Chapter IV: Part ONE: Grey Wethers (4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“True,” said Lovel, “I am obliged to go out to work to make money for you and Olver, but Olver can come with me, and so he shall.”

“And leave me alone here to die, if so be,” said the old woman, beginning to whimper, and she snuffled into her bed-clothes, and said that Nicholas was a cruel son to her.

“The remedy lies with you,” he said quietly; and then, straightening the clothes for her again, he told her that he would not take Olver away from her unless she obliged him to. “But I am responsible for Olver,” he added, “and we are ill enough looked upon in the village already; you know, mother, that I must keep Olver in order, and his brain is too weak to be trusted with dangerous matter.” He wondered why he took the trouble to say this, since he knew that it was useless attempting to appeal to the old woman’s good sense or better feelings, as she had neither.

She only laughed again. He paused beside her for a moment, but there was nothing more to say, and wishing her good-night he took up the candle and left the room. Out in the passage he heard her voice calling him back.

“Matches, Nicholas: let me have the matches to-night.” He shook his head in refusal. “Cruel to me, Nicholas; and my own son too: cruel and hard; he bullies us both....” Lovel shut the door and went downstairs, but the mumble of her complaining pursued him still.

Olver crouched by the fire between the dogs, his curls almost as matted as their pelt. He eyed his brother from under his brows, as though he expected to be scolded. Lovel however only said quietly, “I shall remain at home to-morrow, and if you choose you can go to the Manor House for me.” He let fall this remark in the midst of his occupation of clearing the room before going to bed; he let it fall so casually that no trace appeared of the effort it cost him. “But if you should see Miss Warrener,” he added, “you must breathe no word of the folly you uttered to me. I must have your word on that, you have never yet broken your word to me.”

“I will not tell Miss Warrener,” said Olver.

Lovel was satisfied.

Olver set out early on the following morning, carrying his basket of tools slung on his back, and a number of clean new planks, smelling of resin, under his arm. Nicholas stood at the door to watch him go, envious, regretful, but sturdy in his determination. Olver walked quickly up the village street; the morning was bright; he felt good and competent this morning, and full of importance: not only had Nicholas trusted him to do his work, but he was full of a private intention to spy out the land at the Manor House; if Nicholas wanted Clare, why, then Nicholas must have what he wanted; it seemed to Olver quite simple and direct. He turned in at the gates of the Manor House, pleased by the pretty garden and the cool house with its long windows and open shutters. The lowering mood which was usual to him receded further and further; it was pleasant to feel so good; he looked all round him as he walked, smiling. The door was opened to him by Martha Sparrow in a clean cap and apron; he wanted to kiss her soft old face, which looked as though it smelt of soap, but instead of doing that he pulled off his cap very civilly and said that he had come to fix the bookshelves since his brother was unable. Martha Sparrow looked at his tight curls and thought with surprise that he was an agreeable-looking lad; telling him to wait a moment, she left him on the doorstep and went to Mr. Warrener. “Young Lovel, sir,” she said, “have sent the zany in his stead.”

Mr. Warrener had forgotten all about the book-shelves; he pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and stared at Martha.

“Sent the zany, Martha? What for?”

Martha respectfully and patiently reminded him.

“To be sure, to be sure.” He turned and surveyed with a helpless resentment the books piled up in a corner of his room. “Bring him in, Martha,” he said, resignedly.

“You’ll have him in the room, sir, then?” said Martha dubiously.

“Why not? why not? to be sure, he has to put up the shelves,” replied Mr. Warrener, scenting disapproval.

“These gipsies, sir ... and the zany as naughty as a magpie?”

“I’ll stop with him, Martha,” said Mr. Warrener, who before the rebuke of his old servant instantly became a great coward.

He could not, however, endure the noise of sawing and nailing which began as soon as Olver had spread out his dust-sheet on the floor, but took his bee-hive hat and stole quietly away from the room. He greatly preferred that Olver should do the work wrong, or even that he should pilfer in the room, than that he should himself have to remain at hand to supervise or to furnish any further directions. He therefore retreated to a bench at the remotest corner of the garden, hoping that Martha would not detect him, where, taking his book from his pocket, he gave himself up to his interrupted reading, to the pleasant accompaniment of the bees busy in the limes, and of the distant small noises of a summer day. He had soon forgotten Martha’s remonstrance, and vaguely relied as usual on Clare guessing his wishes, as indeed she always seemed to do, and seeing to it on his behalf that Olver Lovel made no impossible mistake over the shelves.

Before Olver had been at work very long he became aware that Mr. Warrener was no longer in the room. He sat back on his heels and examined his surroundings. The soft carpet and deep chairs especially took his fancy, and he was much impressed by the spacious writing table littered with so many papers, and the number of reference books, held open at a special page by various incongruous objects, this one by a piece of flint, that one by a ruler, and yet a third by the shoe-horn brought down from Mr. Warrener’s dressing-table. Olver rose to his feet, and tip-toed about, looking at the books and at the specimens of pottery, bones, arrow-heads, and what not, in the show cases which composed Mr. Warrener’s little museum. Arrived at the chimney piece he came to a pause, for here he discovered an object which pleased him more than anything he had ever seen, namely a small circular mirror, mounted on a handle, which by reason of its convexity had the property of reflecting everything in a slight distortion,--small, brilliant, precise and peculiar. He was so fascinated by this toy that he ventured to pick it up; first he looked at his own face in it, and laughed childishly to see the widened cheek-bones, the slanting and Puckish eyes; then he turned it this way and that, to make it reflect different corners of the room; and finally he got a tiny picture of the garden in it, seen through the windows, with a miniature Mr. Warrener sitting on a bench, slightly out of focus, in the background. So absorbed was he that he did not notice the entrance of Clare; she came in, wearing a dress of sprigged muslin, and swinging her hat by its ribbons from her hand, and she entered with just that degree of nonchalance which would have led a shrewd observer to the certainty that she expected to find in the room some person other than the person she actually found. So it was that they both appeared, and Olver gaped at her, very much taken aback at being discovered on the side of the room opposite to his work, and with the mirror in his hand.

“Why, I understand Martha to say that Lovel was here,” Clare said inconsequently.

Olver seemed to find no reply; he stood, holding the mirror, and scrutinizing Clare as though he beheld an unbelievable vision, and yet wished to be certain of recollecting that vision in every detail. In the diversion of the mirror he had momentarily forgotten not only his work, but also the ulterior motive for which he had come. He now remembered both. So this was the lass that Nicco wanted! Olver, envisaging such desires with the utmost crudeness, was not in the least surprised. He would not have cared for the lass himself,--she was too limber of build for him,--but he could see her very well as the complement of Nicco, his swarthiness and her fairness side by side.

“He could not come; I am here for him,” he replied at last, thinking himself very artful for saying “he could not” instead of “he would not.”

“Was he busy?” asked Clare.

“No,” said Olver heedlessly, for he was now thinking of the mirror and wondering how he could dispose of it before she should observe it in his hand, “he has stayed at home.”

“Oh,” said Clare. She saw the mirror. “Why, what are you doing with that?” she asked, amused, and she looked brightly and interrogatively at him.

Seeing that she was not angry, he gave a shy smile and looked into the mirror once again, laughing delightedly at the little picture of his own face, and glancing at Clare.

“Do you like it? you may have it for your own if you like,” she said, partly because he was simple, and partly because he was her friend Lovel’s brother, and she knew that he would show it to Lovel.

“For my own? But can you give it to me?” said Olver, clasping his treasure and grinning.

“Yes, it is mine, so I can give it to you. Would you like it?”

“But this is Mr. Warrener’s room.”

“Yes, but the mirror is mine for all that--_was_ mine, I should say, since it is yours now.”

“Really and truly mine? to take home with me? to break if I like?”

“Really and truly yours; but you must try not to break it: a broken mirror brings bad luck on a house.”

“There is bad luck enough on our house already without that,” said Olver, suddenly gloomy.

“Bad luck,--how do you mean?”

“I don’t know; Nicco says so sometimes, when he has a black fit on him.”

“Nicco?”

“My brother.”

It was a little shock to her to find that Lovel, whom she knew only as a figure so detached and self-reliant, should own a childish name. It seemed to make him suddenly human; her eyes softened.

“Does he often have a black fit on him?” she pursued, but as soon as she had spoken the words her loyalty repented of them, and she said, “No, you should not tell me.”

“There is no harm,” said Olver, thinking that he saw a chance to interest her; and he went on, steering away from direct allusion to his brother until he should see a chance to draw round again insensibly to that subject. “My mother says always that our house is unlucky, and, according to her interpretation, ’tis because of the stones that built it,--sacrificial stones, you know they be, Miss Warrener, angered at the desecration. So says my mother, and she should know, seeing that her mother was hanged for a witch, as is common talk hereabouts, and for once the common talk is true. But for my part I have never been able to see that our house was unlucky; we have enough to eat, and a fire to warm ourselves by, though, indeed,” he added, as though the idea had but just now occurred to him, “that is thanks to my brother, and I do not know how my mother and myself would fare but for him,--hee! hee!”

Clare was far too honest to wish to play the spy upon Lovel, yet she was so much impressed by this suggestion of the half-wit youth and his bedridden mother being left to their own devices, and feeling moreover that the most scrupulous conscience could not accuse her of spying upon Lovel when she was to hear something to his credit, that she did not forbear from encouraging Olver, “I have heard that his devotion to you both was extreme.”

Olver needed no encouragement.

“Without him, I should die. It is true that sometimes he is stern, and he sits staring into the fire, and I can get no word from him, but I have learnt that at those times he is unhappy. But he is so gentle, Miss Warrener, you would not believe; at one moment he will seem withdrawn and angry, and the next moment he is all pity. He gives his life up to us; he does not say so, but I know he does. Once when I was a child the village boys threw stones at me, as they might at a dog, but Nicholas he came and beat them all with his fists and carried me home in his arms, and never left me till I was mended.”

“He has a great affection for you,” said Clare, not knowing what to say.

“Oh no,--that is quite impossible,” Olver replied naïvely, surprised at the suggestion.

Clare was touched by his humility, so obviously genuine. It seemed to him, indeed impossible that the demi-god who in his eyes was Lovel, should stoop to any feelings other than pity and obligation towards a poor contemptible burden like himself. Clare began to catch the infection of this idealisation of Lovel; she saw him through Olver’s eyes: humane where he need only have been conscientious; generous where he need only have been just; yet preserving always that aloofness and detachment which safeguarded him from all true contact with sordid things. When she had met him on the highway, or on the Downs, she had not wondered much about the background of his life; she had accepted him as an isolated and romantic figure, organic with the Downs themselves; to her, he was the rider on the skyline, the shepherd of the folds.

“There’s a girl in the village would give five years of life for a kind word from Nicholas,” Olver pursued, considering himself meanwhile in his mirror with an air of great detachment, “but Nicholas has no eye for girls. Oh, see,” he broke off, pointing at the mirror, “my face is like seen in water,--stretched wide. I often saw it so in a spoon, but I never dreamt of so pretty a toy as this. Has it magical properties, do you think? It should have, to match its freakishness. Could I look into it, do you think, in the moonlight, and see the picture, all pale, of what you were doing, Miss Warrener, in the face of the mirror, round like another little moon itself?”

Clare was startled by his outburst, and the laughter that accompanied it. Until then she had almost forgotten that he was reputed mad.

“I’ll ask my mother,” he added, forgetting his prudence in his excitement. “Nicco does not like my learning of her, so we have to whisper it when he is away from the house, and you could not believe the things she tells me. And shows me, too. Why, I can make an object travel towards me, without touching it; and I have seen visions in a pool of water. It is our secret. Shall I show you? Watch the curtains: I will make them belly out, though no wind blows them.”

“No ...” said Clare, stretching out her hand. “If you love your brother as you appear to,” she said rapidly, “don’t do what he disapproves; don’t, Olver Lovel. I am sure he is right to disapprove; I am sure he is wise. Respect him. I am sure he deserves your respect.”

She spoke with energy. “Why?” said Olver suspiciously. “Do you know anything of such things? Would you not like to see the curtains move towards me? My mother says, that with a hair from the head of a person, she could bring that person, willy-nilly, to her. She has tried it with Nicholas, but she could not bring him. He is too strong. He is so strong, that, if he gave his mind to it, he could bring any one; yes, Miss Warrener, he could bring you. He could bring you to him on the Downs, at midnight or when he would.”

“For pity’s sake, Olver Lovel!” cried Clare.

He came close up to her.

“Don’t fear my brother, Miss Warrener. There are powers in our family,--but he does not practise them. I think he does not believe. He is scornful,--and busy. Oh, he is a fool; that girl I was telling you of, he turns away from her and half a dozen more. A dandy lad, they say, and are angry. But that is not the reason. I could tell you the reason, if I would. But I shan’t. No, Miss Warrener, I keep my counsel.”

He leered at her. “Give me your hand,” he said, catching it, “and I will show you something.”

“No,” said Clare, trying to draw it away. “Look at your bookshelves,” she added, to distract his ideas, “you are leaving them unfinished, and my father will be in presently, to ask why they are not done. If he takes it into his head to be annoyed, he will complain to your brother.”

“Nicholas won’t listen to complaints about me,” Olver returned loftily. “He may curse me within our own doors, but no one from outside may say a word against me. If Mr. Warrener complains, he will only tell him not to employ me again. We don’t care whether we are given work or not, Nicholas and I don’t.”

“You forget,” said Clare, “that my father sent for your brother and not for you.”

“Ah, but he wouldn’t come, would he?” said Olver, highly amused. She was relieved to see that he had got out of his sinister mood and was again prepared to laugh and be childish. “You don’t know, because you didn’t see him, Miss Warrener, how he sat glowering at the fire last night, and ended by telling me that I could come here in his place. You don’t see him at nights, when he comes home tired and has to be patient with our mother. He’s patient with her, yes; but he’d get on better if he humoured her more: he’s too unbending.”

“How shrewd you are, Olver,” Clare was surprised into saying.

“Hoi, hoi,” said Olver, wagging his head. “I know my Nicholas; he’ll break sooner than bend. I told him he could come, and take the chance of not meeting--the person he didn’t want to meet; but he wouldn’t have that, not he. He’s stayed at home, to dig in the garden. Time and again, he takes a day or an afternoon off to do that, for he’s mighty fond of the garden, and that’s queer, seeing that his days are spent on the bare Downs, whether or not his business sends him there, where nothing grew that I ever saw, but sorrel and poor grasses.”

Clare wondered how she could best end the conversation, in which Olver hovered evidently around some topic he might not broach, but she did not forbear from smiling when he mentioned Lovel in his garden; she had often seen the garden at the end of the long, tunnel-like passage as she turned down the village street; and the little picture of Lovel’s affection for it was like discovering a patch of sun in a thunderous landscape. Olver meanwhile had turned back to his planks and tools; he was fingering the latter; the little round mirror he had put carefully into his pocket. “I am a good carpenter, you know, Miss Warrener,” he said, as though he were letting her into a secret, and she saw that his attention had changed its object.

Nevertheless she wondered greatly at Lovel’s refusal to do work at the Manor House. She wondered whether she had inadvertently offended him, but could recall nothing; their last meeting had been as friendly as ever, nor had his manner in any way betrayed anything amiss. He was, however, so strange and fiery a creature, so unaccountable in his moods, that some chance word of hers might well have rankled, grown during the night, and borne fruit upon the following day. She went carefully in her mind over their recent conversations, which, happily inconsequent and spasmodic, were a little difficult to recollect in detail; but she achieved this feat, smiling again with a little heartache over Lovel’s remarks about children,--ah, what a good friendship it had been!--but her sifting of their talks revealed nothing. She went about the house, still wondering after Lovel. What if she had imagined the whole thing? What if he had been genuinely prevented? the hints that Olver had let drop might well be the progeny only of that sickly brain. Revived by this idea, yet apprehensive of its allusion, she sought out William Baskett and sent him off to Lovel with a message. “Say to him, William, that I have a small repair to be done to the cupboard in my room, and beg him to come with his bag of tools as quickly as may be. Say that it is a neat job I require or I would not otherwise disturb him. Say that it is in my room, and for my own particular use.”

A quarter of an hour later William returned: Lovel must ask Miss Warrener to excuse him, he was busy and could not come.

At that Clare flamed into anger. What! she held out an olive branch to the man, over some imaginary affront, and he rejected it? Very well. Let him nurse his grievance; he should not be given another chance. She was all the angrier with him because she was angry with herself for having sent a verbal message by Baskett; the story, conceivably, would be repeated at the Waggon of Hay, in which case it would be all over the village; she ought to have written Lovel a note. The whole of her day was spoilt by her resentment; it pricked her constantly through all her occupations; she dared not go outside the gates for fear of meeting the offender; she hated him for thus disturbing her peace of mind and inconveniencing her movements. One thing at least was clear by now, that he was deliberately avoiding her. He should not have cause to complain that she sought him out.

But by the next day her mood was already softened and her conscience again at work. She was sorry to think that she might, however unintentionally, have hurt him so deeply. Poor Lovel! his position and his family made her over-sensitive. She would not willingly add to his burden. Perhaps he was already regretting a too hasty refusal. But how to approach him as it were by chance? for she felt she would sooner lose his friendship altogether than send a second message to his house. There was one very obvious course open to her: she took her pony and rode up to the Downs.

But although she rode up to the White Horse, and down again to the Grey Wethers, and round by Lovel’s hut, and skirted most of the valleys where there was likely shelter and pasture for sheep, she saw no sign of Lovel. She was again angry with him for not being there, nor did the fact that he followed many trades besides that of a shepherd do anything to soothe her annoyance. She came back, entering the village on the farther side to avoid passing his house. She felt as though something whose value she had never realised while she still possessed it, had gone out of her life; and here again she found cause for anger with Lovel.

But she could not remain angry with him for very long together. She wondered what he was doing; whether he missed her as much as she missed him; whether his mood had passed by now into a sulky childish obstinacy that was determined not to make the first advance, but that, if it were dragged out of its corner, could be willing enough to be coaxed into making friends. Clare smiled fondly as she thought how well she knew him. She thought that she had only to meet him face to face for laughter to spring into his eyes,--laughter both at the relief of their reconciliation, and at himself for his past foolishness.

In the meantime she fell to dwelling upon his occupations, and recalling all the gossip she had ever heard on his account, the stories of his skill, and of his almost miraculous cures performed upon ailing animals; of his breaking-in colts in record time; of his more illicit career as a poacher. There was something in her which enjoyed this train of thought and the pictures it evoked. She liked to think of Lovel moving as stealthy as a cat through the woods at midnight, a snare in his hand and a game-bag across his back. She liked to think of him thus alone with the woods, the night, and the slinking animals, his foot cautious upon the leaves; she thought that he must be happy thus. She even liked to think of him bending over his victim, and of the warm, smoking blood spurted over his hands. Although he hunted them, he had a kinship with the animals. When he crouched, motionless as a hare, at the approach of a keeper, he, the hunter, was suddenly on the animals’ side more truly than the keeper, who was there to protect them. There was something ridiculous in the idea of a keeper protecting the animals against Lovel; even the rabbit squealing in the noose must know that only by chance was Lovel out for its capture,--an enemy of superior force, merely, rather than anything so utterly removed as a man.

All this dwelling upon Lovel, which sent her absent-minded about the house and garden, did not bring her any nearer to making her peace with him. She was now no longer angry, but sore and puzzled, and she was sure that he must be unhappy too, although she knew that even after their reconciliation,--ultimately inevitable, to her mind,--he would never own to this. The necessity of this reconciliation seemed to her so simple and so obvious that she never thought of questioning her pride. Daily she rode upon the Down, and daily as she returned disappointed she contemplated in greater detail the possibility of sending, after all, a second message to Lovel. She could even send it in her father’s name. But he would not come. She was convinced he would not come. That was not the method to adopt. She must take him by surprise; she must startle him; appear suddenly before him, so that he would smile before he had time to remember his grievance, and, having once smiled, it would be too late to resume a severe face.

In the midst of this pre-occupation, she almost forgot Calladine, that theatrical man, and the excitability of his manner recently towards her. She had not seen him again, for which she was thankful; she could not have met him without embarrassment. The idea of marriage was incongruous and slightly absurd. She belonged to herself, and to herself only; and the suggestion that Calladine or any one else should wish to capture her was not serious but merely laughable. It had not occurred to her that he, as well as Lovel, might be unhappy on her account; such a thought would have distressed her exceedingly. It was entirely without thought of Calladine, save for an occasional fleeting hope that he might not have chosen to ride in the direction as herself, that she roved over the Downs in search of Lovel. A fortnight passed before she found him. She could, doubtless, have met him long before by simply walking down the village street, but that would not have been at all to her purpose, and she had in fact been at pains to avoid any such encounter. At the end of a fortnight, having ridden up to the White Horse, from where the widest view was to be obtained, she discerned a long way off, up by the clump of beeches on the horizon, a flock of sheep accompanied by a shepherd. Unhesitatingly, even gaily, she started off in his pursuit. She was happy to think that their long estrangement was drawing to its end. She skipped in her mind over the preliminaries which must be got over before they could take up their friendship again on its old easy terms. She, with a mind impatient of all but essentials, would preferably have dispensed with these preliminaries, explanations, upbraidings, and possibly abuse. She wanted to waste no time; there were so many things she wanted to tell him; she wanted to tell him how her pony had gone lame from picking up a stone in his shoe; she wanted to tell him again of the melancholy effect produced upon her by her visit to Starvecrow; she wanted to ask him to splice her trout-rod and come with her one evening down to the quiet pool of the brook. Her eagerness grew with the seething of these small schemes as she urged her pony across the grass. She was approaching Lovel by a devious way, going down into the valleys, where she would escape his notice, until she could strike directly up the hill and top the crest suddenly before his eyes. Her own eyes sparkled over the precautions she was taking. She thought that she had now gone far enough along the low reaches of the valleys, and set her pony at the hill; they mounted the long, steep incline, like going upon an adventure.

On the breeze came the tinkling of the sheep-bells, as the flock moved cropping.

She had calculated her distance well, for when she finally reached the top of the hill, she found that she had exactly hit off the flock of sheep cropping beside the clump of beeches. Close by them lay a bundle of osiers, hastily thrown down, and several wattled hurdles, with fresh osiers threaded into them for repair; a knife, the sun shining on its strong, curved blade; and a small bundle tied up in a red pocket handkerchief. There were all these signs of the recent presence of the shepherd, but he himself was nowhere to be seen. Clare looked round in perplexity. The sun was strong, the breeze fresh, the grasses glittered and curtsied, the shadows of the clouds bowled down the hills and ran up the opposite side, the view was broad, but it revealed no Lovel. With all that open country lying spread out, he must have taken refuge in the small beech-wood,--watching her, perhaps, from behind the trunk of a tree. She was almost amused by this childish game of hide and seek, and in any case was determined not to be baffled by him now that she had come so far; she could not now turn and ride away in acknowledgment of defeat. Swinging herself off her pony she knotted the reins loosely and let it turn away to snuff the grass, while she herself entered the little wood, brave though tremulous, her optimism ebbing as her obstinacy increased. The tree-trunks were not very close together, so that she could look through the clump from one side out to the other; she often went into these clumps of beech, and lay down on the bare ground, looking up the smooth grey trunks, watching the sun glint its shivered rays through the branches, and listening to the wind among the leaves; she had even been into them with Lovel, and he had knocked the warts off the trunks and carved them into frightening faces with his knife to amuse her.

She paused with her hand upon the tree. “Lovel!” she cried. “I know you are here, don’t hide from me; come out, Lovel!” There was no answer, and after a little hesitation she went deeper into the wood. She saw him then; he was not hiding, he was standing there perfectly motionless, in the midst of a small clearing in the trees, standing very quiet, like a man who after a long pursuit sees himself finally brought to bay. He was looking straight at her, as though he knew the direction in which she would come.

Now that she was confronted with him, a little of her self-confidence went; he had, for a long fortnight now, inhabited her mind only, and her vision not at all; and in her mind their meeting had run always on the lines she devised for it, but here she had Lovel himself of untested inflexibility, to trip the running of her programme. She gazed at him beseechingly, but he still stood, in an attitude of expectant resignation, waiting for her to open the attack. It came into her mind that even now she might turn away, without a word spoken, having learnt all that there was to be learnt from a single look. Instead, she went up to him, saying “Lovel?” and upon an impulse she held out her hand.

He remained unmoved, examining her with a sort of abstracted interest. She thought that she had never seen him so much like an animal, pausing even while poised for flight, and a despair overcame her when she remembered her own conceit that she could tame and bring to heel again a creature so wild. She was ashamed when she remembered that she had pitied him, had assumed that he must be unhappy, had smiled to herself when she thought of keeping up his pretence of temper like a sulky child. That smile had had in it much that was tender, much that was maternal; had she then forgotten Lovel, or had her imagination so metamorphosed his image, that she could have persuaded herself of his need for tenderness, tolerance, or pity? He had need for none of those soft things; she had been mistaken in thinking that he in any way needed her; he needed no one; he stood alone. Nevertheless, she would not retreat without some struggle; he might, still, prove to be no worse than angry and hurt; if he insisted on remaining so, it should, at least, not be owing to a lack of good-will on her part. “Lovel,” she said, “Lovel, have I offended you in any way? See, I have come here deliberately to ask you and to say that I am sorry for whatever I may have done; how can I say more?”

Still he did not reply, but turned his head slightly and uneasily as though looking for escape. He still had that air of being poised in the clearing of the trees, alienating him from her as if she had come upon him in the midst of some secret rite which he only awaited her departure to resume. She felt inclined to cry out, “We were so close to one another, once!” and the pain of the loss stabbed her sharply, but instead she pleaded again with him, “Lovel, if you would only speak to me we could put this misunderstanding right.” Where was the smile she had so confidently hoped to startle into his eyes? He had never shown himself so aloof or so forbidding; she felt herself small, insignificant, and importunate; if she had found him in the open, she thought, he would have been more vulnerable, but here among the trees he seemed curiously protected.

He had not moved a step ever since she came up with him; was he rooted there, a tree himself, or a sapling? she did not know; and a panic began to spread over her at his fancied communion and alliance with nature. He was as brown as the earth, his clothes were the colour of dead leaves, his shirt was red like a robin’s breast. She remembered again the tales she had heard of him, and her own fancies that had followed him at the poacher’s trade, and this time she was afraid. She wove them together with the ignorant tales of the witchcraft among the Lovels. Could there be any truth in these fantastic notions? a secret of harmony in nature which entitled the initiated to powers inexplicable to the uninitiated? why did all animals so dread Olver Lovel? so trust to Nicholas? what of her own intuitions? her sudden, reasonless terrors? her mingled love and fear of the sarsen stones and of trees? her constant phrase, uttered half in jest, that some day she would be fetched away? And how was Lovel concerned? what part was he to have in the fetching? If only he were not so brown, brown as earth, lithe as the saplings, his shirt red as a robin’s breast; if only his eyes were not constant pilgrims to the horizon.

She turned to leave him; at all costs she must get out of this wood, where she felt the old threat closing in round her, and in which Lovel was so mysteriously implicated. She turned slowly, not to betray her panic, still with the half-hope that he would speak and thereby break her spell. But when he spoke, it only deepened.

“There is no misunderstanding,” he said.

She wheeled round again upon him.

“Then why have you so avoided me?” she said passionately. “A fortnight ago we met by the Grey Wethers, we had no quarrel, we parted friends. The next day you were sent for to the Manor House, you would not come, you sent your brother. I sent for you later myself,--a special message. You would not come. I thought I had offended you in some way. Do you know that I have looked for you all over the hills to ask you for your reason? A fortnight I have spent in looking for you.”

“I know,” he said. “I have seen you.”

Her voice died away; she had thrown herself against his defences and bruised herself. Her indignation had made a tiny uproar in the wood without detracting from the calm of the trees or the dignity of Lovel. She made a small gesture of abandonment; her one desire now was to get away. “There is nothing more to be said.”

“Set your mind at ease,” he observed unexpectedly. “You never offended me. Believe me, you could not do so even if you tried; believe me, you are too sweet and gentle to do such a thing. Put all the blame on to me. I am capricious and wayward, you know; any one in the village will tell you as much and a dozen worse things besides. You must believe them all. You have my word on it that they are all true. But as for blaming yourself, never dream of doing so. Think only that I am not fit for you to associate with, and let me go my way without looking for me any more.”

“Is this your only reason?” said Clare.

He hesitated. He was still standing motionless and every moment she felt that he was being farther and farther withdrawn from her.

“No, it is not my only reason,” he said at last, “but it is the only one I choose to give to you. It is enough surely. I come of a family with a very ill-name, and I myself would see the inside of a prison over and over again if the guardians of the law were as cute at their work as I, perhaps, am at mine. I think it is sufficient reason.”

“Have you robbed, or even murdered, Lovel?” she asked.

“Would you be convinced if I told you that I had?” he replied with idle curiosity. “I have robbed crowded coverts, if you call that robbing, but as for the rest, although I have taken the lives of pheasants and partridges, I have not taken the life of man or made away with the property of any of my employers while it was in my charge.”

“Your reason is a very insufficient one,” she said, “you are telling me nothing that I did not know already. Will you come outside the trees? I cannot talk to you in here, I feel trapped.”

“No,” he said, retreating a step. “I came in here to avoid you, but since you have followed me we stay in the place I chose. And my other reason is fully adequate,--oh, fully, fully!” he said with great feeling, “so now leave me, Clare, and think of me as harshly as you can. If you meet me anywhere, pass me by; I ask that of you as earnestly as ever a favour was asked.”

“You ask me to pass you by even on the Downs?” she said slowly.

“I do,” he replied. He rushed on, not looking at her, “I must not make friends. I want to be alone. You stole my friendship, and I have resented it. Call me ill-mannered, even brutal; call me ungrateful, boorish. I was angry when I saw you riding to-day. It is better that you should know the truth, and it cannot hurt you, coming from me. What am I to you? a peasant, a gipsy, a Jack-of-all-trades. I have nothing to do with your life or you with mine, so leave me alone,--leave me alone,” he said.

All her pride was lashed alive now; she was utterly astonished, and, in her simplicity, convinced. “I have forced my friendship upon you,” she stammered. “Yes, yes,” said Lovel, driving it home. She stared at him, lovely in her distress. But even in her humiliation she was generous. “Forgive me,” she stammered again. She turned and fled out from amongst the trees, aware,--but not knowing how truly,--that she had left there something which she would never regain. She came out by the osiers, the hurdles, and Lovel’s knife lying upon the ground. The sight of it, in its familiarity, stung tears to her eyes. If he had not wanted her, why had he carved faces from the warts of the beech-trees for her amusement. Why had he tired so suddenly? rebelled so wildly against the slight tie of her friendship? She swung herself on to her pony and galloped away, not seeing where she was going, but only mad to put the greatest possible distance between herself and that wood whence she had escaped indeed, but only with her life.

Calladine meanwhile, who knew nothing of Clare’s friendship with Lovel, and who would have stared had he heard it mentioned, had lived in a torment ever since her visit. She had come and gone again, and he felt as though during her brief sojourn she had stirred round the sluggish atmosphere of his house with a wand. His eye became more critical as he surveyed his surroundings from her point of view. He tried to imagine what she would say were she to take his house thoroughly in hand, and began to introduce such alterations as he thought she would approve; he rearranged his books, he re-hung his pictures, he ordered patterns from London and had his leather chairs covered with a flowered chintz. His servant Mrs. Quince was at first at a loss to know what had come over her master, but after she and Martha Sparrow had put their heads together they arrived at the obvious conclusion. “’Tis a woman’s house now, Martha,--dimity in the windows, and what do you think? dried rose leaves and spices among the linen!--though as yet there’s no woman to live in it.” Calladine shut his mind obstinately to the curiosity he knew he must be awaking in Mrs. Quince; he daily informed her of his wishes while inviting no comment, and she, on her part, took advantage of his new mood, and of the good-humour in which, she argued, he must be anxious to keep her, to ask for an extra pair of hands for all the new work she pretended he was creating. “There’s that girl of Farmer Morland’s, sir, casting round for a place.” Calladine agreed at once, without argument or enquiry. Let Farmer Morland’s girl be engaged by all means; and Daisy, with her red head, her freckles, her pale blue eyes, and her frilled Sunday muslins, was installed in the attic. Calladine, in so far as he noticed her at all, disliked her at sight; she dropped a curtsey to him the first time she met him, and tried to ingratiate him with a smile. But he was too deeply bent upon his own concerns to pay her more than the tribute of a passing distaste. Clare had been to his house, his room had contained Clare, her voice had vibrated through the air he breathed, her hand had rested on his door handle, her foot had trodden his stair. She might come again--but such was his fantasy that he all but dreaded lest the return of her presence should disturb the perfection of his memory. He was almost content, for the moment, that he might remain at Starvecrow, doing her service. A garden, she had said; and he toiled at the obstinate soil till his hands lost their refinement and hardened in the palms, and he smiled to see his broken nails. Mrs. Quince observed him sarcastically from the windows of the house, hands on hips. He had thrown aside his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeves. “But he’ll need to do away with those silk shirts if he’s to go in for pick and mattock,” she grumbled, between tenderness and scorn. Calladine was indeed an incongruous figure, spare and delicate of build, with his greying hair that gave him a slightly eighteenth century appearance, and his long back bent over the stones and flints of that untilled hillside. He thought, sometimes ruefully, when he stood up to stretch his back and to survey the little progress he had made, that Clare had set him a harder task than she knew. He began to invest it with characteristically romantic properties. It was like scaling the Hill of Glass, or separating the wheat from the millet, or travelling to the ends of the earth to bring back a jet bottled from the Singing Fountain. If he could transform this strong wilderness to a blowing curtseying garden, might he, having accomplished his task, present himself to claim his prize? And what would she say, she the distant, she the all-unconscious, when she came to inspect the results of his labours? Would she praise? would she deride? he swung his pick again with an unconvinced jeer at himself for the fabric of symbolism he was creating.

“The new mistress’ll have nothing to say to my old-fashioned ways,” Mrs. Quince observed to Martha, suggesting that it was she herself whom she thus slightly derided. Martha, simple soul, was taken in. “Likely enough, Mrs. Quince, she has a rare eye to the ordering of a house.” Mrs. Quince smiled on one side of her face. “She took over from me when she was fifteen,” continued Martha in perfect good faith, “and I wasn’t able to call my dusters my own. Look what she has made Mr. Calladine do already; the house isn’t the gloomy place it was.”

“What he has done was Mr. Calladine’s own choice,” said Mrs. Quince tartly.

“But you may be sure she put him up to it,” Martha replied.

So for hours they talked round and round the central subject, avoiding always the crux of the discussion, which was that Martha, with the match-making instinct, longed for the day when she should let Clare pass from her hands as a bride, and that Mrs. Quince, who had governed and mothered Calladine (in so far as so uncomfortable and so unreal a man would allow himself to be mothered) equally dreaded the day when another woman should take over from her the reins of Starvecrow. Calladine himself remarked her altered manner. “Will you be taking your lemon and hot water the same as usual at night, sir?” she asked him, and when in surprise he said, “Why shouldn’t I, Mrs. Quince?” she replied in a voice full of vague and sinister suggestion, “Well, I thought as things was so changed, and likely to be more changed in future, that that might be going overboard with the rest.”