Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

HERITAGE

“I was born, and learned myne English in Kente, in the Weald, where English is spoken broad and rude.”

William Caxton.

HERITAGE

V. SACKVILLE WEST

NEW

YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

MY MOTHER

Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam,

Et super arboribus, Cæsar dum magnus ad altum

Fulminat Euphraten bello:

Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque juventa,

Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi.

HERITAGE

PART I

I

Two years of my life were spent in a rough gray village of the Apennines; a shaggy village, tilted perilously up the side of the hill; a rambling village, too incoherent to form a single perspectived street, but which revolved around, or, rather, above and below, a little piazza warm with present sun, though grim with unknown, conjectured violence in the past. Here stood the massive civic palace, ancient and forbidding, with its tower poised and tremulous in the evening sky; and here the church, with its marble pietà, the work, it was said, of Mino da Fiesole. A mountain torrent poured down the village, a wild little storm of water, brown and white, spanned by a bridge, which rose abruptly to a peak, and as abruptly descended. In the evenings the youth of the village drifted towards the bridge, gossiped there, sang a snatch of song, or indolently fished. In the silent midday, stretched at length on the flat stone parapet, they slept....

The village was called Sampiero della Vigna Vecchia.

If I dwell thus upon its characteristics, it is from lingering affection and melancholy memories. My sentiment is personal; irrelevant to my present purpose. I resume:—

In this village—and it is for this reason that the village started up so irrepressibly in my thoughts—I had as a companion a man named Malory. Like me, he was there to study Italian. We were not friends; we lodged in the same house, and a certain degree of intimacy had thereby necessarily forced itself upon us; but we were not friends. I cannot tell you why. No quarrel stood between us. I liked him; I believe he liked me. But we were each conscious that our last day in Sampiero would also be the last day we spent together. No pleasant anticipation of continued friendship in our own country came to sweeten our student days in Italy.

Yet for one week in those two years Malory and I were linked by the thread of a story he told me, sitting out under a clump of stone-pines overlooking the village. It linked us, indeed, not for that week alone, but, though interruptedly and at long intervals, for many years out of our lives. Neither of us foresaw at the time the far-reaching sequel of his confidences. He, when he told me the story, thought that he was telling me a completed thing, an incident revived in its entirety out of the past; I, when I later went to investigate for myself, went with no thought of continuance; and finally, I, when I departed, did so in the belief that the ultimate word was spoken. Our error, I suppose, arose from our delusion that in this affair, which we considered peculiarly our own, we held in some measure the levers of control. Our conceit, I see it now, was absurd. We were dealing with a force capricious, incalculable, surprising, a force that lurked at the roots of nature, baffling alike the onlooker and the subject whose vagaries it prompted.

I should like to explain here that those who look for facts and events as the central points of significance in a tale, will be disappointed. On the other hand, I may fall upon an audience which, like myself, contend that the vitality of human beings is to be judged less by their achievement than by their endeavour, by the force of their emotion rather than by their success; if this is my lot I shall be fortunate. Indeed, my difficulty throughout has been that I laboured with stones too heavy for my strength, and tried to pierce through veils too opaque for my feeble eyes. Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work, which none have rightly understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers.

It was less of a story that Malory told me, than a quiet meditative reminiscence, and he wove into it a great deal which, I begin to suspect, as I think over it, without extracting from my granary of words and impressions any very definite image, was little more than the fleeting phantom of his own personality. I could wish that fate had been a little kinder to me in regard to Malory. I am sure now that he was a man in whom I could have rejoiced as a friend.

When I think of him now, he stands for me as the type of the theorist, who, when confronted with realities, strays helplessly from the road. He had theories about love, but he passed love by unseen; theories about humour, but was himself an essentially unhumorous man; theories about friendship between men, but was himself the loneliest being upon earth. At the same time, I sometimes think that he had something akin to greatness in him; a wide horizon, and a generous sweep of mind. But I may be mistaking mere earnestness for force, and in any case I had better let the man speak for himself.

He said to me as we smoked, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and as he spoke he indicated with his pipe stem a broad half-circle, and I had a glimpse of flattened country lying in such a half-circle beneath my view.

His words gave me a strong emotional shock; from those gaunt mountains, that clattering stream, I was suddenly projected into a world of apple-blossom and other delicate things. The mountains vanished; the herd of goats, which moved near us cropping at the scant but faintly aromatic grass of the hill-side, vanished; and in their place stood placid cows, slowly chewing the cud in lush English meadows.

“I fancied once that I would take up farming as a profession,” said Malory. “I have touched and dropped many occupations in my life,” and I realised then that never before in the now eighteen months of our acquaintance had he made to me a remark even so remotely personal. “Many occupations, that have all fallen from me, or I from them. I am an inconstant man, knowing that no love can hold me long. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I have never married. Such people should not marry, or, if they do, should at least choose a partner as inconstant as themselves. When I say inconstant, I mean of course the temperamentally, not the accidentally, inconstant. It is a new kind of eugenics, a sort of moral eugenics.

“So at one period of my life I had a fancy that I would try my hand at farming. I think perhaps it was one of my most successful experiments. I have a great love for the country people; they are to me like the oaks of the land, enduring and indigenous, beautiful with the beauty of strong, deep-rooted things, without intention of change. I love in them the store of country knowledge which they distil as resin from a pine, in natural order, with the revolving seasons. I love the unconsciousness of them, as they move unheeding, bent only on the practical business of their craft. I revere the simplicity of their traditional ideals. Above all, I envy them the balance and the stability of their lives.”

I wasn’t very much surprised; I had always thought him a dreamy, sensitive sort of fellow. I said,—

“But you surely don’t want to change with them?”

Malory smiled.

“Don’t I? Well, perhaps I don’t. I should have to give up my sense of wonderment, for they have none. They may be poems, but they are not poets. The people among whom I lived were true yeomen; they and their forefathers had held the house and tilled the land for two hundred and fifty years or more, since the Puritan founder of their race had received the grant from, so tradition said, the hands of Cromwell in person. Since the days of that grim Ironside, one son at least in the family had been named Oliver.

“The house was partly built of lath and plaster and partly of that gray stone called Kentish rag, which must have been, I used to reflect with satisfaction, hewn out of the very land on which the house was set. I remember how the thought pleased me, that no exotic importation had gone to the making of that English, English whole. No brilliant colour in that dun monochrome, save one, of which I will tell you presently. Have patience, for the leisure of those days comes stealing once more over me, when haste was a stranger, and men took upon them the unhurrying calm of their beasts.

“After the fashion of such homes, the house stood back from a narrow lane; a low stone wall formed a kind of forecourt, which was filled with flowers, and a flagged path bordered with lavender lay stretched from the little swing-gate to the door. The steps were rounded with the constant passing of many feet. The eaves were wide, and in them the martins nested year after year; the steep tiled roofs, red-brown with age, and gold-spattered with stonecrops, rose sharply up to the chimney-stacks. You have seen it all a hundred times. Do you know how such houses crouch down into their hollows? So near, so near to the warm earth. Earth! there’s nothing like it; lying on it, being close to it, smelling it, and smelling all the country smells as well, not honeysuckle and roses, but the clean, acrid smell of animals, horses, dogs, and cattle, and the smell of ripe fruit, and of cut hay.

“And there’s something of the Noah’s Ark about a farm; there’s Mr. Noah, Mrs. Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and the animals, because there’s nothing in the world more like the familiar wooden figures of our childhood than the domestic animals. If you had never seen a cow before, gaunt and unwieldy, what a preposterous beast you would think it. Also a sheep—the living sheep is, if anything, even more like the woolly toy than the woolly toy is like the living sheep. And they all fit in so neatly, so warmly, just like the Noah’s Ark. However, I won’t labour the point....

“This house of which I am telling you was nearer to the earth than most; it had, in fact, subsided right down into it, sinking from north to south with the settling of the clay, and the resultant appearance of established comfort was greater than I can describe to you. The irregularity of the building was the more apparent by reason of the oak beams, which should have been horizontal, but which actually sloped at a considerable angle. I found, after I had lived there no more than a couple of days, that one adopted this architectural irregularity into one’s scheme of life; the furniture was propped up by blocks of wood on the south side, and I learnt not to drop round objects on to my floor, knowing that if I did so they would roll speedily out of reach. For the same reason, all the children of the house, in this generation as no doubt in many generations past, had made their first uncertain steps out in the garden before they climbed the hill or toppled down the incline of their mother’s room.

“I paused, on the evening of my arrival, before my future home. I said to myself, here I shall live for one, two, three, possibly four, years; how familiar will be that unfamiliar gate; I arrive with curiosity, I shall leave, I hope, with regret. And I foresaw myself leaving, and my eyes travelling yearningly over the house and the little garden, which in a moment the bend of the lane would hide from me for ever. I say for ever, for I would not court the disillusion of returning to a once happy home. Then, as my eyes began to sting with the prophetic sorrow of departure, I remembered that my one, two, three, or possibly four, years were before and not behind me; so, amused at my own sensibility, I pushed open the swing-gate and went in.

“The house door opened to my knock. I stood on the threshold—I stand there now in spirit. Have you experienced the thrill of excitement which overcomes one when one stands on the threshold of new friendship, new intimacy? such a thrill as overcame me now as I stood, literally and figuratively, in the doorway of the Pennistans’ home. I scanned the faces which were raised towards me, faces which were to me then as masks, or as books written in a language I could not read, but which would speedily become open and speaking; no longer the disguise, but the revelation of the human passion which lay behind. The facts of life at Pennistans’ I could foresee, but not the life of the spirit, the mazy windings of mutual relation, the circumstance of individual being. These people were anonymous to me in their spirits as in their names.

“You might fare far before you came upon a better-favoured family. I was in the low, red-tiled kitchen; they were seated at their supper round a central table, the father, the mother, three sons, and the daughter Nancy. Amos Pennistan had the bearing, the gravity, and the beard of an apostle; I never saw a nobler looking man; he had his coat off, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt like a slash of blood. His sons, as they raised their heads to me from their bread and porridge, cast their eyes over my city-bred frame, much as calves in a field raise their heads to stare at the passer-by over the hedge, and I felt myself in the presence of young, indifferent animals.

“An old, old woman was sitting over the fire. No mention of her had been made in our correspondence, nor did I then know who she was. Yet had it not been for her, and for the strange flame she had introduced into this English home, the story I am endeavouring to tell you might never have sprung up out of the grayness of commonplace.

“The faintest smell floated about the room, and as I stood in slight bewilderment looking round I wondered what it could be; it was oddly familiar; it transported me, by one of those side-slips of the brain, away from England, and though the vision was too dim and transitory for me to crystallise it into a definite picture, I dreamed myself for a second in a narrow street between close, towering houses; yoked bullocks were there somewhere, and the clamour of a Latin city. I have gazed at a rainbow, and fancied I caught a violet ribbon between the red and the blue; gazed again, and it was gone; so with my present illusion. Then I saw that the old woman was fingering something by the fire, and in my interest I looked, and made out a row of chestnuts on the rail; one of them cracked and spat, falling on to the hearth, where she retrieved it with the tongs and set it on the rail again to roast.

“The bullock-like sons took no notice of me beyond their first dispassionate glance, but Mrs. Pennistan in her buxom, and Amos in his reticent, fashion gave me an hospitable welcome. I was strongly conscious of the taciturn sons, who, after a grudging shuffle—a concession, I suppose, to my quality as a stranger—returned to their meal in uninterested silence. I was abashed by the contempt of the young men. It was a relief to me when one of them pushed aside his bowl and rose, saying, ‘I’ll be seeing to the cattle, father.’

“Amos replied, ‘Ay, do, and see to the window in the hovel; remember it’s shaky on the hinge.’ I had a sudden sense of intimacy: a day, a week, and I too should know the shaky hinge, the abiding place of tools, the peculiarities of the piggery.

“I wandered out. A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the evening. I felt infinitely at peace. I reflected with a deep satisfaction that no soul in London knew my address. My bank, my solicitors, would be extremely annoyed when they discovered that they had mislaid me. To me there was a certain satisfaction in that thought also.”

“On the following morning,” continued Malory, “I rose early. I went out. The freshness of this Kentish morning was a thing new to me. The ground, the air, were wet with dew; gossamer was over all the grass and hedges, shreds of gossamer linking bramble to bramble, perfect spiders’ webs of gossamer, and a veil of gossamer seemed to hang between the earth and the sun. The grass in the field was gray with wet. A darker trail across it showed me where the cattle had passed, as though some phantom sweeper had swept with a giant broom against the pile of a velvet carpet. The peculiar light of sunrise still clung about the land.”

For a moment Malory ceased speaking, and the goats, the barren mountains, the impetuous torrent, rushed again into my vision like a wrong magic-lantern slide thrown suddenly, and in error, upon the screen. Then as his voice resumed I saw once more the hedges, the clump of oaks, and the darker trail where the cattle had passed across the field.

“I was at a loss,” said Malory, “to know how to employ my morning, and regretted my stipulation that my training should not begin until the following day. I wished for a pitchfork in my hand, that I might carry the crisp bracken for bedding into the empty stalls. I heard somewhere a girl’s voice singing; the voice, I later discovered, of Nancy, upraised in a then popular song which began, ‘Oh, I do love to be beside the sea-side,’ and so often subsequently did I hear this song that it is for ever associated in my mind with Nancy. I could hear somewhere also the clank of harness, and presently one of the sons came from the stable, sitting sideways upon a great shire horse and followed by two other horses; they passed me by with the heavy, swinging gait of elephants, out into the lane where they disappeared, leaving me to my loneliness. I felt that the great fat ball of the world was rolling, rolling in the limpidity of the morning, and that I alone had given no helping push.

“I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I felt myself—do not misunderstand me—suddenly and poignantly conscious of her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.”

I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened.

“You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another. I knew, I knew,” said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, “that here stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common, she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her future.”

As he spoke I thought that, by the look on his face, he was again receiving what he described as an impression so powerful as to amount to an emotion. And he communicated this emotion to me, so that I felt his prophecy to be a true one, and that his story would henceforward cease to be a mere story and would become a simple unwinding off the spool of inevitable truth.

He went on,—

“Our silence of course couldn’t endure for ever. The girl herself seemed conscious of this, for a smile, not unfriendly, came to her lips, and she said quite simply,—

“‘How you startled me! Good-morning.’

“‘I am very sorry,’ I said. ‘Can’t I make up for it by carrying those buckets for you?’

“‘Oh, they’re nothing with the yoke,’ she answered.

“Here old Amos came round the corner, walking clumsily on the cobbles with his hobnailed boots. He looked surprised to find me standing with the dairymaid, a little group of two.

“‘Morning!’ he cried very heartily to me. ‘You’re out betimes. Fine day, sir, fine day, fine day. Well, my girl, done with the cows?’

“‘I’m on my way to the dairy, dad,’ she said.

“I asked if I might come with her.

“‘Ay, go with Ruth,’ said Amos, ‘she’ll show you round,’ and he went off, evidently glad to have shifted the responsibility of my morning’s entertainment.

“Ruth refused to let me carry the buckets, and by the time we reached the dairy—one of the pleasantest places I ever was in, clean and bright as a yacht—their weight had brought a warm flush of colour to her cheeks. Great flat pans of milk stood on gray slate slabs, covered over with filmy butter-muslin; in one corner was fixed a sink, and in another corner a machine which I learnt was called the separator.

“‘Father’s very proud of this,’ said my companion, ‘none of the other farms round here have got one.’

“I sat on the central table watching her as she moved about her business; she didn’t take very much notice of me, and I was at liberty to observe her, noting her practised efficiency in handling the pans and cans of milk; noting, too, her dark, un-English beauty, un-English not so much, as you might think, owing to the swarthiness of her complexion, as to something subtly tender in the curve of her features and the swell of her forearm. She hummed to herself as she worked. I asked her whether the evening did not find her weary.

“‘One’s glad to get to bed,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone, adding, ‘but it’s all right unless one’s queer.’

“‘Can’t you take a day off, being on your father’s farm?’

“‘Beasts have to be fed, queer or no queer,’ she replied.

“The milk was now ready in shining cans, and going to the door she shouted,—

“‘Sid!’

“A voice calling in answer was followed by one of the sons. Neither brother nor sister spoke, while the young man trundled away the cans successively; I heard them bumping on the cobbles, and bumping more loudly as, presumably, he lifted them into a cart. Ruth had turned to wiping up the dairy.

“‘Where is he going with the cans?’ I asked.

“‘Milk-round,’ she answered laconically.

“That was the first time I saw her,” he added. “The second time was in full midday, and she was gleaning in a stubble-field; yes; her name was Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field, throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when, laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and skilfully into a sheaf. The occupation seemed wholly suitable. Although her head was not covered by a coloured handkerchief, but hidden by a linen sunbonnet, she reminded me of the peasant women labouring in the fields of other lands than ours. I do not know whether, in the light of my present wisdom, I exaggerate the impression of those early days. I think that perhaps at first, imbued as I was with the idea of the completely English character of my surroundings, I remained insensible to the flaw which presently became so self-evident in the harmony of my preconceived picture.

“Tiny things occurred, which I noted at the time and cast aside on the scrap-heap of my observation, and which later I retrieved and strung together in their coherent order. As who should come upon the pieces of a child’s puzzle strewn here and there upon his path.

“Ruth, my instructress and companion, I saw going about her work without haste, almost without interest. She was kind to the animals in her care after an indifferent, sleepy fashion, more from habit and upbringing than from a natural benevolence. She brought no enthusiasm to any of her undertakings. Her tasks were performed conscientiously, but by rote. Yet one day, when the sheep-dog happened to be in her path, I saw her kick out at it in the belly with sudden and unbridled vehemence.

“I was first really startled by the appearance of Rawdon Westmacott. In the big, shadowy, draughty barn I was cutting chaff for the horses, while Ruth sat near by on a truss of straw, trying to mend a bridle-strap with string. I had then been at Pennistans’ about a week. The wide doors of the barn were open, letting in a great square of dust-moted sunlight, and in this square a score of Leghorn hens and cockerels moved picking at the scattered chaff, daintily pricking on their spindly feet, snowy white and coral crested. A shadow fell across the floor. Ruth and I raised our heads. A young man leant against the side of the door, a tall young man in riding breeches, with a dull red stock twisted round his throat, smacking at his leathern gaiters with a riding whip he held in his hand. The rein was over his arm, and his horse, lowering his head, snuffed breezily at the chaff blown out into the yard.

“‘You’re back, then?’ said Ruth.

“‘Ay,’ said the young man, looking suspiciously at me, and I caught the slightest jerk of the head and interrogative crinkle of the forehead by which he required an explanation.

“‘This is my cousin, Rawdon Westmacott, Mr. Malory,’ Ruth said.

“The young man flicked his whip up to his cap, and then dismissed me from his interest.

“‘Coming out, Ruth?’ he asked.

“She pouted her indecision.

“‘You shall have a ride,’ he suggested.

“‘No, thanks.’

“‘Well, walk a bit of the way home with me, anyhow.’

“‘I don’t know that I’m so very keen.’

“‘Oh, come on, Ruthie, after I’ve ridden straight over here to see you; thrown my bag into the house, and come straight away to you, without a look into one single thing at home.’

“‘It’d be better for things if you did look into them a bit more, Rawdon.’

“Overcome by the perversity of women, he said again,—

“‘Come on, Ruthie.’

“She rose slowly, and, untying the apron of sacking which she wore over her skirt, she stepped out into the sunshine. For a flash I saw them standing there together, and I saw Rawdon Westmacott as he ever after appeared to me: a Bedouin in corduroy, with a thin, fierce face, the grace of an antelope, and the wildness of a hawk; a creature captured either in the desert or from the woods. Strange product for the English countryside! Then they were gone, and the horse, turning, followed the tug on the rein.

“I date from that moment my awakening to a state of affairs less simple than I had imagined. I saw Ruth again with Westmacott, and learnt with a little shock that here was not merely an idle, rural, or cousinly flirtation. The man’s blood was crazy for her.

“And so I became aware of the existence of some element I could not reconcile with my surroundings, some unseen presence which would jerk me away abruptly to the sensation that I was in the midst of a foreign encampment; was it Biblical? was it Arab? troubled was I and puzzled; I tried to dismiss the fancy, but it returned; I even appealed to various of the Pennistans for enlightenment, but they stared at me blankly.

“Yes, I tried to dismiss it, and to brush aside the haze of mystery as one brushes aside the smoke of a cigarette. And I could not succeed. How trivial, how easily ignored are facts, when one’s quarrel is with the enigma of force at the heart of things! It isn’t often in this civilised life of ours that one comes into contact with it; one’s business lies mostly with men and women whose whole system of philosophy is inimical to natural, inconvenient impulse. It obeys us as a rule, like a tame lion doing its tricks for the lion-tamer. A terrifying thought truly, that we are shut up for life in a cage with a wild beast that may at any moment throw off its docility to leap upon us! We taunt it, we provoke it, we tweak its tail, we take every advantage of its forbearance; then when the day comes for it to turn on us, we cry out, and try to get away into a corner. At least let us do it the honour to recognise its roar of warning, as I did then, though I was as surprised and disquieted as I dare say you would have been, at meeting a living lion in the woods of Kent.

“I could compare it to many other things, but principally I think I felt it as a ghost that peeped out at me from over innocent shoulders. Am I mixing my metaphors? You see, it was so vague, so elusive, that it seemed to combine all the bogeys of one’s childhood. Something we don’t understand; that is what frightens us, from the child alone in the dark to the old man picking at the sheets on his deathbed. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. Certainly my apprehension was a very indefinite one, at most it was a dim vision of possibilities unnamed, it wasn’t even a sense of the imminence of crisis, much less the imminence of tragedy. And yet ... I don’t know. I still believe that tragedy was there somewhere, perhaps only on the horizon, and that the merest chance alone served to avert it. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely averted. One never knows; one only sees with one’s clumsy eyes. One sees the dead body, but never the dead soul. The whole story is, to me, unsatisfactory; I often wonder whether there is a conclusion somewhere, that either I have missed, or that hasn’t yet been published by the greatest of story-tellers.

“Anyway, all this is too fanciful, and I have inadvertently wandered into an inner circle of speculation, I mean soul-speculation, when I really meant to be concerned with the outer circle only.

“I could lay my hand on nothing more definite than the appearance, certainly unusual, of Ruth or of Westmacott; other trifles were so absurd that I scorned to dwell on them in my mind, the red braces of Amos and that faint scent of roasting chestnuts in the kitchen under the hands of Amos’s grandmother. Whenever I went into the kitchen I met that scent, and heard the indefinite mumble of the old woman’s toothless mouth, and the smell of the chestnuts floated out, too, into the narrow entrance-passage and up the steep stairs which led to the rooms above. I associate it always now with a narrow passage, rather dark; sloping ceilings; and rooms where the pictures could be hung on the south wall only, because of the crookedness of the house. In the parlour, which balanced the kitchen, but was never used, was an old-fashioned oil-painting of a soldier with whiskers and a tightly-buttoned uniform, and this painting swung out from the north wall with a space of perhaps six inches between the wall and the bottom of the frame.”

II

On the morrow we again took our pipes to the clump of pines, and Malory began, in his drowsy, meditative voice, to tell his story from where he had left off.

“I hope you are by now as curious as I was to discover the secret of the Pennistan quality. The family were evidently unconscious that there was any secret to discover. They thought no more of themselves than they did of their blue surrounding hills, though in relation to the weather they considered their blue hills a good deal, and Amos taught me one evening that too great a clearness was not to be desired; the row of poplars over towards Penshurst should be slightly obscured, misty; and if it was so, and if the haze hung over Crowborough Beacon, I might safely leave the yearling calves out in the field all night. I should look also for a heavy dew upon the ground, which would predict a fine day besides bringing out the mushrooms.

“We were standing in the cross-roads, where the white finger-post said, ‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ and Amos had corrected my pronunciation from Lee to Lye, and from Cowden to Cowden. I know no greater joy than returning to the heart of a beloved country by road, and seeing the names on the finger-posts change from the unfamiliar to the familiar, passing through stages of acquaintance to friendship, and from friendship into intimacy. Half the secret of love lies in intimacy, whereby love gains in tenderness what it loses in mystery, and is not the poorer by the bargain.

“Mrs. Pennistan came out to join us, and I took the opportunity of asking her whether I might use a certain cupboard for my clothes, as I was pressed for room. She replied,—

“‘Granny had that cupboard, but she’s surely past using it now, so anything of hers you find in it, hang out over the bannister, and I’ll pack it away in a box.’

“Out of this little material circumstance I obtained my explanation; I went in, leaving husband and wife strolling in the road, for it was Sunday evening, and on their Sunday evening they clung to their hour of leisure. I went in, past the chestnuts, up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs I opened the cupboard door, and explored with my hand to discover whether the recess was empty. It was not, so I fetched my candle in its blue tin candlestick, and lifted out the garments one by one; they were three in number.

“I carried them carefully into my room, with no intention of examining them, but as I laid them on the bed their texture and fashion arrested me. A smell came from them, faded and far away. I held them up one by one: a heavily fringed shawl of Spanish make, a black skirt with many flounces, a tiny satin bodice that would barely, I thought, fit a child. As I unrolled this last, something fell from it: a pair of old, pink shoes, tiny shoes, heelless shoes,—the shoes of a ballet dancer.

“As I turned over these relics I heard some one moving in the passage below, and going to the top of the stairs I called to Ruth. She came up, then seeing the shoes in my hands she gave an exclamation of surprise.

“‘Are these yours?’ I asked.

“‘Mine! no; why, look here,’ and she held a shoe against her foot, which, although small, outstripped the shoe in width and length. ‘They’re granny’s, I reckon,’ she added.

“Then she took up the bodice and examined it critically.

“‘It’s a bit rotten, of course,’ she remarked, pulling cautiously at the stuff, ‘but where’d you buy satin now to last as well as that? and bought abroad, too.’

“The subtlest inflection of resentment was in her tone.

“‘Here, give them to me,’ she said. ‘Granny can’t want these old rags, messing up the house. There’s little enough cupboard room anyhow. I’ll put the shawl away up in the attic, for there’s wear in it yet, but the rest can go on the midden.’

“I detained her.

“‘Tell me first, how comes your grandmother to have these things?’

“She was surprised at my ignorance.

“‘To start with, she’s father’s grandmother, not mine. She’s so old, I forget her mostly.... She’s ninety-six, ninety-seven come Christmas. We’re wondering if she’ll last to a hundred.’

“How callous she was! Triply callous, I thought, because of her own youth, because of her great-grandmother’s extreme age, and because of the natural philosophic indifference of her class towards life and death.

“‘She was a dancer, once, you know,’ she went on. ‘Used to dance on the stage, and my great-grandfather found her there, and married her. What a tiny little thing she must have been, just look at this,’ and she held the little bodice across her own breast with a gay laugh, like a child trying to put on the clothes of its biggest doll.

“Then she held the skirt against her slender hips to show me how short it was, and pointed her foot in an instinctive dance position.

“She was holding up the bodice by tucking it under her chin. I looked at her, and she blushed, and convinced me that no woman ever stands altogether innocent of coquetry before any man.

“‘Tell me more about your grandmother,’ I said.

“‘It’s so long ago,’ she replied. ‘She had two children, and one was my father’s father, and the other was Rawdon Westmacott’s mother. You know my cousin Rawdon?’

“‘I know him,’ I said. ‘So you and he are of different generations, though there’s not more than twelve years between you in age.’

“‘Yes, that’s so. Now I come to think of it, there’s the old book in the parlour you might like to read, a diary or something, kept by my great-grandfather. It’s only an old thing; I’ve never looked on it myself, but I’ve heard father talk of it. Shall I get it for you?’

“I begged that she would do so, and she ran downstairs, and returned with a little tartan-covered volume in her hand.

“‘Father sets great store by it,’ she said hesitatingly, as she gave it up to me.

“‘He won’t object to my reading it?’

“‘Oh, no, if you’ve a mind.’

“She evidently looked down on me a good deal for my interest in the old-fashioned volume.

“Left alone, I drew my chair near to the chest of drawers, whereon I had set the blue candlestick; I had two hours before me, and I felt as an explorer might feel on the verge of a new country. Here was a document written by a dead hand, an intimate document, private property, not edited and re-edited, but quietly owned by dignified and unassuming descendants, who would neither cheapen nor profane by giving the dead man’s confidence to the world. It was probable that no intelligently interested eyes but mine would ever read it. I hesitated for an appreciable time before I opened the diary, and in that pause my eyes wandered from the little book to the little garments on the bed, and I fancied that these inanimate objects, made animate by the spirit of their respective owners, called to one another yearningly across the silence of my room.

“When I at last opened the diary I found myself carried straight away into an unanticipated world. The man, whose name and rank, ‘Oliver Pennistan, captain, Dragoons,’ I read on the fly-leaf, was writing in Spain. His first entry was dated Madrid, 1830. He wrote without conscious art, and indeed his daily jottings seemed to me solely the occupation of a lonely evening; at one moment he was annoyed because he had been given pan de municion, which was hard, black, and uneatable, instead of pan de candeal; at another, he had been overcharged by his landlord, and feared he must exchange into a different posada.

“He was innocent of literary artifice, this Pepys of nineteenth century Spain, yet the natural, matter of fact, unstudied candour of his daily biography brought the preposterous age before me, crimped and grotesque, the Spain of Goya. Eighteen-thirty, an incredible period in any country, attained in Spain an incredibility which turned it into a caricature of itself. Oliver Pennistan, I knew, wore whiskers and an eyeglass; tight, straight, high military trousers; drawled; guffawed; said ‘Egad.’ As for the women of his acquaintance, I knew them to be frizzed and fuzzed, with faces mauve beneath their powder, and hearts sick with sentiment beneath their tight bodices. I did not know what had taken Oliver Pennistan to Spain, but I supposed that he was a younger son, as I had heard Amos boast of the dozen boys of his grandfather’s generation.

“Still I did not connect his Spanish experiences with the Pennistans I knew. I read the Madrid portion of his diary without impatience, because I was greatly entertained by the subtle flavour of the age which I found therein, but when he came to packing his valise preparatory for a trip to Cadiz, I fluttered the pages over, looking for his return to England. I wanted to get to the dancer who now sat in the room below mine roasting chestnuts over the fire. I was disappointed to see that the diary never accompanied him to England, and I began to fear that his courtship and marriage would not be revealed to me.

“‘Leaving Madrid with regret,’ ran the diary, ‘but have the benefit of agreeable society on the road. Hope to cover thirty miles to the day. I have a broad sash to keep off the colic, and an amulet from a fair friend to keep off the evil eye.’

“Thus equipped, the dragoon rode to Cadiz, and I must do him the justice to say that he looked on the country he rode through with an appreciative eye, noting the scent of the orange-blossom which assailed him as he entered Andalusia, and the grandeur of the rocky passes which connect northern and southern Spain. At the same time, he kept that nice sense of proportion by which tolerable food and lodging remains more important to the traveller than beauty of scenery. He noted also the superior attractions of the Andalusian women, ‘little, and dark, and for the most part fat, but with twinkling eyes and a smile more friendly, if also more covert, than their sisters of Madrid.’

“I turned over the pages again at this point, and chanced at last upon a phrase which convinced me that he had met his love. Then the book fell from my hand, and I lost myself in a reverie, working my way laboriously through a maze of preconception to the fact that this dancer of whom I had heard from Ruth was not an English dancer, but a Spanish dancer, and as this fact broke like daylight upon me I realised that I had bored into the heart of my mystery. Moments of revelation are intrinsically dramatic things, when a new knowledge, irrevocable, undisputable, comes to dwell in the mind. All previous habitants have to readjust themselves to make room for the stranger. A great shuffling and stampeding took place now in my brain, but I found that, far from experiencing discomfort or difficulty in accommodating themselves to their new conditions, my prejudices jumped briskly round and presented themselves in their true shape beneath the searching glare of the revelation.

“I read on eagerly, the shadow of disappointment lifting from me. Oliver Pennistan lodged at an inn which provided him with excellent Valdepeñas; his business in Cadiz was somehow connected with wine, and many technical jottings followed, put in as a guide to his memory; I did not understand all his abbreviations, but was nevertheless impressed by his knowledge of sherry. His business took him most of the day. In the evenings he was a free man, and spent his time in the theatre; probably it was here that he first saw his dancer, for at about this time her name began to appear in the diary: ‘To the fight with Concha,’ or ‘With Concha to the merry-go-round.’ There were also references to the ‘Egyptians,’ who were Concha’s people, and the Goya world of Madrid was replaced by a society of Bohemians—bull fighters, mountebanks, acrobats, hunchbacks, thieves, fortune tellers, all the riff-raff of the gipsy quarter.

“I took this as a miniature allegory, for in the Prado at Madrid the Goya portraits of ladies and the Royal family hang upstairs, while in a basement, typical of the underworld into which Oliver Pennistan had now plunged, hang his series of extraordinary cartoons, caricatures, nightmares, peopled with obscene dwarfs and monstrous parasites.

“How remote the England of his boyhood must have seemed to him, his eleven brothers, the hills, the hawthorn, the farm-buildings; if he saw them at all, it must have been as at the end of a long avenue. I looked up, out of my window across the sleeping fields, and returned again to the pages yet hot and quivering with life, written in an ill-lighted posada at Cadiz.

“In the same way that, without a descriptive word, he had contrived to give me an unmistakable impression of the Spain of his day, he now gave me a portrait of the dancer, passionate but strangely chaste, scornful of men, but yielding her heart to him while she withheld her body. He gave me a picture also of his own love, flaming suddenly out of a night of indifference, overwhelming him and sweeping aside his reason, determining him to make a wife of the gipsy he would more naturally have desired as a passing love. I was intimate with his intention, yet he never departed from his catalogue of facts and doings; stay, once he departed from it to say, ‘Her head sleek as a berry, her little teeth white as nuts.’ His one description.... I looked across at the little silent heap of garments on my bed, that had clasped the fragile being he revered with so much tenderness.

“‘To the bull-ring with Concha,’ he noted on one occasion. ‘Not to the spectacle, but to the driving in from the corral. Miura bulls, black and small, but agile more than most. They are driven in through the streets in the small hours of morning, together with the tame cattle, by men on horses. These men wear the bolero and high, peaked hat, and carry a long pole armed with an iron point. I would have ridden, but she dissuaded me. We waited on a balcony above a yard. A long wait, but not dreary in such company. There is much shouting when the bulls come, and the yard beneath is filled with fury and bellowing; I would not willingly chance my skin among such angry monsters, but their drivers with skill manœuvre each bull by himself into a separate cell where he is to remain without food or drink until morning. A diverting spectacle, had it not been for the press and the stench of ordures.’

“I have seen that dim yard myself,” said Malory, “chaotic with lashings and tramplings, and pawings and snortings, and the vast animals butt against the woodwork, and their huge forms move confusedly in the limited space. Like Pennistan, I would not care to chance my skin. Concha, who being a Spaniard was bred up to violence, was even a little frightened, ‘clung to me,’ said the diary, ‘and besought me not to leave her. We saw the bulls in their cells from above, by the light of torches. These brands may be thrust down to burn and singe and further enrage the beast,’ but Oliver Pennistan, who had been nurtured on this mild farm among pampered and kindly kine, did not like the sport, so turned away with Concha on his arm and passed through a door into the upper gallery of the arena.

“The vast circle seemed yet vaster by reason of its emptiness. Its ten thousand seats curved round in tiers and tiers and tiers, a gigantic funnel, open to the sky in which sailed a full and placid moon. The arena, ready raked and scattered with whitish sand, gleamed palely below, as if it had been the reflection of the heavenly moon in a pool of water. The great place lay in haunted silence.

“It was here, sitting in a box, that they came to their final agreement. The diary naturally giving me no hint of the words that passed between them, I had to be content with a laconic entry some few days later: ‘Married this morning at the church of S. Pedro.’ I sat on in my room wondering what Oliver Pennistan had made of that surrendered, inviolate soul, the no doubt rather stupid and affected soldier, the scion of English yeomen; I wonder what he made of his wildling, sprung as she was from God knows what parentage; the Moorish Empire and the Holy Land had both surely gone to her making. They roamed Spain together for their honeymoon, and I accompanied them in spirit, seeing her dance, not in public places only, but in their room, for his eyes alone, his hungry love her sweetest applause; dancing in her little shift, and teaching his clumsy hands to clap and his lips to cry ‘Olé!’ I wonder too what the mountebanks of the trade thought of Concha’s husband, who sat through her performance in the hot, boarded theatres of Spanish provincial towns, and would allow no other man near his wife, and who, when one evening she for pure mischief eluded him, only grieved in silence and thought her love was going from him. I wonder most of all what Concha thought of him, his staid insularity, his perpetual talk of home, and his unassailable prejudices?

“As I came to the last pages of the diary, which ended abruptly on the last day of the year in Valladolid, Ruth knocked on my door and said she had come for the clothes. I was so full of the illuminating romance that I pressed her with questions. She was not so much reserved as merely indifferent, but looking at her warm young face in the uncertain candlelight I knew that therein, rather than in her speech, lay the answer to all my queries. I had seen the portraits of Amos Pennistan’s father, and of Rawdon Westmacott’s mother, daguerreotypes which hung, enlarged, on either side of the kitchen dresser, and I knew that in that generation no sign of the Spanish strain had appeared. I looked again at Ruth, at her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise; looked, and was enlightened. I urged her memory. Could she recall no anecdote, dear to her father when in a mood of comfortable expansion, a family legend of her grandfather’s youth? Yes, she remembered hearing that the children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of sudden and uncertain temper. But she remembered, though it was not worth the telling, that Mrs. Oliver Pennistan, in her sunniest mood, would set her children on hassocks to watch her, their backs against the wall, would take down her hair, which was long and a source of pride to her as to all Spanish women, would take her shawl from the cupboard, and, stripping off her shoes and stockings, would dance for her children, up and down, the sinuous intricacies of an Andalusian dance. I wondered what Oliver Pennistan thought, when, coming in of an evening with the mud from the turnip fields heavy on his boots, he found his wife with hair and fingers flying, dancing to the music of her own voice on the tiled floor of his ancestral kitchen?”

III

“Now,” said Malory, “I scarcely know how to continue my story. I have told you how I went to live with the Pennistans, and I have told you Oliver Pennistan’s Spanish adventure, and the rest lies largely in hours so full of work that no day could drag, but which in words would take five minutes’ reproducing. I have told you already how I loved that simple monotone of life. I had arrived in autumn, an unwise choice for a novice less enthusiastic than myself, for soon the trees were bare of the fruit which had so rejoiced me, bare, too, of the summer leaf, and the working day, which at first had drawn itself out in long, warm, melting evening, now rushed into darkness before work was done, and not into darkness alone, but into chill and wet, so that you might often have seen me going about my work in the cow-sheds with a sack over my shoulders and a hurricane lantern in my hand. I do not pretend that I enjoyed these squally winter nights. They had the effect of dulling my perception, and presently I found myself like the country people whose life I shared, considering the weather merely in its relation to myself; was it wet? then I should be wet; was it a bright, fine day? then I should be dry. My standpoint veered slowly round, like the needle of a compass, from the subjective to the objective. I wish I could say as much for many of my contemporaries. Then in our age as in all great ages, we might find more men living, not merely thinking, their lives.”

In after years I remembered Malory’s words, and wondered whether he had found on the battlefield sufficient signs of the activity he desired.

“I remember how entranced I was,” he went on, altering his tone, “by the sense of ritual in the labouring year. I thought of the country as a vast cathedral, teeming with worshippers, all passing in unison from ceremony to ceremony as the months revolved. When I had come to join the congregation, apse and column and nave were rich with fruit, the common fruit of the English countryside, plum and apple, damson and pear, curved and coloured and glowing with the quality of jewels; then busy hands came, and packed and stored the harvest into bins, and colour went from the place, and it grew dark. A long pause full of meditation fell. The trees slept, men worked quickly and silently, no more than was imperative, and from darkened corners spread the gleam of fires which they had lighted for their warmth and comfort. But then, oh! then the place was suddenly full of young living things, and of a light like pearls; children laughed, and over the ground swept a tide which left it starred with flowers, and a song arose, full of laughter and the ripple of brooks. The spring had come.”

He was strangely exalted. I knew that my presence was forgotten.

“The shepherd and his nymph were not long lacking in this Arcadian world. I met them crossing the fields, I spied them beneath the hedges, I learned to step loudly before entering the dairy with my pails of milk. I loved them, more perhaps as a part of the picture than for their own sakes. To me they were Daphnis and Chloe, not the game-keeper’s son and the farmer’s daughter.

“The match was favourably viewed by Amos Pennistan, though Nancy was but eighteen and her lover two years older. I was honoured by an invitation to the wedding. I had already woven a little tale for myself around those country nuptials, a celebration which, although slightly irregular, would have become my lovers better than the parochial gentility which did actually attend their union. I had pictured them by a brook, Daphnis in, to our minds, becomingly inadequate clothing, Chloe’s muslin supplemented by chains of meadow flowers such as the children weave, accompanied by their flocks and the many young creatures, lambs, kids, and calves, as are characteristic of that least virginal of seasons. No wooing; no; or if there must be wooing, let it be sudden and primitive, and of the nature of a revelation, and let the oak trees be their roof that night, and the stars the witnesses of their natural and candid passion. But passion, poor soul! was put into stays and stockings, had his mad gallop checked into a walk, while fingers poked, eyes peeped, and tongues clacked round the prisoner. Alas for the secret of Daphnis and Chloe; shorn of the dignity of secrecy, it glared in the printed column, was brayed out from the pulpit, was totted up in pounds and shillings. Food entered to play his hospitable and clumsy part. For days Mrs. Pennistan baked, roasted, and kneaded cakes and pastries, and daily as she did it her temper disimproved. Such beauty as was Chloe’s, the beauty of health and artlessness, was devastated by the atrocious trappings of respectability....

“What a commonplace tale! you will say, and a vulgar one into the bargain! and indeed you will be right, if a miracle can become a commonplace through frequent working, and if you look upon the marriage of two young creatures as a social convenience, ordained, as we are told, for the procreation of lawful children. I have told you nothing but the love of rustic clowns. But as the great words of language, life and death, love and hate, sin, birth, war, bread and wine, are short and simple, and as the great classical emotions are direct and without complexity, so my rustic clowns are classical and enduring, because Adam and Eve, Daphnis and Chloe, Dick and Nancy, are no more than interchangeable names throughout the ages.

“My Arcady missed its lovers. I realised after they had gone that they had been real lovers, imperative to one another, and that they had not simply drifted into marriage as a result of upbringing and propinquity. Had their parents’ consent been for some reason refused, they would, I am convinced, have gone away together. Amos Pennistan, in one of his rare moments of expansion, told me as much himself. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘it never did to cross Nancy. She was strong-willed from three months upward. Ruth, now, she’s a steady, tractable girl for all her dark looks. Of the two, give me Ruth as a daughter.’

“You may imagine my profound interest in the study of this strain sprung from the stock of Concha and Oliver Pennistan. Here I had Nancy, with her slight English prettiness, and the fiery will which might never be crossed; and Ruth, who looked like a gipsy and was in fact steady and tractable. I could not help feeling that fate had her hand on these people, and mocked and pushed them hither and thither in the thin disguise of heredity. You remember Francis Galton and the waltzing mice, how he took the common mouse and the waltzing mouse, and mated them, and how among their progeny there were a common mouse, a black and white mouse, and a mouse that waltzed; and how in the subsequent generations the common brown house mouse predominated, but every now and then there came a mouse that waltzed and waltzed, restless and tormented, until in the endless pursuit of its tail it died, dazed, blinded, perplexed, by the relentless fate that had it in grip. Well, I had my mice in a cage, and Concha, the dancer, the waltzing mouse, sat mumbling by the fire.”

I shuddered. I did not understand Malory. He had spoken of the violence of his feeling when he first caught sight of Ruth; I could not reconcile that mood with his present chill analysis.

“You held a microscope over their emotions,” I said.

“I was afraid there would not be many emotions left now that Nancy was gone,” he replied regretfully. “I missed her as a study, and I missed her as an intrinsic part of my Arcady. I turned naturally for compensation to Ruth and to Rawdon Westmacott, but here I realised at once that I must dissociate the figures from the landscape. They would not fit. No; contrive and compress them as I might, they would not fit. I am very sensitive to the relation of the picture to the frame, and I was troubled by their southern exuberance in the midst of English hay and cornfields. Now could I but have had them here ...” and again the cropping goats, the mountains, and the torrent rushed across the magic lantern screen in my mind.

“I told you that I knew young Westmacott was there crazy for her; he had no reserve about his desire, but hung round the farm with a straw between his teeth, his whip smacking viciously at his riding-boots, and his eyes perpetually following the girl at her work. He would look at her with a hunger that was indecent. Me he considered with a dislike that amused while it annoyed me. I often left my work when I saw him looming up morosely in the distance, but old Amos dropped me a hint, very gently, in his magnificently grand manner, after which I no longer felt at liberty to leave the two alone. If they wanted private interviews they must arrange them when they knew my work would take me elsewhere.

“I was not sorry, for I had no affection for Westmacott, and it amused me to watch Ruth’s manner towards him. I had heard of a woman treating a man like a dog, but I had never seen an expression put into practice as I now saw Ruth put this expression into practice towards her cousin. She seemed to have absolute confidence in her power over him. When it did not suit her to notice his presence, she utterly ignored him, busied her tongue with singing and her hands with the affair of the moment, never casting so much as a glance in his direction, never asking so much as his help with her work; and he would wait, lounging against the doorway or against a tree, silent, devouring her with that hungry look in his eyes. Often I have seen him wait in vain, returning at last to his home without a word from her to carry with him. His farm suffered from his continual absence, but he did not seem to care. And she? did she get much satisfaction out of her ill-treatment of his devotion? I never knew, for she never alluded to him, but I can only suppose that, in the devilish, inexplicable way of women, she did. In his presence she was certainly an altered being; all her gentleness and her undoubted sweetness left her, and she became hard, contemptuous, almost impudent. I disliked her at such moments; self-confidence was unbecoming to her.

“Then, when she wanted him, she would whistle him up like a little puppy, and this also I disliked, because Westmacott, whatever his faults, wasn’t that sort of man, and it offended me to witness the slight put upon his dignity. He didn’t seem to resent it himself, but came always, obedient to her call. And he would do the most extraordinary things at her bidding. Mrs. Pennistan told me one day that when the pair were children, or, rather, when Ruth was a child of ten and he was a young man of twenty-two, she would order him to perform the wildest feats of danger and difficulty.

“‘And he’d do what she told him, what’s more,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, to whom these reminiscences were obviously a source of delight and pride, as though she, poor honest woman, shone a little with the reflected glory of her daughter’s ten-year-old ascendancy over the daring young man. ‘Lord, you would have laughed to see her standing there, stamping her little foot, and defying him to go down Bailey’s Hill on his bicycle without any brakes, and him doing it, with that twist in the road and all.... One day she wanted him to jump into the pond with all his clothes on, and when he wouldn’t do that she got into such a rage, and stalked away, and wouldn’t speak to him, enough to make a cat laugh,’ and Mrs. Pennistan with a great chuckle doubled herself up, rubbing her fat hands in enjoyment up and down her thighs, straightening herself again to say, ‘Oh, comical!’ and to wipe her eye with the corner of her apron!

“‘Well, now, I declare!’ she said suddenly, craning her neck to see over the hedge. ‘If she isn’t at her old tricks again!’

“I followed her with a thrill to a gap in the hedge whither she had darted—if any one so portly may be said to dart. There, across the field, by the gate, stood the pair we had been discussing, and I was actually surprised to find that the little ten-year-old girl whom I had half expected to see was a well-grown and extremely good-looking young woman. She was sitting on the gate, and Westmacott was lounging in his usual attitude beside her; even at that distance his singular grace was apparent.

“They seemed to be looking at the two cart-horses which were grazing, loose in the field.

“‘She’s up to something, you mark my words,’ said Mrs. Pennistan to me.

“I agreed with her. Ruth was pointing, and the imperious tones of her voice floated across to us in the still evening; Rawdon was following the direction of her finger, and now and then he turned in his languid, easy way that covered—with how thin a veneer!—the fierceness beneath, to say something to his companion. I saw his hand drop the switch he carried, and fall upon her knee. Her manner became more wilful, more imperative; had she been standing on the ground, she would have stamped. I heard Rawdon laugh at her, but that seemed to make her angry, and with a resigned shrug he pushed himself away from the gate and began to walk across the field.

“‘Lord sakes,’ said Mrs. Pennistan anxiously, ‘whatever is he going to do?’

“I begged her to keep quiet, because I wanted to see any fun that might be going.

“Mrs. Pennistan was not happy; she grunted.

“Ruth was perched on the gate, watching her cousin. I was delighted to have an opportunity of observing them when they thought themselves alone. Besides, I intensely wanted to see what Rawdon was going to do. He walked up to one of the horses, hand outstretched and fingers moving invitingly, but the horse snorted, threw up its head, and cantered lumberingly away to another part of the field. Rawdon followed it, pulling a wisp of grass by means of which he enticed the great clumsy beast until he was able, after some stroking and patting, to lay his hand upon its mane. Ruth, on the gate, clapped her hands and called out gaily,—

“‘Now up with you!’

“‘Lord sakes!’ said Mrs. Pennistan again.

“I saw Westmacott getting ready to spring; he was agile as a cat, and with a leap and a good hold on the mane he hoisted himself on to the horse’s back. The horse galloped madly round the field, but Westmacott sat him easily—not a very wonderful feat for a farm-trained boy to accomplish. As he passed Ruth he waved his hand to her.

“She wasn’t satisfied yet; she called out something, and, the horse having come to a standstill, I saw Rawdon cautiously turning himself round till he sat with his face to the tail. Then he drummed with his heels to put the horse once more into its lumbering gallop.

“I saw the scene as something barbaric, or, rather, as something that ought to have been barbaric and only succeeded in being grotesque. Ruth ought to have been, of course, an Arab girl daring her lover in the desert to feats of horsemanship upon a slim unbroken thoroughbred colt. Instead of that, Westmacott was just making himself look rather ridiculous upon a cart-horse. But the intention was there; yes, by Jove! it was; the intention, the instinct; he was wooing her in a way an English suitor wouldn’t have chosen, nor an English girl have approved. Mrs. Pennistan, however, saw the matter in a different light, as a foolish and unbecoming escapade on the part of her daughter; so, thrusting herself between the loose staves of the fence and waving her hands angrily, she called out to Westmacott to have done with his dangerous nonsense.

“He slipped off the horse’s back, and Ruth slipped down off the gate, the man looking annoyed, and, in a slight degree, sheepish, the girl perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Pennistan rated them both. Westmacott kicked sulkily at the toe of one boot with the heel of the other. I glanced at Ruth. She had her hands in the big pockets of her apron and was looking away into the sky, with her lips pursed for an inaudible whistle. Her mother stormed at her.

“‘You’re getting too old for such nonsense. It was all very well when you were a chit with pig-tails down your back. And you, Rawdon, I should ha’ thought you’d ha’ known better. What’d Pennistan say if he knew of your larking with his horses? I’ve a good mind to tell him.’

“‘I’ve done the brute no harm,’ he muttered.

“‘Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for, anyway?’

“‘A bit of fun ... ’ he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth.

“Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which I was to become so familiar.

“‘Ay, Ruth told you,’ stormed Ruth’s mother. ‘An old tale. You let Ruth alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.’

“Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s indifference.

“Ruth,” said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. “She is a problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her, lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be conscious of her.

“She on her part, was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced. Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work. I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her, however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me back into the regions of fact. ‘Ruth,’ I would say, ‘does a woman cling more to her children or to her husband?’ and she would stare at me and reply, ‘What things you do say, Mr. Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I have the dairy to wash down yet.’

“I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather, that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.

“Sunday afternoon was our holiday on the farm, and to the worker alone a holiday is passionately precious. It is all a matter of contrast. On Sunday afternoon I would take Ruth for a walk; the sheep-dog came with us, and we would go through shaw and spinney and young coppice, and along high-hedged lanes. One spot I loved, called Baker’s Rough, where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, and wild flowers had consequently gathered in their millions: anemones, wood-violets, bluebells, cuckooflowers, primroses, and later the wild strawberry, and later still the scarlet hips of the briar. I never saw a piece of ground so starred. Here we often passed, and we would climb the hill-ridge behind, and look down over the Weald, and fancy that we could see as far as Romney Marsh, where Rye and Winchelsea keep guard over the melancholy waste like little foreign towns. We stood over the Weald, seeing both fair weather and foul in the wide sweep of sky; there a storm, and there a patch of sun on the squares of meadow. On fine days great pillows of white cloud drifted across the blue, painted by a bold artist in generous sweeps on a broad canvas, and those great clouds were repeated below in the great rounded cushions of trees. We looked over perhaps fifty miles of country, yet scarcely one house could we distinguish, but when we looked for a long time we made out, here and there, a roof or an oast-house, and I used to think that, like certain animals, these dwellings had taken on the colour of the land. For the most part, a clump of trees would be our nearest landmark.

“I could evoke for you many of those hours when, with the girl beside me, I explored the recesses of that tender country. Without sharing my enthusiasm, she was yet singularly companionable, happy and contented wherever our footsteps led us, with the reposeful quality of content essential to a true comrade.”

He was silent, and I considered him covertly as he sat hugging his knees and staring into the distance with a far-away look on his face. He was, I thought, a queer chap; queer, lonely, alien; intensely, damnably analytical. As I watched him, his head moved slightly, in a distressed, unconscious manner, and his brow contracted into a frown that emphasized the slight negative movement of the head. Yet he did not share his difficulties with me. He dismissed them with a sigh, and a gesture of the hand, and resumed,—

“I mentioned just now the place called Baker’s Rough. Ruth came to me one morning with glowing eyes.

“‘There’s flowers such as you never saw on Baker’s Rough to-day,’ she said mysteriously.

“I tried to guess: mulleins? ragged robins? periwinkles? but it was none of those. She would not tell me. I must come and see for myself.

“We set out after tea for Baker’s Rough, walking quickly, for we had only an hour to spare. As we drew near, the sheep-dog, who had run on ahead, set up a tremendous barking at the gate. I cried,—

“‘Gipsies!’

“There was a real gipsy encampment, caravans hung with shining pots and pans, gaudy washing strung out on a line, a camp fire, lean dogs, curly-headed children. Ruth had guessed aright when she guessed that I would be pleased. Amos hated gipsies, but I loved them. I’ve never outgrown the love of gipsies that lurks in every boy. Have you?”

His eyes were actually sparkling as he asked the question, and I was overcome by a feeling of guilt. Often I had thought this man a prig. He was not one, but simply an odd compound of philosopher and vagrant, poet and child. I resolved not to be hard on him again. I was uncomfortably suspicious that it was I who had been the prig.

“As we stood looking,” he went on, “a woman came down the steps of a caravan, and, seeing us, invited us with a flashing smile to come into the camp. Ruth was delighted; she followed the woman, looking like a gipsy herself, I thought, and the children came round her, little impudent beggars, staring up into her face and even touching her clothes. She only laughed, curiously at home; I felt, despite my love of the roaming people, over-educated and sophisticated. I was loving the camp self-consciously, almost voluntarily, aware that I was loving it and rather pleased with myself for doing so.”

“Your mind twists,” I interrupted, “like the point of a corkscrew.”

He laughed, but he looked a little hurt, taken aback, checked on his course.

“I am sorry,” he said, “you are right to snub me for it. Well, Ruth at any rate was thoroughly at home, and I could see that the gipsy was sizing her up with her shrewd eyes, and wondering whether I should be good for half-a-crown or only a shilling.

“She let Ruth sit on a stool and stir the pot over the fire; it smelt very good, though it probably contained rabbits, which of all foods in the world is the one I most dislike. Then she offered, inevitably, to tell our fortunes, and Ruth, as inevitably, accepted with alacrity. She stretched out her little brown hand, strong and hard with work.

“Of course the gipsy told her a lot of nonsense, and I stood by, acutely apprehensive that I should be drawn in an embarrassing rôle into the prognostications. I had come there with Ruth; therefore, in the gipsy’s eyes, I must be Ruth’s young man. I took off my cap to let the gipsy see that my hair was going gray on the temples. But it wasn’t any use; I found myself appearing as the middle-aged man whose heart was younger than his years, and who would finally carry off the young lady as his bride.

“I tried, of course, to laugh it off, but to my surprise I saw Ruth growing very red and her mouth quivering, so I told the gipsy we had heard enough and that we had no more time to spare. Ruth rose, the pleasure all died away from her face. Then, to add to the misfortunes of the evening, I heard a scream and an outburst of laughter from a neighbouring caravan, and, looking round, I saw Rawdon Westmacott jump to the ground in pursuit of a young gipsy woman, whom he caught in his arms and kissed.

“I looked hastily at Ruth; she had seen the thing happen. The distress which had troubled her face gave way to anger; the name ‘Rawdon!’ slipped in involuntary indignation from her lips. Then an instinct asserted itself to pretend that she had seen nothing, and to get out of the place before her cousin had discovered her. But she conquered the instinct, staring at Westmacott till he turned as though compelled in her direction.

“Not a word did they speak to one another then, but in the silence her anger and contempt flashed across at him like a heliograph, and his vexation flashed back at her. She stood there staring at him deliberately, staring him out of countenance. God! how vexed and furious he was! It makes me laugh now to remember it. I never knew what a fool a man could look when he was caught red-handed. The gipsy only giggled vulgarly, and tried to rearrange her tumbled dress. Ruth never even glanced at her, and presently she removed her gaze from Westmacott—it seemed quite a long time, though I suppose it was not really more than a few seconds—and turned to me.

“‘Shall we go?’ she said.

“‘We went, Ruth haughty, and I at a loss for words. Decidedly the expedition had not been a success. The sheep-dog ran on in front and tactfully barked, and in throwing little stones at him relations were re-established between us. I was prepared not to allude to the incident, but Ruth was bolder; she grappled directly with the difficulty.

“‘You saw Rawdon?’ she said with suppressed violence.

“‘I.... Well, yes, I saw him.’

“‘What was he doing there? He was up to no good with those gipsy women.’

“I had nothing to say; I knew she was right.

“‘He’s always after women,’ she added violently.

“‘I knew that she would not have said this to me had she not been completely startled out of her self-control.

“‘He cares for you though, in his heart,’ I said, rather inanely.

“‘Does he!’ she exclaimed. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘he rides the cart-horses bareback with his face to their tails to please you.’

“‘Oh, you may joke,’ she said; ‘he wants to please me now, but where’d I be if I belonged to him? He’d sing a very different song.’

“‘It rests with you, after all,’ I ventured.

“She was silent, swishing at the hedges with her stick as she passed.

“‘Doesn’t it?’ I urged.

“‘Oh—I suppose so.’

“‘How do you mean, you suppose so? Nobody wants you to marry him; your parents don’t; your brothers don’t. You need never see him again. Send him away!’

“‘I can’t do that,’ she said in a very low voice.

“‘Why not?’

“‘I can’t.... I sometimes feel I can’t escape Rawdon,’ she cried out. ‘He’s always been there since I can remember, I think he always will be there. There’s something between us; it may be fancy; but there’s something between us.’

“‘Hush!’ I said, startled as I was; ‘here he is.’

“He caught us up, walking rapidly, and I could see at a glance that he was determined to have it out with Ruth in spite of my presence. He came up with us, and he took her by the arm.

“‘Ruth!’ he said, in a vibrant voice. I want a word with you. You’ve misjudged me.’

“We had all come to a standstill.

“‘I can’t misjudge what I see,’ she answered very coldly.

“‘You saw, you saw! well, and what of it? That was only a bit of fun. Damn you, if you treated me a bit better yourself ...’

“‘Let me alone, Rawdon,’ she said, shaking him off. ‘You can do as you like, that’s your affair, only let me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.’

“‘Your way!’ he said, scowling at me. ‘Your way’s my way, as you’ll learn.’

“‘Now don’t you come bullying me, Rawdon,’ she said, but I think she was frightened.

“‘Well, you speak me fair and I won’t bully you. I was up to no harm, only larking around.... Come, Ruthie, haven’t you a smile for me? You treat me cruel bad most days, you know, and I don’t take offence. Ruthie!’

“‘We’re not alone, Rawdon,’ she said sharply.

“I thought he muttered, ‘No, damn it!’ between his teeth, and just then I felt a hand close over my wrist on the side farthest from Westmacott, a little imploring hand that checked in the nick of time my impulse to move away. She spoke bravely, as though the contact gave her courage.

“‘That’ll do, now, Rawdon, don’t come making a scene. There’s nothing to make a scene about.’

“‘But you’ll not sulk me?’ he said.

“‘I’ll not sulk you, why should I?’

“‘Then give me a kiss, for peace.’

“‘Let me be, Rawdon.’

“She was troubled, now that her anger had passed. I would have walked on, but for the dry, fevered fingers gripping my wrist.

“A new idea had taken possession of Rawdon’s mind; his eyes glowed in the noble, architectural carving of his face, that so belied the coarseness of his nature.

“‘I’m your cousin, Ruth!’ he cried satirically.

“He caught her by the shoulder and turned her towards him. I thought she would have struggled, and indeed I saw the preparatory tautening of her frame; then to my astonishment she yielded suddenly, flexible and abandoned, and he kissed her regardless of my presence; kissed her ferociously, and pushed her from him.

“‘I’ll see you to-morrow?’ he asked.

“‘To-morrow, likely,’ she answered indifferently, with a quick return to her old contemptuous manner.

“He nodded, put his hand on the top bar of the adjoining gate, and vaulted it, walking off rapidly across the fields in the direction of his own farm.

“‘And let me tell you,’ said Ruth, as though she were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, “he’ll be back around that gipsy place to-night as sure as geese at Michaelmas. He’s as false as can be, is Rawdon.”

“‘Then I think you were weak with him,’ I said. ‘Are you afraid of him?’

“‘It’s like this,’ said Ruth, with that great uneasy heave of the uneducated when confronted with the explanation of a problem beyond the scope of their vocabulary, ‘we never get straight. Rawdon and I. He cringes to me, and then I bully him; or else he bullies me, and then I cringe to him. But quarrel as we may, we always come together again. It’s no good,’ she said with a note of despair in her expressive voice like the melancholy of a violin, ‘we can’t get away from one another. We always come together again.’

“I was sad; I foresaw that those two would drift into marriage from pure physical need, though there might well be more hatred than love between them.

“In the meantime I tried, not always very successfully, to keep Ruth away from him; she liked being with me, I know, and I think she even welcomed a barrier between herself and her all-too compelling cousin, and so it came about that our Sunday afternoons were, as I have told you, usually spent together. There were times when she broke away from me, when the physical craving became, I suppose, too strong for her, and she would go back to Rawdon. But for the most part she would come after dinner on Sundays, silent and reserved, to see if I was disposed for a walk. She would come in her daily untidiness, with the colour blowing in her cheeks, as beautiful and as wild as a flower. I used to feel sorry for Westmacott and his hot blood.

“On these afternoons I tried my experiments on Ruth, and I sometimes wonder whether she ever caught me at the game, for she would give me a scared, distrustful glance, and turn her head away. She was curiously lazy for so hard a worker, and in sudden indolence she would refuse to move, but would lie on the ground idle and half asleep, and would do nothing but eat the sweets I gave her. I never saw a book in her hand. Once,” said Malory, throwing a bit of wood at the goats, “I thought I would convert her to Art. I brought out some treasured books, and showed her the pictures; she was neither bewildered, nor bored, nor impressed, nor puzzled; she simply thought the masterpieces unspeakably funny. She laughed.... I was absurdly offended at first, then I began to come round to her point of view, and now I am not at all sure that I don’t agree. She opened out for me a new attitude.

“After the failure of my pictures, I tried her with a more tangible object. I took her to Penshurst. In telling you of this I am making a very real sacrifice of my pride and self-respect, for, as sometimes happens, I have realised since, from my disinclination to dwell in my own mind upon the incident, that the little rapier of humiliation went deeper than I thought, down to that point in the heart where indifference ceases and essentials begin.”

As Malory said this, he looked at me with his quizzical, interrogative expression, as if to see how I was taking it. I noticed then that he had a crooked smile which gave to his face a quaint attraction. He was a clean-shaven man, with lean features and a dark skin; graying hair; I supposed him to be in the neighbourhood of forty.

“When I asked Ruth if she would come to Penshurst with me,” he continued, “she said she must change her dress. She was absent for about half an hour, while I waited in the garden and threw stones for the sheep-dog. When she joined me I saw that she had done her best to smarten herself up; she had frizzed her hair and put on a hat, and her blouse was decorated with some sort of lace—I can’t give you a closer description than that. I scarcely recognised her, and though I felt that I was expected to make some comment I knew at the same time that I was physically unable to do so. ‘How nice you look!’ were the words that my will hammered out in my brain, but the words that left my lips were, ‘Come along.’

“We started thus unpropitiously, and the strain between us was tautened at every step by the mood of excitement which possessed her. I had never known her like this before. Usually she was quiet, lazy about her speech, and not particularly apposite when she did make a remark, yet I had always found her a satisfactory companion. To-day she chattered volubly, and the painful conviction grew upon me that she was trying to be coy; she hinted that she had broken an appointment with Westmacott; I became more and more silent and miserable. I had anticipated with so much pleasure our going to Penshurst, and I knew now that the afternoon was to be a failure. When we reached the house, bad became worse; Ruth giggled in the rooms, and the housekeeper looked severely at her. She made terrible jokes about the pictures; giggled again; crammed her handkerchief against her mouth; pinched my arm. At last my endurance gave out, and I said, ‘We had better go home,’ and I thanked the housekeeper, and said we would find our own way out.

“Ruth was very crestfallen as we went silently across the park; she walked with hanging head beside me, and as I looked down on the top of her absurd hat I was almost sorry for her, but I was really annoyed, and childishly disappointed, so I said nothing, and stared gloomily in front of me. I thought that if I thus marked my disapproval of her sudden mood she would never repeat the experiment, and that next day she would return to her blue linen dress and her habitual reserve. I did not think she would make a scene, but rather that she would be glad to pass over the disaster in silence.

“I was surprised when she stopped abruptly.

“‘I suppose you’ll never take me out again?’ she said, as though the idea had been boiling wildly in her brain till it found a safety valve in her lips.

“‘My dear Ruth....’ I began.

“‘How cold you are!’ she cried violently, and she stamped her foot upon the ground. ‘Why don’t you get angry with me? shake me? abuse me? at any rate, say something. Only “my dear Ruth.” I suppose I’m not good enough for you to speak to. If that’s it, say so. I’ll go home a different way. What have I done? What’s wrong? What have I done?’

“I realised that she was in the grip of an emotion she could not control. Such emotions came over one but seldom in ordinary life, but when they come they are uncontrollable, for they spring from that point in the heart, which I was speaking of, where indifference ceases and essentials begin. Still, while realising this, I hardened myself against her.

“‘Nothing,’ I said, adding, ‘except failed to be yourself.’

“‘What do you want me to be?’ she asked, staring at me.

“‘My dear Ruth,’ I said, ‘I like you in blue linen.’

“I swear I only meant it symbolically; it was perhaps foolish of me to think she would understand. She went on staring at me for a moment, then a change came over her face, a wounded look, horrible to see, and I felt I had hurt a child, most grievously, but before I could rush into the breach I had made and build it up again with fair words, she had dropped her face into her hands and I saw that her shoulders were shaking. She uttered no word of reproach or self-justification, no plea; thereby increasing her pathos a hundredfold.

“I was distressed and embarrassed beyond measure; I hated myself, but I no longer hated her. I had begun to like her again in the brief period of her rage, and now in the period of her despair I liked her again completely. I implored her to stop crying, and I tried confusedly to explain my meaning.

“She would have none of my explanations, but turned on me cheeks flaming with a shame which forbade any allusion to her clothes. I could see that she was trembling from head to foot, and by the force of her authority over me I gauged the force of her emotion over herself. Genius and passion are alike compelling. Here was a Ruth I did not know, but it was a Ruth I had desired to see, and I triumphed secretly for having divined her under the Ruth of every day.

“Well,” said Malory, “I have made my confession now, for it partakes of the nature of confession. I never saw that piteous finery again, and I never saw the mood that matched it. She calmed down at length, and we made a compact of friendship, but if ever the name of Penshurst arose in conversation I saw the scarlet flags fluttering in her cheeks.

“Meanwhile the familiarity of the place grew on me, as I had foreseen, and there were many inmates of the farm, now old-established, whom I had known since their birth; plants and animals alike. We were haymaking, a common enough pursuit, but to me full of delight; I loved the ready fields, the unceasing whirr and rattle of the cutter, the browning grass as it lay where it had fallen, and the rough wooden rake in my hand. I loved the curve of the fields over the hill, and the ridges of hay stretching away like furrows. Above all I loved the great stack, which swallowed up the cart-loads one by one, and the green tarpaulins furled above it, which made it look like a galleon with sails and rigging.

“I told you I had dipped into many things; I worked once on a Greek trader which plied with figs and oranges from Smyrna to Corinth through the islands of the Ægean. It was a bulky, mediæval-looking vessel, with vast red sails, very little changed, I should imagine, from the one in which Ulysses sailed on his immortal journey. I learnt a certain amount about the orange trade, but I learnt another thing from that Greek ship which I value more: I learnt about colour, hot, tawny colour, that ran the gamut from the bronze limbs of the crew, through the Venetian sails, to the fire of the fruit, and echoed again in the sunset behind Hymettus, and dropped in the cool aquamarine of the waves near the shore, and deepened into sapphire as I hung over the sides of the ship above the moving water. From this rich canvas I had come to the grays and greens and browns of England, the dove after the bird of Paradise, and do you know, I felt the relationship of the two, the relationship of labour between the Greek, the almost pirate, crew, and the English farmer with his classic and primitive tools, the brotherhood between the sweeping scythe and the dipping oar, between the unwieldy stack and the clumsy vessel.

“The scent of the hay is in my nostrils, and the stirring is in my arms to throw up my fork-load upon the cart. We worked sometimes till ten at night, a race with the weather; we worked by sunlight and moonlight, and I preferred the latter. You may think that I preferred it because it pleased me to see the round yellow moon come up from behind the trees, and light that wholesome scene with its unwholesome radiance, like a portrait of Hercules, naked, by Aubrey Beardsley? Well, you are wrong. I preferred it because I got less hot.

“Rawdon Westmacott used to come over to help us. A pair of extra hands was welcome, but I think old Pennistan would rather the hands had been tied on to any other body. It was quite clear that he neglected his own farm only to be near Ruth, and I had long since gathered that the Pennistans would never willingly consider him as a son-in-law. I sympathised with them. He was an unruly man, as wild as he was handsome, a byword among the young men of the countryside; prompt with his fist—that was perhaps the best thing that could be said of him—foul with his tongue, intolerable when in his cups. So quarrelsome was he that even when sober he would seek out cause for insult. I myself, who in my capacity of guest took every precaution to avoid any unpleasantness, had an ominous encounter with him. I had spent a day in London, and returned with various little gifts which I had thought would please the Pennistans; to Ruth I brought a pair of big, round, brass ear-rings and a coloured scarf, for I had a fancy to see her tricked out as a gipsy. It entertained me to see her, who as I have told you was habitually slow of mind, enthusiasm, and speech, respond with some latent instinct to the gaudy things. She ran to the glass in the kitchen and began to screw the rings on to her unpierced ears.

“‘You must learn to dance now, Ruth,’ I said.

“She looked round at me, and in the turn of her head and the flash of the rings I seemed to see Concha of the gipsy booth.

“‘Father doesn’t hold with dancing,’ she replied.

“‘He isn’t here to see,’ I said. ‘Won’t you try a step?’

“She blushed. It was a pretty sight to see her blush.

“‘I don’t know how,’ she said awkwardly, looking away from me into the glass as she wound the scarf round her neck.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘will you learn if I have you taught?’

“She burst into the shrill laugh of the common girl, and cried, ‘Get along with you, Mr. Malory! making fun of a poor girl like me.’

“Concha was gone, but I struggled to revive her, without conviction, and with a queer blankness in my heart. At least,” said Malory, correcting himself, “it wasn’t my heart, but my mind, my sense of rightness, that was disappointed.

“‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I’ll have you taught the dances of Spain.’

“‘Spain?’ she echoed, with a frown genuinely puzzled, so remote from her was all thought of the land of her wandering forefathers.