hill.

It was so characteristic of Nicholas Lovel to keep away from the Scouring! Clare thought how the rest of the villagers must dislike him for his detachment. Not that he cared what the villagers said, beyond wishing that they would leave him and his affairs alone as far as possible,—a vain hope. Clare knew quite well that she could never have inveigled him into making friends with her but for their very early friendship when she was a child and he little more than a boy, when, in fact, he could not fear a rebuff from her, and, meeting her on the Downs, he had told her how to ride her pony, how to read the signs of the weather, and a dozen scraps of country craft which she had assimilated with great respect for his wisdom. They had drifted into a curious, desultory intimacy. Because they knew each other only in this detached way,—etherialised, as it were; stripped of the ordinary routine of friendship;—because she knew nothing of his life, and he nothing of hers; each knowing only the other’s Down-life; each admitted only into the other’s solitude, a part of that solitude rather than an intrusion; because they were really strangers to one another,—there existed between them a complete ease and understanding. All formalities were absent; they never thought of greeting one another when they met; they never thought of talking except when they could continue the current of their thoughts aloud. When they sighted one another upon the Downs, they simply converged until their horses fell into pace side by side. Often their first remark, spoken after long preliminary silence, was without context or explanation, like a bubble rising to the surface from what had been going on within their minds beneath. To be together was like being alone. Clare never talked to Lovel about her father, or about the Manor House; Lovel never talked to her about his difficulties, or about his pursuits, legitimate or illegitimate. At times their talk was purely practical, when he would show her how to cast a fly, or how to throw a sheep for shearing, or how to twist a rough basket out of osiers; at other times it was all theoretical, and there was no puzzle, discontent, or aspiration they would not touch on or thrash out. Quite abruptly, sometimes, he would break off and leave her. She never thought of asking him, next time, why he had done so, any more than she would have thought of asking the breeze why it had dropped. There were weeks together in which she never saw him at all; he came and went in her life like the rover that he was. When they passed each other in the village, they gave no sign of recognition; they had never alluded to this, yet each knew that the other was amused by the tacit convention. She knew, of course, where he lived, though the site, appearance, and actuality of his dwelling seemed to her singularly unimportant. Half way down the village street stood a house, small, but very massively built of grey stones, quarried, in point of fact, barbarously from the monoliths that had been the constant resource of the local builders. The front door, when it stood open on to the street, showed to passers-by a long dark passage, like a tunnel, at the further end of which opened suddenly the light and glow of the square walled garden, with its brilliant green turf, its one dark cedar, and its patches of sunlit flowers. The front door was surmounted by a porch, resting on two round columns; along the architrave of this porch was painted in neat black lettering the name: Nicholas Lovel. It might have seemed curious to a stranger that no further indication should follow on to this superscription; there was nothing to inform the ignorant whether Nicholas Lovel was by trade a farrier, a joiner, a shoesmith, a tailor, or even the keeper of an inn; whether one might enter by the open door, and, taking one’s seat at a table within, rap against a glass and call loudly for the landlord. But strangers were few and far between, and among the habitual population of the village the circumstances of the Lovels had been threshed out so often that you might have imagined the topic would fall upon wearied ears. There were few trades to which young Lovel could not turn his hand. He could plough a field,—and in straight furrows, too,—he could build a rick, and thatch it when it was built, he could repair a waggon or repaint a gig, he could get the better of a horse-coper at his own job, or of a pedlar at his own chaffering, he could cure a sick ewe and bring back to life a weakling lamb, he could cane a chair and twist up a basket of osiers in less time than it takes to tell, he could snare a rabbit and slip under the very nose of the keepers, he could drink most men under the table and walk most men off their legs, and amongst the girls of the village there was not one who at one time or another had not set her cap at young Lovel, and got from him in return neither a civil nor an uncivil word. Yet for all these, and other, accomplishments, there was no one trade which he regularly practised. Any man might call him in for a stray job, whether as a farm-hand, a carpenter, or a shepherd, and many were the bribes which had been offered to induce him to accept regular employment: he declined them all. Gipsy Lovel, they called him in the village; whether on account of his name, his looks, or his vagrant practising, was not defined, probably all three. In appearance he was dark and lean; his Roman features bronzed to a polish, so tightly his skin seemed stretched over his bones; and with the brown corduroy breeches of an ordinary yeoman he usually wore a dark red shirt, which accentuated his already outlandish appearance. In speech he was reserved and sardonic, as might be expected by those who knew,—at least by report,—the circumstances of his life at home. Except by report, none could know them, for no one was ever invited to cross that most inhospitable of thresholds.

And further, there was Nicholas Lovel’s younger brother Olver, by the kind-hearted given occasional employment on odd jobs of carpentering, house-painting, and the like, for he was skilful enough as a workman, and could be trusted to carry out his directions with the fidelity of that kind of brain commonly known as “simple.” He might have passed as a good-looking youth, with tight, chestnut curls and eyes of a curiously pale blue, rimmed with black round the iris, but for the oblique and cunning expression that was apt to cross his face like a cloud drifting across the moon, and the slight hint of deformity that clung about him,—a deformity so indefinite, that it was impossible to say precisely where it lay, whether in his neck being slightly sunk into his shoulders, or in his head being slightly too large for his body, or in his hands being slightly too well-formed, too sensitive for the hands of a workman, or in his tread being slightly too catlike for one of his build and bulk. He had in the village the reputation of slyness, a sudden shrewdness, that was disquieting and therefore repulsive in one whom mere simplicity would have entitled to the charity of all men. From this reputation of cunning the legend had grown in the village, as such things grow always in that fertile virgin soil of ignorance, the legend had grown into a variety of sinister shapes, all ornamented with copious and more or less picturesque detail: Olver Lovel’s grandmother had been burned for a witch; his mother, who was kept in such seclusion now by the severity of Nicholas, was a witch also; Olver himself practised wizardry; he went out of his mind when the moon was full; he was mortally feared by all animals,—this indeed was true, and a matter of common knowledge;—he controlled his evil impulses only through fear of his brother, but if his brother were to be taken away, then God help them all! These were only a few of the things that were openly uttered about Olver Lovel. Nicholas himself was not above suspicion. He had the same eyes as his brother, of the palest blue with those curious black rims, and the effect in his dark face, with his black hair, was certainly very strange. But people did not fear Nicholas as they feared Olver. Nicholas was a straight-forward man, reserved and uncompromising because his pride had so much to suffer, and no doubt his endurance too, living as he did between his two unusual relations; they had, on the whole, a good deal of sympathy and respect for Nicholas. It was no life, they said, for a young man. But who could help him? He would let no one near him, either literally or figuratively; pride was the hardest defence to deal with. A harsh young man; but he had much to put up with. And if he was harsh towards himself and forbidding towards other men, let them at least do him the justice to say that towards dumb beasts he had the gentleness of a woman for a child; ay, and the instinct too: the quick kind touch, and the certain remedy.

The villagers thought him lonely,—even lonelier than he actually was, for they knew nothing of the friendship between him and Miss Warrener. They knew, certainly, that he sometimes went fishing with her down to the Kennet, but they thought nothing of that, for any young lady might be expected to take a man to carry her rod and landing-net, to fix her bait, and to deal with her catch. It wasn’t likely that even Miss Warrener would care to dabble in a mess of worms, or to get her fingers covered with scales, slime, and cold blood. No, nor to have the troublesome job of killing a pike, who of all the animal creation surely clung the most tenaciously to life. What they did not know of was the Down-life shared by Clare and Lovel; for on those splendid, solitary heights they could meet and meet again, unobserved by any save the sheep, the larks, and the circling hawks, indifferent to the pacing side by side of the two horses over the bitten turf. Various were the avocations which took Lovel to the Downs, and if occasion required he would call on Clare to lend him a hand, ordering her about, and she, meekly, followed his directions as an apprentice. She had even been in his shepherd’s-hut with him all day during the lambing season, when a blizzard swept across the hills, and he had his hands so full with his poor ewes that must be tended and sheltered that he had no time left for niceties to spare Clare’s feelings. With set teeth she had helped him that day, and had counted his brief comment at the end as a well-earned reward. And she had ridden away in the evening with her head held down against the driven sleet, and her pony’s mane blown right across his neck with little lumps of ice in the rough hair, and behind her the yellow light that shown in the window of Lovel’s hut had grown smaller and more distant, and she had known that during the whole of the night and of many days and nights to follow he would keep the vigil attendant upon his trade, and would lay on the straw beside his little paraffin lamp the poor weak new-comers into so unpropitious a world.

In all seasons and weathers she had known the Downs with him, and like sailors at sea they had accepted the bad with the good, without thought of avoidance. Like all English country people, they disliked extremes of heat as well as extremes of cold; a high summer’s day, when the heat winked along the ridge of the hills, held for them none of that poetic quality it holds for the idle. Their point of view was sober and practical; if feed grew short, they hoped for rain; if the corn in the lowlands were flattened by rain, they hoped for fine weather; it was simple. If the day were a holiday,—that is to say, if Lovel had taken no job,—then they were as content as any other idlers to lie soaked in sun upon the most exposed flank of upland they could find. They would pull the long grass to nibble it down to the juice at the end, or Lovel with a blade of grass drawn taut between his thumbs would shrill the empty air with strange whistlings, or they would tease the ants and small insects by walling them in with a circle of miniature chalk cliffs. Their laughter spread with the song of the larks as fresh and clear as water, and the great spaces lay all around them with the cloud-shadows chasing one another down and over the slopes, and creating in their overhead passage the perpetual variety of mood and colour of the Down-country.

Down-country, so temperamental; in halcyon days bright and blithe; candid in its well-being, wholesome in its wind-cleaned delight; yet keeping in the valleys and sweeping folds the deeper shadows which gave it tone like the soberness of some latent melancholy. Upon the heights it would receive the sun, and glitter and rejoice like a woman in love, but the cup of the valleys was deep with a greater richness, with remembrance, and foreboding. So, although simple and large in outline, the country,—to Clare and Lovel personal, not inanimate,—was not simple with a shallow or trivial simplicity; not the simplicity of ignorance or emotional poverty; but with a wisdom that still had the courage to be gay,—the reckless gaiety of the profoundly tragic. No monotony was possible over that landscape of sunburnt tan, of blue distances, and stains of a lowering purple. No monotony, no sentimentality; the moods all visible at once over the range of country, all definite and certain of their intention, whether the naked sunburnt heights, or the brooding plunge of shadow.

Only in winter that ever-present reminder of tragedy fulfilled itself. In summer and in autumn it robed itself in peacock colours, blue and bronze, a sorrow as sumptuous as the sorrow of a queen. But in the winter the splendour was gone, only an austerity like stone remained; grey disillusioned Downs, shaven by the winds, shelterless, inconsolable. Then came the snow; and up here, where no trees but the beech-clumps broke the white, where no hedges strove with their little maudlin pretence of security to lessen the rigour of the country towards the softness of man, here no flinching availed; grief was naked as joy had been naked, to be met and fought with, until that despondency should pass and the heights leap out once more into the sun of spring, with only the reverberations of the storm rolling still about the valleys.

Lovel, who resembled the Downs themselves both in his exuberance of spirit with the threat ever-lurking, and in his despair, which was so extravagant and so profound when it overcame him that it seemed he could never again lift himself out of the slough,—Lovel who for all his thought and his reading had never looked into himself or named what he would have found there,—Lovel who could no more control his moods than the Downs could forbid the sun to burnish their gold-brown slopes or the blizzard to rack them with a hell-ride of gale and sleet,—Lovel came upon Clare standing in the sun knee-deep in a dew-pond on one of the highest ridges of the Downs.

Her patient pony, well-accustomed, strayed and browsed near at hand; he snuffed the dry thymy turf; he plucked with disdain at a tuft of grass fit only for sheep-pasture. This was not horse-pasture, this bare beggarly brown turf up here in the glitter of the sun, beneath the exposed and unsheltered windiness of the sky. Open country, open country; no higher peaks to climb; miles of open rolling country on every side. The clean and airy liberty of open country under a blue-and-white heaven. Clare stood in the circle of the dew-pond holding her skirts picked up above her knees. She was laughing; she had seen first the ears of Lovel’s horse prick up over the rim of the hill, then she had seen Lovel himself, not looking to find her, then the shoulders of his horse, breasting the sharp climb, then the complete slim silhouette of horse and rider and two dogs at heel. And she had hailed him; a shout of laughter mingled in with his name; she had hailed him. At the top he had drawn rein, shading his eyes against the sun, and looking down he had seen her, standing down in the bowl of the dew-pond. He had caught her in the act of hesitation, afraid lest she should venture out of her depth. Capless, she stood in the dew-pond, holding up her skirts, and her white legs disappeared just below the knee into the water. She laughed up at him, holding her head a little on one side in the way he knew well, which gave her a fleeting and elusive appearance, so that her mouth and eyes seemed to slant upwards with a fugitive and sylvan air, which materialised but rarely,—or when, as now, he caught her at an angle,—but which always hovered there, not always willing to be revealed, but ready to glance out at the right summons, to whomsoever should hold the shibboleth to produce it.

He drew rein, looking down at her, and her pony whinnied a recognition, and strayed loose to join Lovel’s horse.

“Not deep!” he called to her.

She ventured a few steps further.

“You have seen it empty,” he rallied her.

“Do you know the secret?” she asked, stopping. The water, disturbed by her advance, rippled round her knees.

“Very few know it,” he replied cryptically.

“Ah, but you, Lovel, you know all those secrets. How do they puddle the clay? How, to hold the water? I am sure you know it, Lovel! Are you a dowser, too? they say so, in the village. They say you can pace over the country until the hazel-twigs jump in your hand. Is it true?”

“They say a lot of things in the village,” he replied laughing.

“Does it matter to you what they say?”

“Not when I’m up here,” he replied, tossing his head, and his horse tossed his head too, and the bridle jingled.

“Well, but tell me the secret of how they make the dew-ponds,” she persisted, kicking with her foot into the water.

“The secret would soon be a secret no longer,” he answered, putting her off. “And I never said I knew it.”

“Ah, but you do,” she said; and thought that those who knew the secret of the dew-ponds got their knowledge in a straight line of tradition from the earliest inhabitants of those regions. “Oh, I do envy you, Lovel,” she said, forgetting that she stood in water and stamping with her foot so that it splashed up round her, “I do envy you all the queer things you have got behind you,—they all seem to run into your fingers with your blood.”

He laughed again,—he seemed to be in a good humour to-day, and well he might be, with the bright grass glistening round his horse’s feet, and over his head the bright blue-and-white spaces where the kestrels hovered like little specks, and the green pattern of the fields far, far below. He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she were a nymph,—a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. The olive and the myrtle were alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat; the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both represented their own particular aspect of romance, each to the other. “Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.

It was some days after this that Clare received from Calladine an invitation to visit him at Starvecrow. Although she was immediately aware that she would not reply with a refusal, she felt a shiver of chill as though she had been beckoned in from the warm sunshine to a cold and cavernous place. The impression was alarmingly vivid both in generality and detail. She had met the groom coming up the short carriage-drive of the Manor House, and after reading Calladine’s note looked up at the gaunt, raw-boned animal that the groom was riding, at its ugly quarters, and long melancholy head; she looked into the basket in which Calladine had sent her an offering, and saw the trout lying on their bed of long grasses, neatly ranged, pointed nose alternating with forked tail. The gift seemed to her gruesome and faintly absurd; trout, cold, plump, and dead. Yet on the evenings when she had gone fishing with Lovel under the willows, the trout as they laid them in the long lush grass had seemed gleaming and iridescent, cool from the water, and together they had examined the scales on the meshes of the landing-net. Lovel had lifted up their gills with his fingers, and had compared them to the under-side of a mushroom. But these trout of Calladine’s were merely dead; their eyes protruded; their gills were closed. She glanced up at the groom, and fancied that a despondency clung about him as about his horse, an absence of joy; and then she thought that this gloom came upon Calladine’s possessions because he revelled in having it so; the very name of his house, Starvecrow!—had he taken the house for the sake of its name! had he bought this horse because of its starting bones and dejected droop? engaged the groom for his sallow, unshaven appearance and lank hair? dismal envoys that he might send in reminder from Starvecrow out into a cheerful world?

She turned slowly towards the house, carrying the basket of trout on her arm. She had sent back a message of thanks to Calladine with an intimation that she would visit him on the following day, and already the prospect of this visit was hanging over her, damp and chill. Listlessly, when the afternoon arrived she put on her muslin frock and her big straw bonnet, listening meanwhile for the sound of wheels on the gravel; she saw her own reflection in her mirror, saw herself cool and outwardly serene, but the picture gave her little pleasure. This with Calladine was one of the few appointments she had ever made in her free life, and it irked her curiously. From the first moment of her waking in the morning she had felt tied. Like a hobbled colt she wanted to kick herself free. That her afternoon should be restricted, ordained in advance,—in the midst of her resentment she had laughed at her childishness, had been ashamed of her egoism. What would become of her were she suddenly to find herself bound for life? She had been content to look after her father’s innocent wants; she had not shown herself selfish towards him; she could absolve herself from that charge; but then, he had not encroached on her comings and goings; she had given freely from love what she might have refused from duty. This appointment with Calladine was a duty; now she was tied; she could not take her pony or her fishing-rod this afternoon if the whim seized her. No, she must wait obediently for the arrival of Calladine’s gig; she must climb into it and sit meekly beside the sallow groom while he drove her to Starvecrow. Arrived there, Calladine would be waiting for her, and his pleasure would be her irritation. The appointment which had been a restraint to her would have been only a delight to him. A sulky child, she stared out of the window for the approach of the gig. She heard it now; the scrunch of the wheels, the clop-clop of the horse’s trot, and now it came into sight, the familiar high, ramshackle affair, gaunt horse and all, clanking up the carriage-drive and stopping in its abrupt, dislocated way in front of the door. Clare went down. Martha Sparrow was in the hall; she crooned over Clare in her lilac-coloured gown. “A flower come to life, my pretty child....” Mr. Warrener came out of his study; he saw Clare standing in the shadowy hall with Martha fingering round at her flounces; he pushed his spectacles on to his forehead. “Why, Clare, where are you going?” “To Mr. Calladine, father, I told you.” “Ah, to be sure, to be sure; well, he has all the luck; you’re a pretty thing to see.” She kissed him, laughed, sprang up into the gig, it started off clumsily, swaying from side to side, and the Manor House was lost to sight behind the trees.

The gaunt horse spanked along the lanes; Clare did not talk to the groom, who drove with a serious concentration which promised no unbending. She wondered whether all the servants with whom Calladine surrounded himself were as unprepossessing. She was often more than a little impatient with Calladine for his deliberate mournfulness; but, more especially since he had told her in so strange a manner the history of his life’s passion, she had tried to school herself into a reverent sympathy. She felt that she was very young and consequently ignorant, and that he was old, sad, experienced, and entitled to her respect. Instinctively she folded her hands in her lap, and sat demure. But in a moment she was again laughing at herself, and, although she tried to reprove herself for the levity, at him. The vexation of the appointment was lifting from her; her spirits rose, now that she was out in the lanes and could watch the caterpillars hanging from the oaks; she would not be affected by Calladine’s gloom, by his soberness, his measured smiles. Of what use could she be to him if she allowed herself to become as repressed in his presence as he was himself? Turning to the groom, she began to talk to him, persevering until she got a response, and even some growls of information about Mr. Calladine’s stable; as Clare uncovered her own knowledge, the man became less grudging, and presently as their argument developed along lines of expert interest he was impelled to say that Miss Warrener evidently knew a horse when she saw one. Clare laughed merrily, and valued the compliment extremely. What she knew, she replied, she had learnt from experience and from Gipsy Lovel,—for she was glad of an opportunity of pronouncing his name. Ah, that was a chap for a horse, he said; or indeed for anything that went on four legs; that was the chap to go to a horse-fair with; Miss Warrener would never be cheated if she had Gipsy Lovel to give her advice. He seemed to have a feeling about horse-flesh; no need to pull their mouths open or run his hand over their fetlocks. He, the groom, wondered that Lovel didn’t set up as a horse-dealer himself. He would guarantee that Lovel could take in most men in the county; yes, and the whole West of England, for the matter of that. Clare triumphed in his sudden loquacity. Even the gaunt horse seemed to be sharpening its pace,—though possibly that might be only because they were drawing nearer to Starvecrow. The groom laid the whip across its withers, and it broke into a sort of bundling half-canter which rocked the gig up and down and obliged Clare to cling on to her big hat; she was amused, because she thought that this was the effect of Lovel. They had come now to a particularly deserted tract of country, along the foot of the Downs; and, after climbing the slope a little way, they saw a group of buildings upon an eminence, sheltered,—if shelter it might be called,—by a thicket of wind-blown thorn upon the easterly side. Other trees there were none, nor any other houses within sight, nothing but the tan rolling of the Downs and the road that climbed the hill and was lost to sight over the other side. She descried Calladine there at his gate, waiting for her, exactly as she had expected to find him. “I hesitated between coming to fetch you myself, and remaining here to welcome you when you arrived,” he said, as he came forward to help her out of the gig.

She knew at once how pleased he was to see her. There was no affectation about his pleasure. It was a tremendous event for him to receive her at his house, and he conducted her with infinite solicitude, and a half-hesitation which, she knew, was intended to give her the opportunity of noticing and commenting upon every detail. By a curious process now all the naïveté of her childishness and her upbringing dropped from her, and she became as delicately gracious as any skilful woman; she remained a little aloof from him, receiving his deference as though it were her due, rewarding him in exchange with her friendliness and her interest, smiling at his eagerness with an amused and sympathetic smile, placing here and there the word of approval he most desired, and bestowing upon his possessions the appreciation or the gentle derision which for ever after would advance them in his eyes. He had never before seen her in this mood. He was bewildered and charmed. He had known her delightful and inconsequent, wayward and perplexing; he had seen her as a child, he had thought of her as a spirit, he had never yet seen her as a woman. Her very gestures, he thought, were different; quieter, more secure; and yet she had not lost that fugitive air of hers, that shy grace; the combination enchanted him. He followed her into the house; he was sure, now, that Starvecrow was pleasing her; he need not have been so apprehensive. To rest his eyes upon her in his little hall, so cool in her lilac frock, filled him with the deepest and most disturbing joy. It was he, now, who grew tremulous and at a loss, while she remained so exquisitely self-possessed. Seeing that he scarcely knew how best to carry on his hospitality,—for he seemed incapable of anything but of gazing at her,—it was she who led the way into the inner room, and touched his books and looked at the pictures on his walls, and at the view out of his window. Had he but known it, she was thinking Starvecrow worthy of its name, a desolate place, in a situation without the grandeur to compensate for its austerity, and without the comfort to excuse its meanness.

“You should plant some cottage roses against your house,” she said, “and some bushes of Old Man’s Beard.”

“It shall be done,” he replied, without taking his eyes off her.

She sat down in his worn old leather chair, took off her hat, and hung it on the chair-knob. She seemed to him to light the room by her presence, the room which was dingy if not actually poor, and which had never before had in it anything so delicate and fresh as Clare with her muslins and her small yellow head leaning against the chair-back. But he was afraid almost of speaking to her, lest he should scare her away, so like was she to some small shy animal which by wary gentleness he should have enticed into his home. “You are wearing all the colours of the dawn,” he said, “lavender and primrose,” and ceased because he dared not go on to the blue of her eyes, that he thought like the blue of the early sky.

She smiled at him. “You have made no garden here, in all your twenty years,” she said. “You should build a wall round a square enclosure, and fill the beds between your paths. The wall would protect you against the wind and you should grow lupin and iris and tulips, honesty, sweet sultan, and snapdragons, and a path down the centre between cottage lilies and China roses.”

She was speaking against her own convictions; she infinitely preferred her Downs uncultivated; but her instinct, strangely indulgent towards Calladine, told her what would most comfort him.

“I have no heart to do such things,” he replied, “but since you order it I will set about it immediately.”

“Mr. Calladine,” she said, leaning forward, “when you answer me so gravely, are you indeed serious, or are you laughing at me in your sleeve?”

“Serious! you can have no idea how serious,” he exclaimed, tempted to speak out his whole heart, as he had never before been tempted, by the sight of her earnest eyes; and he got up, and walked about the room. “Don’t you know, that your caprice would be my only interest? my only law? You are the only person,” he said, recollecting himself, “that has taken an interest in my poor concerns,—cared whether I steeped myself in sorrow or dragged myself out into the wholesomeness of a new life.” (“Ah,” cried Clare’s conscience within her, “how little I have cared!”) “But for you,” he went on, “I should have continued in my dejection; only your encouragement, lately, has revived me, and I have realised that I was not the old and finished man I had resigned myself to be. If you order me a garden, I will turn gardener at fifty,—if you, that is, will be my critic and my adviser, if you will command me to do this and do that.”

She saw, then, how easily swayed he was, and how an idea could take possession of his mind, for beyond an occasional kindness she could not be said to have interested herself at all in his concerns or to have encouraged him to forsake the gloomy ways of retrospect or his solitary habits of life. Still she was very glad that his imagination should be able to thrive on such meagre nourishment; it did her no harm, and she was glad if it might do him good.

“You have surely thought for long enough about the past,” she said idly.

Again he seized upon her words, and she reflected with some amusement that she had never imagined any one so susceptible to suggestion.

“I will act on what you say,” he exclaimed. He went across to his writing table and took from his drawer an etching of a woman, slightly tinted, with coarse curly hair, cruel eyes, and a large beautiful mouth. Calladine tore it into fragments; he flung the pieces on the ground and stamped on them. “I never had the courage to do that before,” he said, staring at Clare and breathing heavily; he looked really frightened at what he had done, and she knew that he wanted her to reassure him. For her part she wanted to laugh, but knew that she must not. “You should have done it years ago,” she said sensibly, “instead of living in the house with that locked into your drawer.”

“I used to take it out in the evening and pore over it until it nearly came alive,” whispered Calladine. He kicked the fragments with his toe. “You are my angel,—my guardian,” he said, turning passionately to Clare.

She saw that the contradictory being was greatly shaken by what he had done. “He will regret it, and be glad,—be glad, and then regret again,” she thought shrewdly to herself. She wondered whether she had done wisely in not stopping his hand: would he be freed henceforth, or would he be haunted? “Now burn those pieces,” she said with authority, “or I shall think of you trying to piece them together again, when you sit alone here in the evenings.” The idea was half-frightening to her, and half-absurd. “Burn them,” she repeated, pointing to the grate.

There was no fire, but Calladine obediently gathered up the fragments and burnt each one separately, holding its corner to a lighted match. Clare watched him, thinking how familiar must once have been to him those shredded features, how he must have kissed that beautiful mouth and imagined that he sought for truth in those narrow eyes which only returned him mockery. He knelt beside the grate, burning carefully, and crumbling the charred paper between his fingers, piece by piece. She felt sorry for him suddenly.

“You must not be lonely without your picture,” she said with great gentleness.

“I hated it,” said Calladine; “let it go; you have delivered me. You saw her, didn’t you, before I burnt her? you saw her exactly as she was: I was no match for her.” Clare thought that he could probably say this without exaggeration, and that, had she herself met the other woman, few words would have been necessary between them for the understanding of Calladine. How deep was the confederacy of sex! she had never thought of it before; she smiled at Calladine with a detached pity. “I have no longer any past,” he went on, “only the present, hourly more lovely. Shall we go out for a little and leave the dust of the past to settle in this room?”

Clare was glad to go out, for the room was making upon her a sad and cold impression, but she found little comfort in the exterior of the house, ungarnished as it well could be. She began to talk to Calladine again about the garden he must make, for not only was she really distressed for his own sake by the bleakness of his dwelling, but annoyed, almost, in a feminine way, by the man’s incompetence to deal with his own existence, and not unflattered, either, by his submission to her directions and the attentiveness with which he received every word that came from her lips. She saw that he clung to her as his salvation; she became more autocratic, with a pretty tyranny. She would transform his patch of desert into an oasis; she, over at King’s Avon would think of this Starvecrow as blooming into gaiety and colour by her orders. Calladine watched her, and she knew that he watched. But she never allowed him to speak of herself, keeping him rigorously to the business of his new garden; her laughter rang out, and she rallied him, awaking almost against his will the rare smile on his melancholy lips. At moments he thought, as he followed her about, that he must stretch out his hands and cry to her “Clare! Clare!” No one ever treated him as Clare treated him; other people always took him at the valuation he set upon himself, composed their faces to a becoming sobriety as soon as they perceived his own, and quitted his grave company with relief. He chose to construe their acquiescence into a grim sort of flattery. But Clare was privileged; Clare might assume whatever mood she would; he would endeavour to follow her, perhaps clumsily, for he had lost,—or liked to think that he had lost,—the habit of lightheartedness; still, she should teach it to him again and he would renew his youth.

He had come to the age when the sense of passing days induced a panic. Clare had youth, Clare had a reserve of youth on which he could draw without impoverishing her; he felt that she gave him life as surely as if he drank it at her breast.

She seemed, as she stood in the centre of the square she had designated as his future garden, to be all the flowers which should blow there presently at her command. He said this to her, in that courtly artificial manner he had of saying such things, with so much froth of emotion underneath. It was the first personal remark he had made to her since they had come out of the house, and it gave him relief. But she only laughed again, and this time he could have shaken her with rough hands for her laughter, and for her holding off the words which would stifle him if they remained unspoken. “Clare,” he said violently.

She glanced at him with that new self-possession; she was maddening him, though not with the purpose he would have attributed to any other woman. How she eluded him! how she would perpetually elude him! and so hold him forever. He knew himself to be fastidious enough to esteem only that which he had lost, or could never hope to seize. “Clare,” he repeated, this time with a genuine despair.

They went back into the house, where tea had been made ready; she noted his preparations, the honey, the girdle-cakes, the fruit and cream. He deprecated them, “A bachelor’s house....” “What could be better?” she replied; and had slipped from him once more. She ate heartily, borrowing a handkerchief to wipe the cream from her lips, unaccountably a child again, and a new bewilderment to him. He now felt that what he might have said to the woman of whom he had had a glimpse, he could not say to the child who trusted herself in his house, and he thought with baffled anger, how ably she managed her alternative of weapons. A spoonful of honey in one hand, and a cake in the other, she leaned forward, talking to him, he more helpless than ever, and she more completely in control. He dared not think of his house when her presence should have gone out of it; he wondered whether he would suffer least pain by returning to his sitting-room directly the gig had driven away, by going for a walk on the Downs and returning only after dusk, or by driving her himself back to the Manor House. The idea of her going at all was intolerable; perhaps he had been unwise to ask her to come; perhaps he had only been at his favourite trick of turning the knife in the wound. But she was speaking, she was saying, “I shall come again to see whether you have prepared our garden against the autumn.”

By her movement he saw that she was about to take her leave; he leapt out of his own chair and stood over her, saying wildly, “Don’t go, Clare, don’t; how can I bear your going? don’t leave me again, stay with me a little longer, I can’t face the loneliness without you,” and a stream of incoherent ejaculations flooded from his lips, while his hands fumbled towards her, yet with a remnant of soberness he strove to restrain them. Clare looked at him calmly, with wondering eyes. “But I must go home if my father is not to be kept waiting for his dinner,” she said.

Calladine stepped back instantly and released her. “I am sorry,” he said. “The loneliness, perhaps, gets a little on my nerves.” He passed his hand across his eyes. “You are the first visitor I have welcomed here for many years, and your presence threw me off my balance.” He tried to speak lightly. “Come, I will take you to the gig,” but still he lingered, looking to see whether she had left anything behind, in a last attempt to delay her. “Shall I drive you home?” he asked desperately.

“No,” she said, not wanting his company at all, “stay here and begin to dig the garden.” She smiled. She was anxious to get away. Not until she was out in the lanes would she again breathe freely. She went without any appearance of hurry, thanking Calladine, who tore from his solitary rose-bush all the branches he could crowd into her arms, and climbed back into the gig as she had come. He saw her go, despair and joy and anguish rending him.

The strain and anxiety of being with Calladine drove her, as always, towards the wish to be with Lovel. “Brother,” she could have called him, from the ease of his companionship. She could have put her hand into his, simply for the trust she had in him. But she knew too well that the indifference of his greeting would repulse instantly any such movement of confidence on her part; he would glance at her, when they met, and his glance would take her back into the assurance of their old intimacy, but there would be no softening of sentiment in it. Never that; a challenge and a bracing, but never compassion or a caress. Could she ever go with a trouble to Lovel? Her instinct leapt up into an affirmative; he would listen gravely, would understand without commiserating, would counsel quietly, and would fortify her with a sense of his reliance in her trustworthiness. He would trust her to behave always as he would expect that she should behave. She would endure anything rather than disappoint Lovel. More: even in his absence, even though he should know nothing of it, she kept herself constantly up to the level of his standards. She winced at any thought of his possible disapproval. She had not for him, nor could she imagine herself having, the indulgent and,—school herself to reverence as she would,—contemptuous pity she had for Calladine; what had she told Calladine to do? to grow lupin and iris, tulips and honesty, sweet sultan and snapdragons, in a walled patch of what had once been Down-land! to wall the Down? was it possible that she had told him to wall in the Down? what gulf she must divine between him and herself, between him and the Down-country in which he had elected to live, if she could tell him to wall in the Down. Yes, even a square, a stray square of Down, forgotten between a lane and Starvecrow’s farm-house. What would Lovel say, if she told him that? True, Lovel himself was sometimes set on to plough the Down, and willingly proceeded with the task; but that was different: that was the old struggle between man and the soil from which he wrested his daily bread; Lovel would tame the Down to grow barley for man or roots for his cattle,—a poor crop at best, extorted from the recalcitrant soil, like charity from an irreconcilable spirit, a poor crop, flaunting red poppies for its last flag of insubordination,—Lovel would plough the Down for that purpose, and relish the tussle, meeting in mutual understanding an adversary as stubborn as he himself; but for his mere pleasure he would not wall in a square to grow the effeminate flowers of decoration. They would blow and curtsey, Calladine’s flowers, until a wind swept over them from the angry Downs and laid them low,—but stay, what had she said?—“The wall will protect them against the wind.” Yes, and protect Calladine too: he could not stand up against the winds from the Downs. So, in her heart, she pitied Calladine and was disposed to see him protected? What had he done to deserve from her the insult of that charity? She had seen Lovel go out into a snowstorm on the heights and had not feared for his discomfort or his danger, any more than he feared for hers. Calladine she would have prevented with kind, firm words on the threshold of the door.

And it so happened, at her first meeting with Lovel after her visit to Starvecrow, that she, riding, sighted him in the distance following a plough-team over a curve of hill. He was not at work in one of the folds of the lower reaches, the favourite position for the rare stains of cultivation. He and his team were in outline against the sky, following the slow and classical progression of the furrow over the curve; the hempen reins looped slackly from the horses’ heads to his hand; the man, the horses, and the plough pursued their way, disengaged from all but the essentials of their labour, with the old inevitable simplicity. Clare rode towards the brown patch and, reaching Lovel, rode at a walk beside him up and down the freshly-turned furrows. The bright share cut cleanly into the sod, turning it over. They both watched it, as it slid through the sod, with a professional and satisfied criticism. “Poor soil,” Lovel said once; otherwise they had not spoken. She liked to watch him plough, appreciating his dexterity, and the jump of the plough-shaft under his hand; she liked his voice ringing out to the horses at the turn. The slow rhythm soothed her. “Who are you ploughing for?” she asked. “Morland,” he said briefly. “Shall you be finished by six?” she asked, looking across at the westering sun; and he nodded. “I’ll wait,” she said, and getting off her pony, she slipped the reins over her arm and stood watching Lovel without impatience.

At six he unhitched his team and came across to her, the horses slouching along behind him. “An ungrateful job,” he remarked, staring resentfully at the stony furrows; “they never put me on to the loam; always the chalk for me.” “I wish you had a bit of land of your own,” she said. “Ay, I’d get the better of it,” he replied, suddenly eager.

His team stood patient, heavy and shining compared to her small pony. The curious light of sunset began to creep over the Downs, turning their tan to a rosy orange. “Fine weather,” nodded Lovel. He turned to his horses, and began to adjust a bit. The rooks were settling on the patch that he had ploughed. He stooped down, and picking up a lump of earth, crumbled it between his fingers. Clare, observing his fine, bony, downward-bent face, knew that he was reflecting. Sure enough, he raised it to say, “How would you bring them up, if you had children?”

“Have you been thinking about children?” she asked, amused.

“It’s thinking about children,” he replied seriously, “that shows you the things we base life on. There’s money, there’s humbug, and there’s death. What do we say over and over again to children? ‘Don’t touch that, you’ll break it, it’ll cost money to replace.’ ‘Be polite,’—that’s humbug. ‘Don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself,’—that’s death, really, or at any rate the fear of injury. A child doesn’t see much difference between being alive or being dead. As for money, or for time, which is the same thing, it takes him years to get his brain round those two things. It’s a fine and careful system we’ve got, haven’t we? While I was following the plough, I was having an imaginary conversation with a child. ‘If I was dead,’ said he, ‘I shouldn’t know that I was dead, so what would it matter?’ And I couldn’t find an answer in my head.”

“But if you had children of your own,” said Clare, “you would find yourself bringing them up in the same way.”

“Oh, perforce,” he replied, “but that’s the end of all theories. We’re chained by necessity; it’s the wire across the path that brings the horse down in mid-gallop. We’ve got to teach our children caution,—the fear of death,—merely to keep them alive until they grow up. And all that we should enjoy teaching them is obscured by the don’ts and the shoutings-out to keep their limbs whole and our crockery unbroken.”

“Well,—and humbug?” she said.

“That’s civilisation. ‘What’s polite,’ asks the child, and ‘what’s a lie?’”

“Would you like to have children of your own?” asked Clare.

“Yes,” replied Lovel briefly, and changed the subject. “I have to bring a handful of sheep home for Mr. Morland from the fair at Marlborough on Tuesday. Will you be going to the fair? Horses, mostly.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Clare in delight, clapping her hands.

“Better meet me there, as ’twere by chance,” said Lovel, suddenly a little grim. “‘Miss Warrener taking up with gipsies,’—I can hear them talk. No, meet me there, make out you’re interested in a pony, and fetch me to have a look at him.”

“But we can ride home together?” said Clare crestfallen.

“We’ll meet outside the town and come home over the Downs. I don’t want all the gig-wheels in amongst my sheep.”

She laughed suddenly, seeing how practical he was, and liking it.

He slipped the reins of his team from off the gate-post where he had hitched them, and hoisted himself, sitting side-ways, on to one of the great elephantine backs. He sat there, slack and swaying to the horse’s tread, in the manner of all carters, and the other two horses lumbered after him, their hoofs going plop-plop in the thick dust of the road, and the hair round their fetlocks flopping as on spaniels’ paws. Clare followed him, light on her pony. They did not become him well, she thought, those great horses; he demanded the slimmer, swifter animals of creation, hares, Arabs, or deer. But it amused him to play the plough-boy. How indifferent he seemed, she thought,—scarcely looking at her, riding on with his gaze held towards the sunset; how different from Mr. Calladine’s eagerness to propitiate her; and a tiny sore of feminine vanity was pricked. Then she laughed at herself, immediately; what was she expecting from Lovel, her Lovel? expecting him to be different from himself? she would not like it if he were. And she knew that he was content to have her there, even though he never troubled to look around.

Lovel set off in a practical mood for Marlborough fair. He was thinking of the sheep he had to buy and bring home for Farmer Morland; in a way the farmer’s trust provoked in him a sort of contemptuous pride, and, poacher and free-lance though he was, he would have scorned to make a penny’s profit for himself out of the transaction. The commission was given him to execute; the farmer relied upon his honesty and his knowledge; the thing was simple: that was a trust of which he would not take advantage. On his lawless expeditions, he was betraying no man’s confidence; the keepers all knew him, and, meeting him unprofessionally in the lanes, would exchange with him a grin and even a wink of understanding. They stood for the law, and he for the skill that would defeat the law; they knew it, and he knew that they knew it; that was a frank challenge, with sport in it on either side; but as for Farmer Morland’s sheep, a mere matter of money, he would never demean himself to a bargain with the middle-man, and the farmer’s interests, for the moment, were his own. He might next week be snaring the same farmer’s ditches; that was a separate matter.

At the back of his mind, as he rode ambling along on the strip of grass at the roadside towards Marlborough, he retained the knowledge that he had arranged with Clare a meeting at the fair. The knowledge lay there, like a warm patch in his consciousness, and he enjoyed keeping it just out of sight, while he directed his thoughts on to the sheep, and noted the farmers, shepherds, and cattle-men who streamed along the road in the same direction that he himself was taking, some on horseback going at a quick trot, some in their high spanking gigs, and some crawling in farm-carts with pigs and calves bundled up under a net. All the pastoral population of the district seemed to be streaming towards Marlborough along the great arterial road, and Lovel had no doubt that they were streaming equally towards it along the road on the further side of the town, and not along the main road only, but converging upon Marlborough by all the lanes and lesser roads, from Devizes and Savernake, from Ogbourne St. George and Ogbourne St. Andrew, from the Winterbournes and the Hintons. He surveyed them as they passed him; they were known to him for the most part, solid men and honest enough, their faces as broad and open as the country which had bred them; and the shepherds, who with their slow, limited movements seemed to resemble the animals committed to their care, contented in not having a preoccupation beyond the recurrent business of the animal year, with its breeding, shearing, and dipping; and the old wiseacres, who, although they no longer bought or sold, made a practice of attending all the local fairs where their fat cobs would carry them, there to criticise and shake their heads over the methods of their juniors. Lovel watched them all go by, feeling himself slightly alien, as though he had been all the while conscious of his darkness beside their ruddiness.

Gig-wheels rattled and hoofs spanked crisply along the ringing road, and Lovel watched them go by, the stream, like life itself, hurrying past him. That old road had known the traffic of the past and present, and,—although there was not much to tempt his reflectiveness in the wide airiness of the light-coloured summer morning,—he said to himself, addressing his thoughts to the rubicund pre-occupied agriculturists, that after all the hair-splitting and tangle introduced by love, malice, envy, ambition, or their kindred, were cleared aside and done with, the main business of life was nothing more than the maintenance of life, else why all this buying and selling, this labour and breeding, this system which produced tilled fields and stout farmers trotting to market, cattle-pens in Marlborough market-place, and booths with headstalls and shovels? so that nine-tenths of the population were so taken up with the business of living that it was time to die before they had ever had leisure to take a look at life at all. Lovel, thinking thus, looked at them in his detached way with a little envy, a good deal of sarcasm, and a complex wistfulness, failing to find any meaning in the conclusions his logic had led him to. A lot of pother, just to keep alive; and for what purpose?

All over the civilised world, on which Marlborough was a speck, they were doing it; but they would not understand Lovel if he told them so, and he knew better than to diminish his reputation of being a practical man.

And now in spite of all his thoughts which bore him away on absences of speculation, his horse, which had been carrying him more soberly along, brought him in sight of Marlborough, and he saw the concourse of gigs, from which the horses had been unharnessed and led away, standing parked with the shafts stuck upright in the air, and beyond them the lime-whitened hurdles which penned up the tossing sheep; he saw the gaitered legs moving among the open spaces; he heard the barking of sheep-dogs as they rushed excitedly round, he heard the cries of the vendors and the lowing of the puzzled cattle. A cattle-market and horse fair was to him no novelty; he got off his horse, and, not thinking any more now of the cumbersome system of civilisation which had gathered all those men and beasts together from their homes to the same spot at the same hour, he walked round surveying with as shrewd an eye as any farmer there the merits and demerits of the goods and livestock offered for sale. The principal business of the sale was not yet begun, but a good deal of private bartering and haggling was going on, and the sellers at the opening of their booths were crying their wares, whether wooden baskets, hay-rakes, tarred twine, leggings, hedging gloves, chaff-cutters, milking-stools, scythes, sickles, carters’ whips, churns, shears, or in fact any of the smaller articles necessary to pastoral or agricultural existence. The whips hung up in heaves made gay with scarlet braid; the wooden goods were displayed along the front of the booths, clean and newly-planed, showing the honest grain of the wood and smelling fresh of sawn edges and rosin; and on some of the booths, fluttering like flags, were hung coloured petticoats and shawls to tempt the men to bring home a remembrance to their women. There were tinkers too, selling shining saucepans, and gipsies with bead necklaces; a dancing bear ambling along on a leash; hokey-pokey carts, and a hurdy-gurdy; and outside the town, in a field, was encamped a travelling circus, with a roundabout and a set of swings, that awoke in its progress shrieks of terror and ecstasy all over rural England. Among the various attractions, Lovel moved quietly and alone, his two dogs at his heels, as self-contained as their master. Several strangers threw curious glances at him, for his quiet step, which they thought stealthy, and the darkness and leanness of his air, which so differentiated him from the fair sturdy weight of the crowd of countrymen. Interrogation by these strangers evoked a glance and a reply, contemptuous in intention, yet respectful in its immediate hint of mystery, “Egyptian, they do say ... queer tales.” But Lovel, if he noticed these rare enquiries, paid no attention; he was accustomed to feel himself shunned and dreaded, and his dogs seemed to share his loneliness, for they never crossed the road to nose another dog, but kept to Lovel’s heels, and woke to interest only when there were sheep or steers to be shepherded, in the same way as the man was scornful and kept himself aloof, but spoke keenly and with authority when any question arose relating to his various professions.

Amongst the cries and distractions of the market Lovel tried to keep his mind fixed upon the sheep business which had brought him there, until that should be despatched, but there was another business which kept his eyes straying round, and that was the hope of perceiving Clare, a small and merry figure, with her pony’s rein slung over her arm. He did not shirk, in his own mind, the desire he had to catch sight of her, or the sudden relief and satisfaction that sight would bring him. So long as she was there, Heaven might pour and thunder; but all would still be well. So long as he had not seen her, the sun might shine; there would still be a darkness at his heart. Lovel long since had faced this truth with resolution and a complete despair; but with no attempt to delude himself or to minimise. It lay quietly at the bottom of his heart, a quiet patch of certainty, which shouts and jostlings and an alert scrutiny of the frightened herds were powerless to disturb. It was there, like a thing he must put out of sight for the moment, but to which he would have to turn presently, when his business was finished; he would have to turn to it,—not reluctantly, but in due course, like returning home,—he would have to attend to it, grapple with it, decide what was to be done.

He found that his eyes strayed round increasingly, looking for her; her continued absence produced an emptiness, in which all things seemed meaningless and noisy. Then he saw her, standing at a little distance chatting to the landlord of the Royal George Inn, and a great calm spread, lake-like, over him. She was at hand; nothing else mattered. He proceeded quietly to transact his business, having all his faculties now undistracted about him; he did not even want to look at her, now that he knew that she was there; she would wait for him and though they both stood talking to other people, without betraying the consciousness of one another he knew that they were really converging, that their two lives were really converging upon the same moment when they would join up and turn to leave the market-place, without a word spoken, together. Sure enough, next time that he looked up, she had drawn a little nearer; he was glad; he felt his absolute silent unity with her, without any question of command or submission on either side, an almost sexless unity, and one that had grown up without any agreement spoken in words.

“Those’ll be father’s sheep, Lovel?” said a voice ingratiating, at his elbow.

He looked down, and saw Daisy Morland, the farmer’s daughter, her large freckled face raised amiably to his between the puffed red ringlets. Lovel disliked Daisy as much as Daisy liked him; he avoided her company as pointedly as she sought his; the fact that he was for the moment in her father’s employ no doubt encouraged her to think that she had a certain claim on him; and now especially when his mind was bent upon Clare she seemed to him more than usually aggressive.

“I’ll help you drive them home,” she exclaimed brightly.

“No need, I have the dogs,” said Lovel, and added, “thanks,” which he was far from feeling.

“No trouble, you know,” said Daisy, giving him a look full of meaning.

Several of their neighbours were watching the scene with amusement.

“Best let me take them quietly,” said Lovel; “and anyhow,” he added, as though that settled the matter, “I’m riding.”

“Oh, but I’ve got the cob!” cried Daisy triumphantly.

“Best not,” said Lovel, for he could think of nothing else to say.

“But I say yes,” said Daisy. “Come, Lovel,” she persisted in a coaxing voice, “my own father’s sheep? You wouldn’t stop me riding alongside you?”

Lovel felt himself beaten; he had, indeed, no reasonable objection to raise.

“I shan’t be taking them by the high road.”

“So much the better,” said Daisy.

A clear voice said beside them suddenly, “Lovel, I have a favour to ask; I don’t like riding alone in such a crowd of people, may I ask your escort back to the Manor House when you go?”

He turned upon Clare, who had come up unobserved, and saw the mischief beneath the request so formally and demurely proffered.

“Of course, Miss Warrener, I am at your service,” he replied instantly, and they stood, for a moment, the two of them together, looking at Daisy, whose freckled face had grown suffused with an unbecoming red, that clashed with the red of her hair and spread patchily round her throat down to the opening of her gown.

“Forgive me for interrupting you, Daisy,” said Clare serenely.

Daisy mumbled a “No matter, miss,” class triumphing over sex.

“Can I get your pony for you, Miss Warrener?” said Lovel to Clare politely.

“I will wait till you are ready,” said Clare politely to Lovel!

Their eyes met.

“Let us go,” said Lovel irresistibly.

With the clamour of the market all round them they manœuvred the little flock of sheep out of their pen into a side-street, leading their horses till they should be clear of the town. The cries of the market place died away behind them,—the market place where Daisy still stared after them with a stare of dull, revengeful anger, too stupefied to care as yet that the whole of Marlborough should have witnessed her humiliation. But, having no pride, she minded this less than the loss of the ride she had promised herself with Lovel. Miss Warrener had got him, taken him coolly away from under her very nose; they had drifted away together without any fuss as though they belonged naturally to one another. Miss Warrener! Who would have thought of meeting Miss Warrener at a cattle-market? It was not the first time, either, that Daisy had seen Lovel and Miss Warrener together, not by any means the first time, since she was not above following Lovel secretly and spying upon him up there on the Downs when he thought himself safe. But who could have thought that the girl would have come to Marlborough fair for the purpose of meeting Lovel? for Daisy had no doubt that that had been Clare’s intention; and so cool about it, so lady-like, “Lovel, I have a favour to ask” indeed! “Lardy-da!” said Daisy to herself, mincingly, as she angrily imitated Clare’s manner in her own mind, affecting to despise it, while really envying it as she would never have acknowledged.

She woke to the realisation that the market was still proceeding, with its shouts, its jostlings, and its huddling of beasts, round her immobilised figure, and, bestirring herself, she went in search of the fat cob, meaning to follow (at a distance, and keeping out of sight), Lovel and Clare on their ponies, who, she calculated, must by now be driving the little flock before them over the crest of the hill.

And she saw them go, with the eyes of a jealous woman, and knew that during the two succeeding days, while Lovel kept the flock at pasture, Miss Warrener joined him again, and sat with him on the Grey Wethers; she saw all his length stretched on the grass at Miss Warrener’s feet, and saw their fingers close together over some cat’s cradle that they were playing. But she saw no more than that, though she watched so that there wasn’t much that her eyes could have missed.

Lovel rode slowly away along the back of the Down, the woolly flock tossing and huddling along in front of him, in a hurried, senseless way, controlled by the barking of the two sheepdogs, who were swift to chase up a straggler, or to straighten out any unseemly bulge at the side of the flock,—that same flock that he had bought at Marlborough fair for Farmer Morland. Lovel, knowing he could trust his dogs, rode in an abstraction. The afternoon sun cast fitful, fan-shaped gleams down through the thin clouds, like sunbeams passed through a sieve, or seen through a veil of the finest rain; it produced an effect of shadow and wet gold familiar to him in his comings and goings over the Downs, but now for the first time it occurred to him to compare the outside world with his own life; and, while his meetings with Clare might stand for that wet gold, the shadows fell mournfully into a yet more inevitable analogy.

He came down into the village by dusk, regretful as ever to exchange the heights for the hollow. Up there he seemed to shake off for a little the burden of his life, which as soon as he re-entered the ring of the village he resumed. He was, however, too well-accustomed to this sensation to pay any particular attention as he passed through the gap of the embankment. “Charmed circle,” his mother had often croaked to him, but he always shrugged disdainfully, knowing well that his imagination was all too ready to be led away along such lines, and being determined to keep his good sense wholesomely about him. The tossing woolly backs of the sheep preceded him now in a long wedge, four or five abreast, down the narrow road; they bleated uneasily, and tried to break through the hedge on either side. “Poor silly things, ye don’t like being penned up any better than the rest of us,” Lovel said to them, as he bent from his horse to open the gate into the field, and called to his dogs to head off the flock, which crowded back helter-skelter through the gate and then dispersed themselves in a sudden browsing content in the field among the monoliths.

Lovel called off his dogs and pulled the gate shut again, with the crook of his riding whip. He surveyed the sheep for a moment over the gate: they were already grazing, dim shapes in the dusk, on the comparatively rich pasture after the short turf of the Downs. “A good lot,” Lovel thought professionally, “and all for the butcher to-morrow,” but he had no sentiment to waste over the fate of the sheep. He rode on into the village, leaving the circle of the embankment with its few naked trees, behind him; ahead of him, the church spire rose up against the sky, and presently as he turned the corner the village street came fully into view, with all its necessary provisions for the conduct of existence: houses for folk to be born in, shops where they might purchase the paraphernalia of daily life, the tavern where they might be merry, the church where they might worship, be christened, married, or buried according to their passing needs, and the chapel where, if they were so inclined, they might differ as to their faith with their fellow-men. Church and Chapel Lovel ignored altogether, a work which his mother had begun for him by refusing flatly to have him made a Christian. “You’ll call him Nicholas Lovel for all that Parson don’t souse him,” she had said, arms akimbo, to the indignant deputation of the parish.

John Sparrow was turning into the Waggon of Hay as Lovel rode past it. “Come join us, neighbour?” he said half in mischief; the wits of the village lived in constant hope that some day, some day, a liquor potent or sufficient enough should be found to loosen the lips of Gipsy Lovel, and what secrets they would hear then! Lovel was briefly tempted, then he shook his head, and passed on: his mother and brother would be waiting for their meal for him, too helpless to begin without him since he had said he would be home by four. At that moment the Church clock struck six: he was two hours late, two hours he had idled away with Clare. He strung himself up to endure the reproaches with which he knew he would be greeted.

He left his horse in the small paddock at the back of the house, and, carrying the bridle and saddle over his arm, returned to the street and went into the house by the front door. The passage within was dark, but by long habit he found the hooks on which to hang up his gear, and at the noise he made in doing so, and the tread of his riding boots on the flagged floor, his brother came eagerly out into the passage, carrying a candle.

“Oh, Nicholas, is it you? Why, you promised to be home by four, and it is gone six; where in the world have you been all this time? I have been three times down the road to look for you.”

“I wish you would do nothing of the sort when I am late,” Lovel said curtly. He hated his brother at that moment, he hated the dark house and the implied reproach; his two hours with Clare flooded over him. “Is supper ready, at least?”

Olver whined, “I had forgotten about supper,—I thought only of you,—don’t be angry with me, Nicco,—I know I should have set it out.”

“It does not matter,” said Lovel: if he got angry Olver would cringe, and whine the more. “Give me the candle, I will see to it.” He took the candle from Olver’s hand, and Olver’s strange eyes gleamed on him in its light with questioning timidity. The grandfather’s clock ticked loudly out of the dark recesses of the passage. “I hope you have kept the fire going,” said Nicholas, opening the door into the living room. Olver followed at his heels with the dogs.

The living-room was dark and low, lit redly by the logs in the open fire-place, and because there was neither paint nor paper on the walls the great stones of the masonry were visible. The eye looked down instinctively to find a floor of hard-trodden mud,—and was disappointed, for the floor here, like that of the passage, was formed of flag stones. There was little furniture: a centre table, which served for meals, a few chairs of cane and wood, a tall dresser reared against one wall, containing on its shelves the crockery for everyday use, and a shelf above the fire-place, on which stood a row of china fruits in bright, shining colours,—this comprised the sum total of furniture and decoration in the whole room. Lovel scarcely noticed what was in the room and what was not; he liked the stone walls, and would not have them covered up, but them he liked for the sake of their tradition and of the quarry from which they had come.

He now set the candle on the table, and got from out of the cupboard under the dresser a loaf of bread, some cheese and butter, and the necessary knives and plates. He did this menial work mechanically; he had long ceased to expostulate with his brother, or to induce him to mend his neglectful ways. He supposed, when he thought about it at all, that till the end of his life he would continue to serve and provide for his mother and his brother. He was their provider, their protector, their victim, their master, and their slave; that was his function, and he did not complain against it. A servant he would not get, even could he have paid the wages ten times over, because of the tattle carried to the village. He saw, then, in the simplicity of his mind, no other course open to him than to perform all the duties himself.

He set aside upon a tray a cup of tea, when he had made it, and a bowl of gruel for the bedridden old woman upstairs. This he gave to Olver, telling him to carry it up carefully, and stood himself at the foot of the stairs holding up the candle for a light. He heard the door open above, and his mother’s querulous voice. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how long she had been waiting for her tea, and of what she would have said could she have known the cause, and have seen the two figures of himself and Clare standing in the sunlight on the Downs. This radiant vision of Clare crossed his heart in a flash; it hurt him. Had his mother seen them? he never knew himself the true extent of the powers he must not allow himself to think about, because he was afraid of them. Gipsy Lovel, he knew they called him in the village....

Olver came down again, and still his eyes sought his brother’s face to find whether he had been forgiven. His brother’s servility and excessive devotion to himself exasperated Nicholas. He sat over his supper tossing bits of food to the dogs, and trying to pretend to himself that Olver with his searching eyes and anxious face was not sitting opposite to him in mute beseeching, hanging on to his looks and gestures. Nicholas despised himself for his churlishness, but to-night his home, his brother, were violently intolerable to him. He could not breathe, he was being stifled; he rose nervously and kicked the logs into a blaze; in the middle of doing this he swung round.

“Why do you follow me so with your gaze?” he asked impatiently.

“You are angry with me, Nicco, for having forgotten the supper, but indeed I thought only of you, and you are all I have in the world.”

Lovel said, not unkindly, “Well, you wasted your anxiety: I am better able than most to look after myself. I am not angry any more,” but in spite of his words he still felt that the house oppressed him, and that a restlessness, usually kept under control, was gnawing at him. He knew well whom to blame: it was Clare, who appeared to him the personification of all he had abjured. He had had Clare for two hours before his eyes, the sight of her stirring him as the wind stirs a bell, and now in the place of Clare he was returned to the monotony of his sad home; in the full determination not to think of Clare he crossed over to the fire where his dogs already lay sleeping, filled his pipe and lighted it, and forthwith began to dream of nothing but Clare as he sat gazing into the heart of the red ashes.

She was so little known to him; he liked to picture,—yet his bashfulness made of it a fearful pleasure,—the ordering of her room, of her clothes laid neatly in drawers; he thought of her ribbons; he knew that in the evenings she discarded her gauntlets and her cap and wore soft coloured silks—he had heard Martha Sparrow say so. He had never seen her in these; was never likely so to see her; he trembled at the thrill of so seeing her: her arms would be bare, her throat rounded and white, with red corals up it. Yet he was not sure that he desired to see her thus, save as an experience, for thus the difference between them would be most emphasised; when he met her upon the Downs, and their ponies fell into step side by side, then she was at her closest to him, seeing the heavens and the hills with the same eye, knowing the same things as he knew, reading the signs of the weather, picking up the same landmarks familiar to them both; but such was the tremulousness of his mind that he wavered between the preference of knowing her at her closest, or at her most remote: the one caressed him infinitely, but the other mystified and tempted him, and made his pleasure into a rapturous pain. What hope had he of ever beholding in the flesh that wraith which his fancy evoked? he, Lovel, sitting over the fire with his two rough dogs and his mazed brother, and at the end of a day’s shepherding, while she dined at the Manor House with her father in the warmth of lamplight and the quiet dignity of pervading scholarship? She was gracious enough to him when they met on the hills; there, the closeness of their age and pursuits made them forgetful of their other disparities; the same rain made them both wet, the same wind ruffled their hair; but with her nod of farewell, kindly though it might be, they were instantly severed: he sank, she rose, and drifted out of his reach. He was indignant that an accident of fortune should be the mean occasion of parting them, an accident of fortune, not of birth, for by lineage the Lovels, although so fallen, had, in the pride of their Egyptian blood, no comparison to fear. Then he remembered that a deeper irony kept him apart from any woman. He had before him constantly the sight of his mother and brother to uphold him in the resolution that with the three of them the race must end. Such blood must not be carried on. But because the primitive instincts were deep and intractable in him, the renunciation roused his anger; his animal birthright was to beget sons, and he rebelled against the chance that cheated him of it; and in the same train of thought came the image, whose lovely audacity appalled even while it enraptured him, of his children and Clare’s; he saw their strong limbs and heard their laughter, an image vivid and actual, and—he swore to himself—of a wholesome inspiration. He must see and think no more of Clare! But as he came to this conclusion, Olver, who had been squatting on the opposite side of the hearth, stirring the ashes and shooting furtive glances from time to time at his brother, said, “There came for you a message while you were away, from Mr. Warrener, to know would you go up to the Manor House to-morrow, to fix shelves for his books. William Baskett came with the message, and says, Mr. Warrener is impatient, and though the books have been stacked up on the floor for over a year, must needs have the shelves ready to-morrow now that he had at last taken the idea into his head.”

“I cannot go,” said Lovel moodily.

He gave no reason. He thought that the effort was being made unnecessarily hard for him by this chance intervention. True, he might not set eyes on Clare, but even so the Manor House would be so redolent of her as to trouble him to the soul. She might be absent; but, again, she might come into the room and stand over him while he sawed and planed, chattering to him in her fashion, at once grave and light-hearted. “I cannot go,” he said, afraid for himself.

Olver shuffled across the hearth and knelt at his brother’s feet, looking up into his face.

“There is a weight on your mind, brother. Oh, yes, no use in shaking your head: I always know. Won’t you tell Olver? You don’t know what powers I might have to help you,—no, no, nothing that you disapprove of,” he added hastily, seeing Lovel’s face darken, “but you know, you often say I’ve a kink of wisdom, and so I have,” he went on, carried away, as he readily was, by his vanity. “Only you cannot appreciate it, brother, or you would trust me more.”

Lovel would have given much to be left in peace just then in order to pursue his quarrel with his own heart, but he was incapable of slighting his brother’s demonstrations of affection, so he put his hand on the head pressed against his knee, and, without speaking, caressed the curls in a manner he hoped was not too obviously perfunctory. He felt Olver’s instant yielding under the caress, and the creature’s pathetic dependence only increased his melancholy. “It costs me so little, and means so much to him,” he thought, and continued to soothe Olver’s temples with the tips of his fingers.

They sat in silence for some time, a silence disturbed only by the sigh of a tired dog in his sleep, or by the falling apart and flaring of a log. Presently Olver said, in a meditative tone, without moving, “You hated me, Nicco, when you first came in and I asked you where you had been. Yet I have often asked you that, and you have not been angry.”

“You knew where I had been: driving sheep for Mr. Morland,” replied Lovel mechanically.

“Yes,—and meeting Miss Warrener.” Olver gave a great chuckle. “Oh, yes, I know,” he continued, “because the first time I went down the road to see whether you were coming I met Miss Warrener, riding on her pony, and she stopped to ask me how I did, and said that she had seen you. She carried a bunch of gorse slung at her saddle, which she said you had cut for her. Is that how the land lies, brother?”

“No, no,—simple boy,—never hint such a thing.” Lovel was angry, and extraordinarily distressed.

“I know,” said Olver, nodding sagely. He rambled on, “Daisy Morland has seen you together, and because she wants you for herself her eyes are sharpened. I found her in Farmer Morland’s barn, cutting mangolds for the cattle. She asked me to help her. Very soon I was cutting mangolds alone, and she was lying in the hay watching me. She said, ‘That brother of yours is a sly dog,—hoity, toity with us poor girls,—too good to speak to a Christian,—and all because he fries other fish in secret.’ I asked her what she meant. She tossed her head and said it was not for her to give away your secrets to me. So I stopped cutting, and threw her down on her back in the hay, and tickled her till she promised she would tell me. She was soft to tickle; she squealed and wriggled about. Why don’t you like her?” asked Olver.

“Go on,” Nicholas answered.

“Then she said she had been hiding behind a rick somewhere up near the Grey Wethers, and she had seen you come riding along with Miss Warrener. She said you got off your horses when you came to the Wethers, and sat down on one of the stones, and stayed there till the sun began to sink; then you caught your horses and rode away, very close together. She said you had talked all the time as though a week was too little for all you had to say. She said she had seen you both at Marlborough market, too. Then she began to cry; she cried so loud I was afraid Farmer Morland would come in to see what was ado, so I held my hand over her mouth until she stopped. She said you were breaking her heart, and she cared nothing what became of her. She said she was reckless. What’s the meaning of it all?”

“Jealousy,” said Lovel, with suppressed fury.

Olver said nothing, but his conviction remained sagely the same. He was sorry he dared not tell Nicholas the rest of the story, but Nicholas was inexpressibly severe and prudish; he would not have approved of the scenes in the barn, neither of the knock-about scene of tickling and squealing amongst the hay, nor of the subsequent scene, when Olver had laid his hand over Daisy’s mouth, and, half-strangled, she had spluttered against his hand, and the wetness of her mouth had mingled with the wetness of her tears to inflame his rustic senses, and in the indifference to her misery she had not resisted him. He smiled to himself as he remembered, but he knew better than to tell this to Nicholas. Only once had he seen Nicholas really violent, on one occasion when he had come artlessly to his brother with the tale of his first exploit; Nicholas’ explosion of anger was a thing Olver had never forgotten. It remained lurking, a thing which at any moment might flare up again. He kept such stories now for his mother’s ear alone; the old woman, enchanted at this surreptitious alliance against Nicholas’ hateful authority, would cackle in sympathy, and, making her hand a trumpet to her ear, invite Olver to pour out in a whisper details increasingly succulent, and so passed hours, Olver with an eye constantly on the door, lest Nicholas should unexpectedly return, but turning always again to whisper to his mother, who with her “Hee! hee! and did you so? good lad!” and similar ejaculations, would puff him up to thinking himself a man where he was most an animal. Lovel was thinking only of how he might best delude his brother’s shrewdness, and how discover whether the girl was scattering this gossip broadcast over the village. He had always disliked the girl,—her red hair, pale blue eyes, loose mouth, and freckles,—nor was it likely that he would turn to civility now in order to coax her into discretion. He was inexpressibly concerned, perplexed and discouraged, and the longer did he remain brooding over the fire, the more convinced did Olver grow that Daisy’s hysterical theory was the true one.

They heard the rapping of their mother’s stick on the floor overhead; it was the signal that she needed something. The dogs raised their heads and began to growl. Lovel, wrenched back to the actualities of his daily life, said, “Go, you, Olver.”

He sat on after Olver had gone, but he was not allowed to pursue his reflections, for the sounds of violent quarrelling reached him from overhead: his mother’s voice raised to a scream, and Olver’s to an indignant bellow. He knew that he must go up and separate them. The cause of their quarrels never transpired; the outburst was puerile, violent, and senseless, and came to an end with the same childish suddenness as it had begun. Lovel never knew which he dreaded most, and which most filled him with anxiety and distaste: their alliance or their hostility.

He rose, and taking the candle he went upstairs to his mother’s room. He went with an extreme weariness and repugnance, feeling that the burden he had to carry was too heavy when private sorrow was added to it, and wishing for once, strong though he was, that he might lay it down and be seen no more in that country. The sound of the quarrelling voices continued as he made his way along the upstairs passage, but they fell into an abrupt silence in the presence of his authority. He stood in the doorway and they looked at him guiltily. The old woman, huddled in her chair, muttered something under her breath. He took in the squalid disorder of the badly-lighted room.

“Go down to the kitchen, Olver,” he said.

Olver slunk away. Lovel came forward, and patiently began setting the room to rights; although he was too practical a man to indulge himself in the fastidiousness which might have been his by nature, he was often sickened by the loathsomeness of the many tasks he had to perform for his mother: he was sickened now. She was utterly without regard for decency; but for her son, she would have wallowed contentedly in the squalor of her room; it was amazing to him how, helpless though she was, and able to travel about only by propelling herself in her wheeled chair, she yet contrived during his short absences to reduce the room she inhabited to the appearance of a hovel.

“Can Olver not fetch away your supper, but you must start quarrelling with the lad?” he said.

Immediately she broke into a torrent of grievances, in the high, shrill voice of her petulance, which Lovel knew so well; and he regretted that he had not let the matter pass uncommented, since it was irremediable. He waited until she had finished, then bent over and said with his usual gentleness, “Come, mother, let me help you to bed.”

She allowed him to raise her from her chair, first throwing back the old miscellaneous shawls and coverings, and, half lifting, half carrying her across the room, he deposited her on her bed. She kept up meanwhile a continual grumble: where had he been all day, that he had so neglected her? Since early morning he had not been near her; she had been dependent upon Olver for her food and her company; but Olver was a good lad; he did not go off all day like Nicholas did, wenching, no doubt,—Nicholas pressed his hands tightly together, to keep himself silent,—Olver had sat with her that afternoon, and they had talked; where would she be, without Olver for company?

During this complaining and muttering Lovel had busied himself with making her comfortable in bed; he covered her over, arranged her pillow for her, placed a glass of water within her reach,—she always wanted matches too, but was not allowed them;—he now looked down upon her as she lay, her helpless form under the shapeless heap of bedclothes and her scant grey locks straggling over the pillow. She had the same eyes as her sons, in what must have been a fine bony face; and the same cunning look frequently stole into them as stole into Olver’s.

“I hope you have not again been filling the lad’s head with the rubbish I have so often forbidden,” said Lovel anxiously in reply to her last remark.

“A nice way for you to speak to your mother!” she croaked. “Olver doesn’t speak so to me; forbidden, indeed! Never you mind what Olver and I have been saying. If I had only been given Olver to myself I could have made him into something better than a mere simpleton, as you all dub him; but no, I wasn’t to have Olver to myself: there was always Nicholas between us, with his ‘forbidden’ ... forbidden.... Anyhow, Nicholas hasn’t won altogether,” she muttered, not quite daring to speak too distinctly; “there are hours every day when Nicholas isn’t at home.”

“I can always get Olver to tell me the truth,” said Lovel, “and if I find you have been at your tricks I shall have to keep him away from your room.”

The old woman laughed; a grating and unpleasant laugh, between fear and amusement.

“And to do that you will have to stay at home, and then where will the money come from, my pretty boy?”