Chapter III: Part ONE: Grey Wethers (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well,--and humbug?” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several of their neighbours were watching the scene with amusement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So much the better,” said Daisy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their eyes met.

“Let us go,” said Lovel irresistibly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I cannot go,” said Lovel moodily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” Nicholas answered.

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

“Jealousy,” said Lovel, with suppressed fury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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