Chapter VI: Part ONE: Grey Wethers (6)

Shortly after nightfall a man with red and yellow streamers pinned on to his coat and tied round the crown of his hat, passed down the village street beating a drum as a signal that the performance was about to begin. There proceeded already a stream of the population towards the fields, by twos or in families, and between the gate of the field and the tent the grass was already trampled into a track. Night was come; and within the opening of the tent the interior lighting glowed warm and fulvid; towards this square of light in the centre of the field, thus inviting, the procession of villagers made its way, inwardly eager, outwardly sheepish, and drew together at the entrance, where a rude box-office had been erected, and another man with red and yellow streamers dispensed tickets in return for the coppers and six-pences paid across his little counter.

Inside the tent, the newcomers herded, uncertain. Most of the benches immediately around the central oval of grass were already filled up, and the rows of faces and hands were uniformly lit by the two gas-flares, one on either side of the supporting pole. The grass oval, under this light, appeared most brilliantly green. The roof and sides of the tent swept away into shadow,--shadow dimly peopled by the audience on the rising tiers of benches, of whom only the first two or three rows were illuminated, and the rest indistinguishable, save as vague rings of buff-coloured hands and faces, over which the light sometimes flickered fitfully. Over in one corner stood one of the yellow carts, its shafts propped up somewhat foolishly into the air, and its body, on which was painted in large black letters the single word, ORCHESTRA, filled by members of the company with bassoons and other wind instruments, the lower parts of their persons concealed by the sides of the cart, and the upper emerging like so many jacks in the box. Beside this cart was the opening for the entrance and exit of the performers.

Into this scene of flaming light, strong colours, and deep shadows, came Lovel and his brother, the former so scowling and dark,--for he detested this appearance in public,--that he might rather have been a member of the traveling mountebanks than of the yokel audience. As he stepped out into the light, followed by Olver, this defiance was almost absurdly evident in his manner. He knew that the light was full on his face and on the figure that shambled behind him, and that the eyes of the audience were turned with a mild curiosity towards the pair; he felt himself to be an incident of the show they had all come to see. He looked round for a place. A few kindly neighbours made room on one of the front benches, so that, although Lovel would have preferred a more retiring seat, he was obliged to take his place there with Olver, at his side. Olver was gazing all round with the fascination of a child. He had never seen so many people gathered all together before, and his neighbours, familiar to him as individuals, acquired a new impressiveness when seen thus together in their numbers; he had never seen a circus ring, or an illumination so strange or so effective as that cast by the gas-flares; and as for the performance itself, he had nothing but vague and fantastic ideas of what he was about to behold. Very furtively he brought out from his coat pocket the round mirror which Clare had given him, and bent over it; reflected in it, he saw the lights, and the ring of faces, the thin scarlet rope, the shadows, the green grass, the yellow cart, according as he turned it. Lovel sat stiff and erect beside him, staring straight ahead, his arms folded across his chest. Olver bent lower over his mirror. He chuckled softly over it. The orchestra now stood up in the cart and began to play, brassily, noisily, but to the great delight of the audience.

Olver was annoyed because he could not see reflected in his mirror the agreeable noise which the band was making, and the tiny reproduction of the scene was thus rendered incomplete. Still he peered into the mirror, where the picture was small and distant, as seen through the wrong end of field-glasses, and also with that slight distortion which never failed to enchant him: the supporting pole appeared slightly bent, the scarlet ropes curved round like serpents, and each face, as he examined it separately, was a tiny caricature of the face reflected.

With the blare of the band Lovel relaxed a little from his rigidity; he glanced round him, nodded briefly to a few acquaintances, and considered with an uninterested eye the scanty properties of the show standing prepared near the performers’ entrance. He heard the eager whispering going on in the audience, and, being himself scornful and unhappy, was possessed by a passing contempt. He saw Martha Sparrow there with her brother John, and a group of the cronies from the Waggon of Hay; he caught sight of Farmer Morland with his wife and daughter, and instantly looked away, for he had seen Daisy’s eyes fixed upon him, and had no wish to respond to the smile she was holding in readiness. No doubt they considered that he ought to have escorted her. At that moment he saw Clare come in with Mr. Calladine.

He had not expected this, and remained transfixed, staring at them in complete dismay. Clare came in shyly, turning to speak to Calladine over her shoulder; she was wearing a dark blue cloak over her muslin dress, and no hat, only a dark blue ribbon in her hair. Coming, in her turn, into the light, she hesitated with a perceptible confusion that seized Lovel by the heart. Calladine came forward, competent and proprietary, found her a seat, and took his place beside her; they bent together over the leaflet of the programme. Still Lovel stared; she looked up, and their eyes met across the width of the ring. Her lips parted; for a full minute they stared at one another. He saw the blush rising, like a flame of reproach, in her cheeks. For that minute, as their heads swam, they had no thought of the pairs of eyes observing them: of Olver’s, of Daisy Morland’s, or of Calladine’s, respectively with a mischievous, a jealous, and a dismayed absorption. Then Clare came to her senses; she looked deliberately away, looked around, searching for faces she might greet, found Martha Sparrow, found some of the tradesmen, and smiled to them all with disproportionate alacrity. She spoke again to Calladine, whose pride in her had changed to a visible moodiness; he answered her indeed, but briefly, and sat angrily tapping the top of his walking-stick against his teeth. Lovel, having no knowledge of the world, but only his instincts, wondered whether he should leave the tent, or should remain to enjoy the atrocious pleasure of watching her once again. He knew that now he would have to fight out his renunciation afresh from the beginning; the dull resignation which had clouded over him of late had all melted away in a second before her restored presence. Merely to see her sent the heat and ecstasy of life back into his veins. Twenty-eight years of existence had not accustomed him to the rush of his own emotions. Such a reasonless joy as this which seized him even while he knew that she was promised to Calladine, still had the power to surprise him.

The beginning of the circus did not distract him; rather it favoured him, for under the cover of the general interest he was able to gloat his eyes upon her to his heart’s content. Olver, who had long ago made up his mind about his brother, had now little desire to watch for the manifestations of a passion he took for granted in spite of all Nicco’s denials, and devoted the whole of his rapt attention to the events of the ring. These were enough to transport his simple soul, easily pleased at best. Piebald horses, and fat thighs encased in pink tights, curvetted before him; while with flashing smiles young men and women performed apparently impossible feats of strength and balance. Olver presently conceived the idea of following the circus in his mirror, and alternated between the actual, which was already entrancing enough, and the reflected, which provided him with a world so indescribably and doubly queer. He hoped that the little, queer, brilliant pictures would be preserved forever in the depths of the glass. A fat woman in pink and spangles jumped through paper hoops off the back of a cantering horse, crying “Hop!” as she jumped and again as she landed, and the manager standing in the centre cracked his long whip at the horse’s fetlocks, but only hit the clown, whose whitened face, ghastly under the gas-jets, went bowling round in somersaults over the grass of the ring. There was also a snake-man, dressed from head to foot in emerald green, who contorted himself in the midst of a silence rendered more impressive by the sudden cessation of the braying band, into the knots common to all such performers; and the laughter which had accompanied the clown was stilled into a respectful awe. The snake-man, Olver found, was especially effective seen in the mirror.

The atmosphere in the tent by now was somewhat clouded by tobacco smoke, softening the hard, high glare of the gas, and through the smoke the faces appeared hazy, sitting round in their rows, likewise the hands, that periodically broke out into a beating of applause. But to Lovel, who had not taken his eyes off Clare, her face was distinct as ever; and his own face, to Daisy Morland, was distinct, and, above his red shirt, dark and proud.

In the ring now were three small bears, one dressed as a clergyman,--whose appearance had provoked roars of laughter,--one as a lady, with a poke bonnet and bustle, and the third as a clown, the buffoon and wag of the party. These three sad animals were at their tasks of travelling round the ring on large balls, pushing a perambulator, balancing on a tight rope, or whatever it might be; Lovel, in so far as he bestowed a passing interest in the show, was indignant at the pitiful degradation. The audience had no such niceness; they roared their hearty laughter, and some of those sitting immediately behind the scarlet ropes even thrust a foot towards the bears as they passed round in their drab monotony, provoking a dull turn of the head and a lack-lustre glance, too spiritless even for a snarl. Arm in arm the clergyman and the lady paraded the ring on their hind legs, stopping now and then to bow gravely; they stopped thus opposite to Clare and Calladine, recognised by the quick eye of the manager as the only gentry present. Clare and Lovel looked at one another once more when this occurred, a look in which their personal passion, for once, had no part, but only discomfort and sympathy with the indignity put upon the beasts. Yet that look, impersonal though it was, only tightened Lovel’s heart the more, for it had in it all the intimacy of their understanding, in the same way as when they had been used to look across the Downs, and, seeing the bowling shadows of the clouds, had spoken no word, but sometimes smiled, knowing each so well the thoughts that were passing in the mind of the other.

He began to wonder what he should do when the show was over, and the moment came for every one to leave the tent. He was near the exit; should he hurry out and hasten home, shutting the door of his house behind him, before Clare and Calladine had so much as turned into the street? “Likely they’ll wander home by the fields, being lovers,” he said to himself. Or should he go boldly up to Daisy and invite her to walk home with him, in order to prove to Clare the extent of his indifference? He rejected this course, despising its cheapness. Or should he remain seated where he was, letting Clare and Calladine pass out of the tent before him? The one thing to be avoided was the jostle in the exit. He might get pushed up against her, or against Calladine,--if he felt Calladine jostle against him he would turn and hit him. But he had Olver to reckon with; Olver who would tug at his coat and bid him come, if he tried to remain behind; Olver who would in any case torment him afterwards with questions as whether he had seen Clare; and, half turning to look at Olver, he caught sight of the mirror held tilted, over which the boy stooped with such absorption, and he wondered idly where Olver had got this toy, that seemed so to fascinate him and to occupy so much of his time; but after that passing curiosity he returned to his own miserable concerns that gnawed like rodents at his brain, and his eyes perpetually sought the face of Clare, as though in her fairness lay simultaneously both the problem and the solution.

So turned inward upon himself was he, that a sudden shout was the first thing to rouse him. He raised his head; a sheet of flame shot upwards from the gas; all was confusion suddenly; the audience rose and stampeded into the ring, trying to get to the exits; benches were overturned; women screamed, men swore; overhead the flame tore a great hole in the darkness, and portions of the burning canvas floated, turning over and over, down to the ground.

Lovel fought his way through the striving mass of people like one possessed, caring nothing who he pushed aside or who he struck and elbowed. For one second he came upon the terrified face of Daisy; she tried to cling to him, but he threw her off. He was fighting against the tide of the crowd. By now the canvas was roaring overhead, the shouts increased, the panic surged wildly towards the narrow openings, all round was nothing but terror and a mad confusion. Lovel clove his way through the sea of limbs and faces; he tore a path by sheer fury. Reaching Calladine, he thrust him aside, and seized Clare by the hand. “Come,” he said, dragging her. He was obliged to put his arm round her shoulders and half carry her along as with the other arm he opened up a way for them both. The exit was hopelessly blocked; he took his knife from his pocket and ripped a long vertical slit in the side of the tent, through which he forced her first and then himself after her, and the crowd seeing this escape, streamed through after them. The night air was suddenly cool around them. He picked her up and carried her away to the top of the encircling embankment. The Downs were black behind them, and from the height of the ridge they gazed down upon the red leaping flames in the field below.

The field was wildly lit up, and around the blazing tent stood the crowd in a circle, watching the destruction they could not prevent. The flames reared to the height of trees, holding up the blackness; the light fell upon the shapes of the sarsen stones, that, unmoved, regarded this disaster as they might have regarded any other. Clare seized Lovel’s arm.

“Are they all safe?”

“They will be, by now,” Lovel replied mechanically.

“The animals,” cried Clare.

At that, Lovel returned to earth, and a slow smile of amusement crept over his mouth.

“Why, they will have escaped,” he said slowly; “escaped and be roaming about till morning. The village besieged by bears. Well, Miss Warrener, it will not be the first time that bears will have been loose among these stones or prowling on the Downs. Will we all turn out with sticks and staves to-morrow to drive ’em in? Come and ride them in, Miss Warrener, to-morrow morning before any one else is astir. Will you do that?”

“With you?” she asked.

“Why not?” he replied. “But I forgot,” he added, “Mr. Calladine has the disposal of your doings now, has he not? Many’s the pleasant hour you spend over books or in your garden; gentle and pleasant. There was a time when you rode rough as a boy; but that’s over now. Your finger nails are smooth,” he said, taking her hand and examining it critically by the vague light of the flames; “the hand of a lady,” and he lifted it up and sniffed it. “Scented too!” he said. “Scented for Calladine to kiss and fondle,” and gently he gave it back into her keeping, shaking his head. “Ah, Miss Warrener, it was a terrible mistake you made when you rode your pony in your little shepherd’s cap; ’twasn’t that you were cut out for. No, but for a lady’s life. ‘I shall want the carriage this afternoon, Mrs. Quince, to drive to Shrivenham.’” He minced the words. “‘And I shall want the rug put in the carriage lest it turn cold at sunset.’ No more catching your pony in the paddock when the fancy takes you for a gallop across the hills. I’ll come as your groom, if you’ll have me, and promise to keep away my brother, whose touch startles horses.”

“You must let me go home,” said Clare, who, white-faced, was holding her cloak about her.

“Remember, there are bears,” said Lovel. “A bear dressed as a lady, a bear dressed as a clergyman, and one, poor soul, as a clown. They are walking arm-in-arm, perhaps, as they did in the ring, but if they met you walking alone across the fields they might remember that they were born wild. They might forget that they had been tamed to civility. Cap off: ‘Good evening, miss,’ as I might meet you in the lane. Never trust the brute too far. But shouldn’t Mr. Calladine be here to protect you?”

“How can he see me up here?” said Clare. “The night is very dark, and the light down there must blind him.”

“You have on a light dress under that cloak,” mocked Lovel, “if you want him to see you.” But she did not throw aside her cloak, and he noted it.

At that moment came a cracking sound, as the central pole of the tent crashed down, bringing with it what was left of the flaming canvas. A loud cheer went up from the crowd, who, now that their own skins were safe, were irresponsibly quite ready to accept one form of entertainment in substitution for another. The fire died down for a moment, then flared up again, as some of the benches and trestles caught alight. The proprietor of the circus raged round, clasping his head with his hands, but there was nothing to be done, and the few buckets of water brought from a neighbouring well made no difference at all.

“Mr. Calladine is not more prompt at finding you here that he was in getting you away from the tent,” said Lovel.

“Why do you gibe at Mr. Calladine?” Clare burst out. “He has had a great deal to suffer at my hands, and it ill becomes you to sneer,” she finished inconsequently.

The inconsequence did not trouble Lovel; his mind leapt the gap with the ellipsis.

“At all events he has nothing to complain of at present,” he remarked. “Nothing, except that he is not the man to take good care of what he has obtained. Born irresolute--there’s a disadvantage of birth as bad as any other. Yet, I’d exchange my own for it; I’d accept to have only myself to overcome. Yes, by God, I’ve no sympathy for him. Why doesn’t he carry away his conquest? Too uncertain of his own worth? Look at his face--haggard with doubt of himself. I scarcely envy Calladine. He’s a straw to be swept away by a strong current, safe only so long as he may lie in shelter. If I wanted to undo Calladine, I should say to him, ‘Are you sure that you are the man to hold so untamed a thing?’ As yourself, I mean, Miss Warrener. Or am I mistaken? Are you a lady at heart--a lady and not a woman? Mrs. Richard Calladine. The muslin dress, or the shepherd’s cap? If the muslin dress, then go to Calladine. If the shepherd’s cap, then....”

He paused.

“I should not listen to you, reducing Mr. Calladine to this insignificance,” murmured Clare in great distress.

Calladine had become a shadow; a poor grey wisp drained of blood. Only Lovel and herself seemed alive, so terribly alive that the wraith which was Calladine faded between them. So far, no one had noticed them standing up on the ridge of the embankment; the night was, as Clare had said, very dark, and furthermore a few sparse trees helped to conceal them. They stood, not very far from one another, very much isolated, detached from the glow and excitement of the fire down in the field below, as though they were two travellers come to a brief surveying pause on the road which they pursued together.

“Mr. Calladine is not the poor creature you think him,” said Clare on an impulse. “Years ago he loved a woman, still unforgotten. That is not the fidelity of a weak man. I tell you this, in order that you should think better of him, and knowing that you will keep it to yourself.”

“A woman he never got?” said Lovel. “And brooded over her ever since? Do not doubt--Miss Warrener, he coaxed himself into loving her more, during all those years of brooding, than ever he did when he had her before his eyes. Be very sure, she made a proper fool of him, to embitter him so for a lifetime--until he found you. Don’t be too sorry for him. He has enjoyed living upon that memory.”

“Oh, you are hard and cynical,” said Clare, vexed, because she saw suddenly the whole of that episode, which, in her eyes, had always thrown so picturesque a colour over Calladine’s melancholy--saw it now in a cruel, naked light, Calladine duped first, and then retiring in sulky discomfiture, to build upon a silly, sordid, mismanaged story an erection of wordy romance: “I wish I had not told you; you take every opportunity, to-night, of belittling Mr. Calladine.”

“I? Oh, no,” said Lovel, carelessly, “and in any case, why do we talk about him so much? he is not here, but to-morrow you will again be with him, and the day after that, and the day after that. Even now he is probably arrived breathless at the Manor House, where he will tell your father that that gipsy fellow snatched you away, and that he has lost you altogether. He has never given me anything but black looks, ever since he came to live here. How much have you told him about yourself and me?”

“There was nothing to tell,” said Clare.

“True,” said Lovel. “There was nothing to tell.”

They were silent. She felt that he was in a highly dangerous mood. Calladine was not dangerous; violent, but not dangerous; not as Lovel’s contained quietness was dangerous. Lovel, at any moment, might suddenly leap upon her; he was so lithe and quick. Moreover, she felt now, in his company, that she was alone with him on a hill or a wide heath, for the people down in the field below had no significance whatever, no more than had Calladine, to whom she was promised.

“I ought to go home now,” she said presently.

“Oh, yes,” said Lovel, turning on her, “you ought to go home. Go home and tell them that the gipsy fellow took you out, rudely enough, but still into safety. Go and tell them that once or twice on the Downs you gave him a few kind words and that he presumed upon them to get you out of that tent to-night. Tell them that once he rejected your kindness,--which you offered out of your pity for him,--and drove you away with harsh words.”

“We have not spoken since,” she said.

“No,” he replied without comment.

Suddenly they began talking quite naturally and gently with one another.

“Who would have thought,” said Lovel, “that you would be coming to the circus. Not that I should have come, nor you, I fancy, either, had we known what we were to see. Yet we might have thought. Wild beasts turned to buffoons. I would have liked to let a tiger out of its cage, loose among the crowd. Did you see their eyes? yes, even the little pig-eyes of the bears. I wouldn’t like to look into the eyes of the tigers in their cages, when they stare through the bars. Trundled about over England in those cages.... Why did you come? I came to please poor Olver.”

“And I because Mr. Calladine was dining at the Manor House, and I ... oh, there is nothing to do after dinner,” she finished lamely.

“What do you do as a rule?” he inquired, with a passing curiosity.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sometimes he talks to my father, sometimes we walk in the garden, sometimes I sing.”

“You sing,” he repeated. “You sing.”

“Sometimes he and my father go over the things in my father’s cases, and they forget me, and I sit in a corner with some stitching.”

“Yes,” said Lovel, “and the windows are open down to the floor, and the moths and cockchafters fly in from the garden towards the lamps, and you let your stitching fall into your lap while you watch them.”

Clare was utterly startled.

“How do you know?” she murmured.

“Oh, I know,” he replied. His vision of the room, and of the three, was so sifted and precise. “Sometimes you sing?” he prompted her.

“Mr. Calladine leans over the piano, when I sing,” she said, looking at him big-eyed.

“That frightens you?” he said, more as a statement than as a question.

“A little,” she said, telling him what she had thought she could never tell to a soul. “He seems so soft, and yet so hungry.” Her voice sank.

Lovel understood; he nodded.

“If he would sit away in the corner,” continued Clare, “I should not be afraid of him. It is his leaning over me like that. It makes me look at him all the while I sing. But he likes my singing; he asks me to do it, and he will not let me refuse.”

“And sometimes you walk in the garden,” he said, still in the same voice, as though he were looking at a tiny picture seen down the end of a long vista; “does he frighten you then?”

“Less out of doors; less when we are not shut in. I avoid the trees; being under them is more like having a ceiling over our heads. I keep to the lawn.--He is more in his place, within doors,” she said, making a discovery which answered many of her problems.

“Lamplight suits him,” said Lovel, his perceptions very clear and malicious.

She saw Calladine leaning over the piano; she saw his greying hair and his fine hands lying loosely clasped on the ebony lid. She heard the notes under her own fingers playing a slow gavotte; it was the music he liked. She felt her eyes coming round again and again in fascination drawn towards his face. A breeze fanned her cheek; and she saw herself standing with Lovel on the earthwork, the stars above their heads, and the red glow of the dying flames deepening the shadow of his brow.

“We have always been in the open together,” she murmured involuntarily.

“I have never seen you in a room,” Lovel corroborated.

“The day that I found you on the Downs,” she said painfully, “the day when I last saw you,--you tried to hide from me among the beeches. Why was that? Did you hope that they would protect you? Did the sense of enclosure give you strength? Would the Downs have compelled you to be more honest? I believe it was that. One can lie better,--can’t one?--in a room; and as you had no room you took the shelter of the trees. You couldn’t tell me lies out on the Downs?”

“Is that why Calladine prefers a room?” he enquired.

“Mr. Calladine tells me no lies,” she said, with a small flicker of pride.

“Oh, no,” said Lovel easily; “he only tells lies to himself. Through and through. Or are they lies? Romances, perhaps. Only romances. And you are part of them. But they couldn’t thrive in sunshine.”

“We are not in sunshine now,” she said; “only in star-shine, and losing our heads a little. I am going to marry Mr. Calladine, you know, Lovel. So perhaps I should not talk about him to you as I have been talking, or ... or indulge myself in these fancies. You asked me what I had told him about yourself and me; I answered that there was nothing to tell; nor is there.”

“But if I had not gone into the beech-clump ...” began Lovel. He was suddenly Puckish, mischievous; or so she thought.

“But you did go into it!” she cried out.

“And stayed in it till you were out of sight. But Calladine,” he resumed, disregarding her effort to restore the balance of their conversation, “Calladine will get you into a room for the rest of your life. It will be a dim room, with the light shrouded from it. He will talk in it, and you will listen, and his talk will seem to you less and less unconvincing. Presently you will accept it as natural talk; you will answer in the same key. You will play sad old tunes, and Calladine will lean over the piano. But he will grow less graceful and more ungainly, and his joints will crack when he stoops over your hand to kiss it. And always you will be in the house,--in the room.”

“Lovel!” she cried.

“The dimness of the room will bleach your spirit,” he said finally and remorselessly.

What strange mood possessed him? Were the legends true? had he the gift of prophecy? His very language had a sonorous, almost a Biblical, ring. It was true that the occasion fostered it, and that he might be taken for a prophet, standing there on the elevation, ringed with darkness, and with that pool of dying fire at his feet.

“Is it kind, Lovel, is it kind to put these thoughts into my head?” she cried, distressed.

“Kind,” he said scornfully. “When did ever you want kindness from me? I haven’t given you kindness, or romance like Calladine’s. I keep kindness for Olver.”

“And for animals,” she interjected, remembering. The remembrance softened her marvellously towards him.

“And for animals. But for you....” He scanned her from head to foot, as though the term for what he had given her were inexpressible. “Not kindness for you,” he finished up.

A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view.

“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,--not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. See, now, they are beating out the fire.”

The last sparks flew large and red in the darkness.

“Fire and wild beasts and the stones,” murmured Lovel dreamily. “How many centuries is it, do you think, since those three things have met together here? The place will get a bad name among owners of circuses. They will say that it clamours for its natural prey; that the circle is under a curse; that it scents blood; and a hundred such fabulous things.” He laughed as he spoke, but Clare, looking at him, thought that the fantastic creature half believed it himself. “What will you say, when they want to know where you have been?” he asked. “You won’t dare own up to the gipsy fellow. You’ll say you watched the fire, and let it be understood that you were alone,--isn’t that so?”

“Of course I shall say I have been with you; why not?” said Clare.

“Ah, but I’d rather you didn’t,” he said earnestly. “Keep it a secret,--that we stood and talked unseen while the rest beat the fire out down below. I had not thought that I should see you again, and now I know that I shall not see you again,--in the distance, perhaps,--and hear the bells for your wedding,--and see you driving by,--Mrs. Richard Calladine,--but I shall never stand again with you alone as in this hour. Let us keep it a secret. I don’t care what you think of me. Look, the fire has gone out now, and it is quite dark, but the time I spent with you was lit by the fire. I will walk round with you to the Manor House, and let you go.”

In silence they started off to walk round the top of the earthwork towards the Manor House. The village lay below them in its strange cup, and around outside the circle lay the Downs hunched in the starlight. Where the road intersected the circle they ran down the slope and crossed it, their footsteps briefly crunching on the gravel, but on the opposite side they scrambled up again and silenced steps on the turf and continued side by side along the high ridge above the ditch. A breeze from the Downs blew cool against their cheeks; they knew it well, it was a friend pleading with them, calling them back to the open. They both knew the Downs so well that in their consciousness they were all the time aware of the country’s geography, stretching before them like a foreshortened map; the long roads, the little English towns with their broad main-street that was only a section of the Roman highway, the ancient green tracks over the hills, and the angular spatchcock landmark of the White Horse, straddling on the hillside. Neither of them had thought sufficiently beyond these things to be tormented by the further world. But, on the other hand, they had attained a degree of familiarity and concentration undiminished by any scattering of their faculties. They had not sprinkled their interest over other lands and other folk. They had dwelt only on their country and on themselves, so that the breeze came to them direct as a messenger from the Grey Wethers lying out derelict on the hills, and the sickness of the desire of each to respond to the call found an echo in the soul of the other.

So vivid was the call, so absurd the refusal, that as they reached the point above the trees of the Manor House garden, Lovel stood still and laughed out loud.

“So you go back to rooms,” he said, and laughed again, but more bitterly. “You!” he said, charged with contempt.

They were closer in understanding than ever they had been in their lives. He began to speak low and rapidly, “Clare,” he said, “there is no more softness in you or in me than there is in this soil. There is no flabby flesh, only bone. No trappings, only the hard skeleton. We’ve pared away.... If I had not taken shelter in the beechwood,--and it was the nearest approach to shelter I could get,--I might have taken you by the hand and galloped away with you; you would have come. That would have been mad. I have got my mother and Olver, and not only that, but I’ve got their blood in me. I want to have sons, and I may not, because of that blood. That was why I said I envied Calladine having only himself to overcome, when here am I as hard as flint, who might beget sons with that soft squelch in them that has rotted Olver. A bad stock, I said to myself; be strong; let it die out. And then the irony ... well, you know nothing about that, and even that seems not to matter now. Never be surprised, now, if you hear that I have been borne a son or a daughter, only don’t judge me too harshly. But how could I have brought you to my mother and Olver? and our children, yours and mine,--how could I, Clare? What chance had I but to cease from seeing you? Oh, if it had not been for them and my blood, then there would have been the Downs for you and me, Clare. Don’t share the Downs with Calladine; he lives among them, but he isn’t strong enough to endure them. There are some countries that it takes a strong man to endure. They don’t generate strength, and they crush weakness. Calladine should have lived in towns. But now that he has got you he may be rescued.”

“You know that Mr. Calladine has not got me, and never will have me, except in name,” said Clare.

“That’s true,” replied Lovel, not disputing her statement. “Let him live with you by his side, you listening, listening patiently, for as long as he chooses to discourse, and looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. I don’t say that I envy him. (“How you despise him!” she breathed.) And yet,” he said, “don’t I envy him a little? Can I help myself? He will see you every day, he will be able to call your name through the house at any moment and hear your answer. Don’t I envy him that? Wouldn’t I change places with him for that?--But he’ll tire of you, perhaps,” he added, dropping from his sudden anguish into the old whimsicality, “tire of you even though he has never got you. No, I don’t envy him. I’ll be less lonely,” he said with a fine insolence, “than he.”

“I must go, Lovel,” cried Clare.

He stepped back from her instantly.

“Go to Calladine,--in name. Go from me,--in name,” he said, out of his torn heart. “Only go,--go,--go!” he added, turning away from her and laying his arm across his eyes.

She left him then, feeling, although he had not once touched her, as though she had slipped all on fire from his clasp, so close had been their communion in spite of their immense separation. She did not know where he would go, or how long he would remain, gazing after her, standing on the height of the circle. For her own part she ran down amongst the trees, across the lawn, and entered the study by one of the French windows, to find her father absorbed in his work, not having noticed her absence, and blissfully unaware of any excitement or of his daughter having been in the slightest degree in danger. He said, “Bless me! bless me!” several times while she flung herself with exaggerated animation into a description of the fire, and pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead, and stared at her with an absent-minded interest as though she had just come straight out of the heart of the flames. “Dear, dear, and where’s Calladine?” he said at last. “There was something very curious I’ve come across and particularly wanted to show him. It quite corroborates my ideas. I made sure he’d bring you home.” “But you don’t understand, father: the circus-tent caught fire, and we got separated.” “Of course, to be sure,” said Mr. Warrener mildly. “Well, I daresay he’ll come over to-morrow, and I can show it him then. It’ll interest you too, Clare....”

Clare lay awake for a long time. The windows of her room were open, and outside the breeze sighed, a plaintive spirit trying to get into the house. The world outside was crying to her, endeavouring to reach her, sending its gentle messengers to plead with her. The heavy-foliaged trees rustled, as it seemed, with an unwonted nearness to her window, and the room was full of the insects of the night, which as soon as she had turned out her lamp woke into life and fluttered against her cheek and thudded softly against the ceiling like small downy ghosts. A moth imprisoned beneath her hand struggled for freedom; she shook it off with a gesture between tenderness and revulsion. Several times she lit a match, and the little creatures became still, flecking the bed with their long mottled bodies and closed wings, but no sooner had darkness fallen again than they returned in greater numbers to their soft wheeling and the bruising of their voiceless plea. She lay now shivering in spite of the summer warmth, awed to her very soul by the deepened significance of night. Darkness by shutting away the visible and reassuring world opened the field to all finer perceptions, to all the mysterious relationships, to the purified intuition of essential unity. That sense,--the sense of unity, the discarding of all irrelevancies,--was an unexpressed link between herself and Lovel; she was not sure, everything else being sifted down to its last bare expression, that it was not _the_ link. Out in the night somewhere an owl hooted, and she heard the distant baying of a dog; the spacious presence of the Downs opened out before her widened senses, their loneliness, and the secret of their ancient tombs; their untilled defiance rolling eternally under the stars. Where was Lovel now? Was he still standing like a sentinel on the dyke, between the Downs and the sleeping village, with only the vault of the black sequined sky above his head? as she fancied him there he seemed to grow in stature until in his heroic proportions he became an embodiment of that open country which called to her, and his voice rose harmoniously in a long cry above the soughing of the breeze in the trees. Or had he plunged down from the circle after she had left him, to roam across the uplands, a wisdom in his feet, a swiftness that lifted him above fatigue? That he was out somewhere in the night she was sure; no house would confine him, not even a house whose walls were built of the sarsen stones. He was out somewhere, and every moth that bruised itself so plaintively and so impotently against her was his envoy; every sound that reached her, whether the whisper of the breeze or the churning of a night-jar, bore the burden of its message from him to her. If she called back to him “Lovel! Lovel!” surely in one form or another her voice would find him among the hills.