Chapter X: Part TWO: Part Two (4)

“My God,” said Calladine, staring at the pallet, “they lay there last night,--they lay there!” He looked round the pitiful cabin, and a groan was forced from him. “He brought her here!” he said, “and I who gave her everything she could desire,--comfort, even beauty, refinement....” He sat down and buried his face, and touched perhaps the bitterest moment he had yet gone through. “How much she must have loved him,” he said, raising a suddenly haggard face to Mr. Warrener.

Mr. Warrener was deeply perturbed and distressed. Such things were altogether beyond his experience and understanding.

“Hush,--don’t take it so much to heart,” he said, confused, but meaning to be kind, and he touched Calladine on the shoulder with a gesture singularly awkward. “Now let us think what is to be done. Shall we remain here, and trust to their return at nightfall? It is true that we could not, all four of us, spend the night in this hut, but probably Lovel knows the way,--he can take us all home safely.”

“You seem to have a curious confidence in the fellow,” growled Calladine.

Mr. Warrener blinked in his mild fashion.

“Yes,--I don’t quite know why,” he said, “except that I’ve seen him about the village,--he seemed an alert, romantic kind of creature.--Forgive me, I see that pains you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Calladine, ironical.

“We must wait,--there is nothing else to be done,” said Mr. Warrener, reluctantly.

“No,” said Calladine, rousing himself to a sudden determination, “I will wait, but you, Mr. Warrener, must make your way home while daylight lasts. You will only have to follow our own tracks in the snow. Indeed, I should prefer it,” he said, seeing the old man hesitate, and gently he took Mr. Warrener by the arm and urged him out of the hut. A hard cruel sun was already setting red behind a clump of beeches. The white sky became suffused with crimson in the west; on the rounded tops of the hills the snow flushed to pink. But it was a hard, cruel world that they saw, the hard red of the snow where the sunset did not catch it. The line of the beech-clump curved already across the slowly sinking sun, and presently hid it altogether from sight; the tops of the hills lost their flush, and only a few red bars lingered still in the sky.

“What a desolate spot!” exclaimed Mr. Warrener, impressed, “and what a spot,” he went on, “for a shepherd to study the courses of the stars, for such has been the tradition of shepherds since the days when the known world was not one tithe of the size we now learn it to be. Think of that, Calladine,” said the old man, warming to his subject, “those early shepherds on the hills were more conversant with the cycle of the heavenly bodies than with the distribution of their own planet. A fine tradition among shepherds--for what else have they to do? They don’t read in books, but they read in the heavens through the long, lonely nights; and observe, Calladine, that in winter, when the pleasures of the earth are less, the heavens in compensation treble their magnificence. I don’t believe that a man who spends his nights alone in the open remains similar to other men. He’s soaked in the sense of space; and young Lovel....”

“Yes, yes,” said Calladine impatiently, “but there is no time to be lost if you are to reach King’s Avon before dark. Follow our tracks; there are no other tracks to confuse you, for it snowed a little this morning; indeed, there is still snow about in the air.”

“I don’t like to leave you alone in this lonely place,” said Mr. Warrener, still hesitating.

“Doubtless Clare and Lovel found no fault with its loneliness last night,” Calladine replied harshly.

“My dear Richard,” said Mr. Warrener, vexed at his son-in-law’s harping on this theme, “I am sure you distress yourself unnecessarily. Clare will be able to reassure you,--and she is a very truthful child,” he added, with a certain pleading pathos, as though to justify his upbringing of her.

“Where, then, did the man sleep?” said Calladine, turning on him. “Supposing he gave Clare the pallet, where did he pass the night himself? Tell me that.”

“Why, I don’t know,--sitting up, I suppose,--he could lean his back against the wall,” replied Mr. Warrener.

Finally he consented to go, and set off, Calladine watching him until after trudging up the hill he topped its crest and was lost to sight. Calladine then, a prey to such loneliness as he had never dreamt, returned into the hut to wait. Twilight came, the long, cold, late-winter twilight when the world seems dead. The last vestiges of colour faded out of the west. Such sharp shadows as there had been, merged into a greyer, universal shadow; the hard black and the hard white turned to grey, vast and mournful; the sky was all grey now, and the dusk heavy with impending snow. The quietness and the poverty of the hut settled down round Calladine. He had examined its few poor resources, fingering the utensils he found in the little cupboard on the wall, the tea-pot, the canister of tea and sugar, the rasher of bacon put ready on a plate; but now he sat listless, with hanging hands, and not so much as a sound came to make him raise his head. He did not know how long he sat there. The darkness deepened; soon the black night was again over the Downs, vaulted; the big golden stars, and the dim huge shapes of the hills. He was without sensation, numb, having the consciousness only of his extreme solitude. So numb was he, that he was scarcely aware what he waited for. He simply sat on, in complete darkness now, feeling neither hunger nor cold, forgetful almost of his sorrow, patient only like a man condemned to an indefinite suspense.

When he heard the sound of a voice singing out on the hill, he raised his head and waited. The voice drew nearer, singing a cheerful song; it trilled and carolled, as in an exuberant lightheartedness. To Calladine it came with a strange effect, this voice singing out in the night, unexplained, bearing down upon the hut, frivolous and rollicking. Suddenly it sounded quite close, outside. The door was torn open, a figure carrying a lantern appeared on the threshold, and Calladine beheld the grinning face and battered hat of Olver Lovel.

The boy carried parcels in his arms, besides the lantern swinging from his wrist. He appeared in excellent spirits, grinning broadly, skipping as he stood on the threshold of the door, with little excited skips from foot to foot. He seemed scarcely able to contain his high spirits and his excitement. When he saw that the hut was already occupied, he gaped stupidly, then burst into peals of laughter. Calladine, remaining seated, looked at him without a word. He perceived nothing startling in the advent of this apparition, apathetic as he was, and at the same time strung up to the most improbable occurrences. It seemed to him quite natural that Olver should stand shouting with laughter in the doorway; he saw nothing grotesque in the encounter of himself with the crazy boy out in this hut on the hills. Clare!--this was the note to which Clare had re-tuned his life.

“Mr. Calladine!” said Olver, ceasing from his laughter. He came forward and put his parcels and his lantern down on the table. Its rays illuminated the little hut. “So you were waiting for them, sitting here in the dark, were you?” he observed.

“Will they come?” asked Calladine.

“Oh yes, they’ll come,” replied Olver easily. “But they won’t let you stop here, you know,” he added. “No, nor me either,” he pursued, coming closer to Calladine and speaking confidentially. “They’ll put us both out into the snow, get-yourselves-home-as-best-you-can. They won’t care. They won’t notice us, scarcely. They’re in a dream. Nod to me, perhaps; give me a pat, like a dog. Good Olver; he brings our food. But do they eat it? they seem like they don’t need food.”

“Have you seen them, then?” said Calladine.

“Seen them? Lord bless you, yes; and seen you too, wandering round with Daisy. I was behind you, many and many a time, but you didn’t turn.”

He began now to unpack his parcels, bringing out a loaf of bread, a tin of milk, some eggs, and finally some raw meat in slices. Calladine watched him in silence. He disposed of everything in a business-like manner, fetching two plates out of the cupboard, laying the table, putting ready the tea-pot and the canister.

“You might well have lit the lamp for them,” he said reproachfully to Calladine.

He lit the little paraffin lamp himself, and the hut was further irradiated by its yellow glow. The hut made now a patch of warmth and light among the cold, dark hills; a box of light, like a star in the blackness of space. Calladine felt the warmth creep through him, as though he were admitted to a hint of the sufficient and radiant secret of those lovers. The poverty of the shelter disappeared now, in the golden warmth of the light from within. And he felt that he, and not they, was the pauper.

Olver meanwhile had set the meat to fry over the lamp. It frizzled as he turned it with a fork, and he crouched over it, humming his song. “You seem very well contented,” said Calladine.

Olver looked up, having forgotten Calladine’s presence.

“I am contented, because Nicholas is happy,” he replied.

“Simple enough!” said Calladine.

“But she is happy too,” said Olver, sitting back on his heels and staring at Calladine.

“He is only a mad boy,” thought Calladine to himself.

Olver sang. He sang an old song, of a girl drowned in the mill-pool because she had lost her lover. The wistful beat of the ballad came back at the end of each verse; it droned on, with mournful persistence. At last Calladine could bear its monotony no longer, and asked, “When will they come?”

Olver shrugged. “Who can tell?”

“Where are they?” Calladine asked.

Olver shrugged again. “Who can tell?”

Calladine remembered how often he had asked Clare, “Where have you been? where have you been?”

He remembered that her answers had never left him any the wiser; he had never come near to what he really wanted to know.

What was it, indeed, that he had really wanted to know? the whole secret of her being, to be explained in a dozen words?

He said to Olver, “It is night, it is cold; have they lost their way out on the hills?”

Olver laughed at him. “Lost? They?”

“They are only human!” cried Calladine, afraid. He got up and stood over Olver. “Tell me, they are human, aren’t they?”

Olver laughed again.

Calladine went to the door. He opened it and looked out; the cold met him, and the stars in the blackness. “Clare!” he cried. “Clare!”

“I am going mad,” he said to himself. “I am going out of my mind.”

Looking back into the hut, he saw Olver still on his knees on the floor, prodding at the meat over the lamp. He went back, bent down, and cried close to Olver’s ear, “What are we doing here? they are keeping us waiting.”

“We don’t count,” replied Olver indifferently.

He began his song again. He had taken his mirror from his pocket, and was squinting into it, at the reflection of the hut; on each beat of the measure, he nodded down towards it.

“Her hair was tangled in the reeds.
Her hair so gold and gay,”

he sang.

“Would you like to look into my mirror?” he asked Calladine.

An idea took him; he scrambled to his feet.

“They’re all afraid of my mirror,” he said. “_She_ wouldn’t look into it, for fear of what she might see there. But you shall look. Look into it now, and you’ll see them; you shall see them as they were in here, last night.”

Calladine pushed him away; made him stagger against the wall of the hut.

“You would see them! you would see them!” cried Olver, delighted.

Neither of them noticed that the door had opened, and that Lovel stood in the hut.

“Nicco!” cried Olver.

Calladine wheeled round. Clare came into the hut, and her face shone out like Lovel’s, both golden in the light, both arrested in the midst of their carelessness.

Lovel spoke to Calladine.

“This was the only place we had,” he said, “couldn’t you leave it to us?”

Clare looked at Calladine; her face wore that oblique, fugitive look which he had known, and loved, and dreaded.

She turned to Lovel, and they swayed towards one another as though something drew them.

“We had better go,” she said, inviting him.

“Yes,” he replied, drifting idly on the stream of her will, of their common will, one with her.

She gave him her hand, and in the gold light they hung briefly, transient creatures of eternal flight. The curtain of night and stars stretched behind them, in the rectangle of the open door.

“The scenery is set!” cried Calladine hysterically, pointing with his hand.

The rays of the lantern streamed out towards the snow, gilding a path up the whiteness, quickly lost into the dark.

“They need no shelter,” cried Calladine.

The hills were outside, waiting, and the stars, silent.

“Why linger?” cried Calladine to Clare and Lovel.

They faded into the night, noiseless and swift. Calladine ran out of the hut, he ran up and down, he cried “Clare! Clare!” and the hills answered him. He came back into the hut, where Olver, dancing, held the mirror up to his eyes. “Look! and you shall see them.” He dashed the mirror out of Olver’s hand; it smashed upon the ground. “You will never see them again, now,” cried Olver, “you will never see them again.”

+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber’s note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+