Chapter II: Part ONE: Grey Wethers (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dying?” she exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stamped her foot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not deep!” he called to her.

She ventured a few steps further.

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

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

“Very few know it,” he replied cryptically.

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

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

“Does it matter to you what they say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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