Chapter VII: Part TWO: Part Two (1)

She had been married for four months to Calladine.

Evening after evening they sat opposite to one another over the fire at Starvecrow. Often they played chess,--a pastime to which he seemed tirelessly addicted.

He would rarely go out; he shivered and said that it was cold,--it was true that snow lay upon the Downs and that the wind blew incessantly,--and why should a man face the bitter cold of March when no necessity compelled him and when a pleasant fire could console him within doors? Nor did he like her going out without him. So they stayed in, until she felt that she could have sent walls and ceiling flying by one extravagant gesture of her arms.

But he,--oh, how content he was! He had lost his melancholy; he had brought out for her benefit from cases and cupboards numerous objects wherewith to beautify their rooms, but her inability to distinguish among the various artists was a source of infinitesimal friction between them; “No, no, my dear; _Clodion_, not _Houdon_,” he would say, and she would accept the correction meekly with a little laugh implying that the matter was not of very great importance after all, and with that little laugh would undo all the merit of her meekness.

At first he had enjoyed making these corrections. It flattered him to think that he had brought into an atmosphere of artistic refinement this child of the hills whose knowledge although so thorough as far as it went, was concerned with such rude things as rocks and skulls and antlers, supplemented by a working experience of shepherds’ and woodman’s lore. Certainly he had always been ready to take an interest in Mr. Warrener’s work, and to entertain a respectful admiration for the old gentleman’s scholarship, but that was a different matter: it was a tabulated profession, archæology was a branch of study suitable to gentlemen, especially old gentlemen; Mr. Warrener contributed papers to the journals of several societies; he was a distinguished and accepted authority. That was quite another matter. It had been amusing, even, to find Clare dabbling her fingers in the same research; amusing to hear the terms so glib upon her lips; surprisingly instructive, sometimes, to catch the odd bits of information she let fall while out riding with him on the Downs. But what had been amusing in the child was insufficient, even unbecoming, in the married woman. To dilettantism, _per se_, he had no objection; he was a believer in dilettantism; but in the name of all good taste let it be dilettantism in graceful and becoming subjects! So he tried to interest Clare in _terres cuites_, in crystals and in the bindings of books. She looked at them at first with pleasure, they were exquisite; she had never seen such things before, or suspected their existence; she exclaimed over them, marvelled at their workmanship, fingered them, discovered new loveliness in them as she turned them this way and that. Calladine was enchanted by her appreciation; he thought he might venture further; he tempted her with subtler baits. But she returned to the fragile eighteenth century statuettes. He let her have her way, tolerant, determined not to force her interest. He watched her. There was about the little terra cotta groups a false paganism, a windy grace, that intrigued and allured her. Here was something that she could nearly understand; nearly, if not quite; not quite, for there was still something, or the lack of something, which troubled her; she could not put a name to it, consider how she might, with a pucker between her brows. These dimpled children, with the thighs and hoofs of goats,--these girls with draperies blown by the wind at the moment when the sculptor caught and fixed them motionless for ever,--these young men with slanting eyes and laughing mouths,--of what did they remind her? and in what were they so evasively deficient? She circled round the table on which they stood. Calladine’s eyes followed her in amusement. She was puzzled, this nymph who was so much more like a nymph than any nymph that Clodion ever made, puzzled by the drawing-room _faroucherie_ of these false fugitives. “A little self-conscious, you find them?” he had murmured at last.

But the artistic education of Clare proved a game that had palled. She had gone clean through his objects of virtue, and had come out the other side. She seemed to have been briefly deluded by them, then to have sized them up, to have detected their essential fraud, and to have discarded them from her interest. Mortified though he was, he perceived somewhere in himself a respect for her pure, uneducated instinct. Still, as this was a thing he could not, out of self-respect, admit, he continued at intervals his efforts to guide her feet into the paths he himself found so pleasant. He liked to sit within doors re-ordering his books and his treasures, while the snow drifted up against the windows and the wind cried unappeasably across the Downs. “Why are you staring out at that ugly landscape, Clare? Don’t you like the fire better, and a chair, and a book to read?” But she read very seldom; only once, when she had been reading, he saw to his consternation that tears were falling silently down her cheeks, and, going up behind her, he had seen over her shoulder that Shelley lay open on her knee:

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!...

“Clare, why so silent? I declare, you’ve grown more meditative than I,--where’s your irresponsibility? is the dignity of marriage so heavy upon you? Were you as silent with your friend Lovel? didn’t you prattle to _him_? eh, tell me?”

“What funny questions you ask, Richard. Lovel? I don’t remember. No, I don’t think I ever talked much to Lovel.”

“Well, but in all those hours you spent, riding with him, fishing, and I don’t know what else....”

“Well, we were busy, Richard; too busy to talk.”

“And he was a common fellow, wasn’t he? it’s not to be expected you would have talked much to him? eh?”

“He certainly wasn’t fine like you, Richard.”

“Now how do you mean that? Too fine, am I? And he,--a poacher, wasn’t he? a bit of good-for-nothing? You don’t answer. A queer fellow, not without good looks; oh, I wouldn’t deny him that. A romantical sort of fellow, Clare?”

“Practical as he could be, on the contrary.”

“Maybe; none the less, there was something romantical about him....”

So he tormented himself by this small constant nagging about Lovel, liking to dress the man’s personality up in the lyrical words of his own choosing; but for the rest he appeared satisfied, living with Clare a captive under his roof.

But sometimes she eluded his company. Then he roamed about the house, up and down stairs, out at the front door, down to the little wicket gate in the new wall, holding his muffler close under his chin, for the wind tore at his coverings, tweaking his scarf, flapping his coat, freezing his fingers, blowing his grey hair about in wild strands. He stood at the little gate, vainly trying to smooth his hair, gazing round the expanse of the hills, and calling from time to time as loudly as he could call, “Clare!” The wind took his voice and dispersed it like smoke; instantly tattered, it streamed away on the wind. No hope that Clare should hear that futile call, and it seemed to him that the empty Downs must from her childhood onwards have accumulated the echoes of voices crying “Clare! Clare!” A bell-like and doleful name, so cried; a name made to ring out; a wailing appeal; a name to cry after a gay truant, knowing that no answer would be returned. A gay truant, marked out for tragedy, dancing away, while those who remained behind cried after her and broke their hearts.

All his complacency dropped from him, he stood at the gate, looking and calling; then turning back to the house he sought her again in every room, even up to the attic where Phoebe Batch, startled at his intrusion and dishevelled appearance, gaped at her master and stammered out her, “No, sir,”--she had seen nothing of Mrs. Calladine. Mrs. Calladine! She was Clare, just Clare; Calladine with a bitter twist could not at that moment associate her with the respectable title. He turned away, downstairs again, and back to the front door, to stand on the doorstep, gazing across the little garden, over the low wall, up to the pale inhospitable hills.

She returned, of course; every time she duly returned; and he upbraided her, and almost wept, but she said nothing, only looked at him with wide eyes, indifferent and remote. He upbraided her more loudly, even shook her on one occasion and “Don’t stand there,” he cried, “as though you had left your wits out in the blizzard,” and he flacked his fingers in his hysteria, and his voice grew shrill. But after a little while he would quieten down, and his melancholy would return, and he would sit with his head in his hands, saying that for his unhappiness he had married an elf and not a woman.

Clare looked at him, sitting sunk in his chair, and presently she would thaw, as though those wits which he said she had left out in the blizzard were creeping back little by little into her body, and then she would put her hand kindly on his head and tell him not to fret. But that was all the explanation or comfort he ever got, to his great exasperation, being a man who liked to know how his wife had occupied every moment of her time,--to know, indeed, every thought which passed through her head.

Fortunately for himself, he soon forgot; the next morning he would descend, serene as ever, and set himself after his breakfast to his usual mild pursuits. Only in a sudden suspicious glance shot at Clare would his anxiety reawaken, and he would look at her feet, to see whether she wore her black strapped shoes and white stockings, peeping out under the fulness of her skirt. And sometimes, for a day or two after one of her escapades,--her evasions, as he called them in his own mind,--he would follow her upstairs if she went up to her bedroom.

Inquiringly she looked at him.

“Yes, Richard?”--for she was always gentle, save when she gazed past him with that far-away look, that seemed to range the Downs though her husband’s body and the walls of the house stood in her way,--“Yes, Richard?”

He mumbled, half-ashamed.

“I came to see what you were doing....” He could not bring himself to say, “I came to see whether you were changing your shoes,” for that seemed ridiculous, beneath his dignity.

He had his happy moments. Sitting in his little room with her after they had dined, in the firelight, he beheld the very picture he had so often imagined. He had got her there, for his own; and his eyes rested long upon her grace, travelling, with delicate sensuality, over her young body and the little hands lying idle along the arms of her chair. “You never sew, my Clare,” he observed to her once, regretting this, for he luxuriated in all the pretty attributes of woman. She smiled at him. “What are you thinking of?”--his favourite question, and he bent forward to pick up her limp hand and fondle it. “Tell me what you were thinking,” he repeated jealously.

For once she lifted frank eyes and gave a frank answer.

“I was wondering how much real need you had of me, Richard.”

“Remember the man I was before you came to me,” he said reproachfully, yet with a certain pride in recalling the gloom which had been his to discard.

Then she said no more,--a trick of hers, which irritated him when he would fain have had her explain and amplify. He liked argument, he liked analysis; and into neither could he draw her.

“How unwillingly,” he said, “do you dwell upon personal relationships!”

He had lost his gloom and melancholy,--or was it that he had begun to think that hobby ridden to death, sometimes inconvenient to himself and possibly diminishing in impressiveness to other people, and had welcomed his marriage as a plausible reason for abjuring it? His habitual manner he had not altered; he still maintained towards her the same elaborate courtesy and his air of rather patronising protectiveness, as though thanks to the one convention, he revered her, and thanks to the other, condescended.

Yet, he had changed; changed from the very day of their marriage. He had paraded her on his arm before their wedding-guests, the smile had wandered perpetually over his lips, he had abandoned his slight stoop, he had straightened himself up into a handsome and possessive bridegroom. She had been too apathetic at heart to be nettled by his so parading her in public: “My wife,” the formula constantly on his lips, had not stirred her resentment; those were the outward shows,--they could not touch her secret being. And, looking at him perhaps nevertheless with a faint surprise, she had ascribed this new manner to his natural triumph at getting her, and had expected a relapse as soon as the novelty should have staled into habit. But there had been no relapse. He had brought her home to Starvecrow, and then she had realised how all the new chintzes, the curtains in the windows, the works of art brought out from the drawers where all these years they had lain concealed, had been but the preparation for this long-schemed change in his mode of thought. They slipped now into their place, they came into their own, small but significant. He had at last now an excuse for shedding with relief the strenuous manner of years. There remained no work for her to do.

Oh, little objects of art and skill. What hours he must have spent trifling with their suavity, taking them from their hiding-places of an evening after he had heard Mrs. Quince go safely up to bed, and knew that no one was looking, no one likely to break in upon him and surprise him at his comfortable pottering; the hours of mansuetude he must have spent turning and caressing them between his fine sensitive hands! He had not brought out those little objects to show her the day she had gone to tea with him at Starvecrow; oh no! the only thing he had brought out had been the drawing of that woman’s head, which he had so dramatically destroyed in her presence. She saw that destruction now as the first step taken towards his emancipation. But the little objects he had not shown her,--those delicate fraudulent statuettes in terra cotta, those chiselled and prismatic crystals. How bare, how cheerless she had thought his room! those heavy leather armchairs, now so jaunty with chintz! She had pitied him, genuinely and kindly, even through her impatience at his mismanagement of his life. She had chided herself for any passing suspicions that his gloom might be deliberate. And she had seen in her marriage with him an opportunity to perform, supremely at her own expense, a task perhaps worth performing.

But what right had she to murmur, when she saw her intentions crumble? She had, indeed, achieved her object, albeit in a manner so disconcertingly unforeseen. She reproached herself, in her mind which gave no quarter, any more than Lovel gave quarter; she reproached herself for not rendering thanks that her task had been thus made easy. What! she dare to murmur because she had been spared the strain of months, even of years? because she had not been permitted to string herself up to an effort daily renewed, an exertion in which her own weariness must never for an instant be allowed to appear? because Calladine had taken the law out of her hands, and had ordained for himself the resurrection to which she had intended to force him? She looked back with the smile of rueful irony to her brave and pitiful plans for his redemption. She had intended,--so gallantly--to set her back for ever towards her old life. She would have devoted herself,--so sturdily,--to the man who had need of her. She would not have flagged. The vision of her married life had disclosed itself during the weeks of her engagement in detail to her anticipation. There was no detail she had shirked,--not even the least picturesque. She had not tried to idealise Calladine; no, rather she had tried to see him in the light that Lovel’s careless scorn had thrown; not as a romantic figure, blasted by the catastrophe of an early passion, but as an incompetent, bungling, pitiable figure. Her pity, her charity, and her contempt would between them have carried her through. But now that she found herself forestalled, as it were,--found that Calladine had already accomplished for himself precisely what she had intended to accomplish for him,--she was disconcerted, almost angry. It was in vain that she upbraided herself for her own ingratitude. The life that she had planned for herself was not falling out according to her design. She was cheated; a person who has tried to take in the dark a step that was never there. Let her keep her sense of proportion,--her refuge now, her only refuge,--and she would not even yet be wholly lost. Then she could laugh at the futility of her plans; she could see, as from without, their derision, and their full pitifulness. Her life at Starvecrow had not fallen out according to her design. What of it?

A woman spending thirty, forty, wasted years in a forgotten corner of the Downs. What of it?

Her memory would not cling about the place after she should be dead, any more than the memory of victims clung about the sacrificial stones. “Here blood was shed,” but that was a collective phrase; all individuality had long since,--almost immediately,--been telescoped into the clemency of perspective. So it would be with her, and she saw herself already as part of that anonymous crowd, whether of the victims of a savage creed, or of the women with the wasted lives,--no sublime and legendary sorrow, except in so far that all sorrow shared in the same great dignity,--women who had lost children or lovers, women who had trailed ill-health about their daily business, women who had borne the long, mute burden of uncertainty, all the grey, silent, muffled women that whispered round her, and that had taken to their graves unchronicled the blunt or the poignant sorrow of their hearts.

Nameless, they lived for her now. For her now, the Downs, hitherto so void and so spacious under the freedom of the winds and the cycle of the seasons, for her now the Downs were peopled. Their dews were brushed dark with footsteps. Their heights were scanned by searching eyes. Their flanks were bruised by the stumble of weary limbs. Their beech-clumps were threaded with the breath of secrets. She had not known, at first, whether to resent or to welcome the looming-up of this hushed population. It seemed to her that they rose up out of the ground, stealthy, ashen, tall. They were everywhere about her. They had known the Downs as she knew them, and the changing seasons had found as they did for her either a significant echo or an incongruous irony in their souls. Their presence did away with the loneliness, the untouched and indifferent loneliness of the uplands, which in her egoism she had seen as a background to her life and Lovel’s populated only, in so far as they were populated at all, by the rough figures of the men of barbarous ages, men who fought for the simple preservation of their own existence, undivided by any shredding of their moods, whose religion was one of fear and not of charity, the men who had set up the stones and raised the barrows in order to propitiate the dark Unknown of creation and of death with such rude pomp as they could devise. They had been stark, striding elementary figures, one with the tree-trunks and the sarsen stones. They had ennobled the Downs by the record of their constructions. It had seemed to Clare that the intervening centuries between their age and the present day had been blank,--that she inherited the Downs direct from their hands,--those Downs which revealed themselves to her eyes unchanged from the hour when the stone men had passed away from them. The barrows, the dew-ponds, the Grey Wethers, the green tracks, the hawks and the larks, the space,--all unaltered; the stone men, returning, would find no change. What had she said, long ago, to Calladine, “an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are, are bleached bones by now, dry and clean. I think,” she had said, “that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”

And now there came to her this newly-realised population, bruised by life down to the softness of humanity. As to her those dry, bleached ghosts of the rude ages were masculine, so those more human ghosts that rose up out of the centuries were feminine. Increasingly, they had splintered their emotions; they had departed from the stark, simple facts; they had become more complex and more wistful. The stars and the stones had meant less and less to them; the Man of Sorrows, and not the terrible orbs of heaven, had been their god. They were kneaded, malleable. They had endured much, but in the full consciousness of endurance; their spirit, even if not their voice, had groaned under the load of life and its ironies; they had not accepted as a matter of course, unquestioning, a lot that was hard. For all that, they had not been the less courageous; perhaps even their courage had been of a sublimer brand. And they were women, women, always women. The men had remained nearer to the old, strong, practical stock,--the purveyors of necessities. It was upon the women that civilisation had had the most effect. Calladine himself, the most highly civilised man that Clare knew, had always seemed to her instinct more like a woman,--sitting in his house and picking his griefs into smaller and smaller pieces. But Calladine’s griefs were not very real griefs,--she knew that now. She knew that he was, really, quite negligible.

She had been almost afraid, for a brief period, to go out upon the Downs,--afraid of forms rising up round her, of hands pulling at her garments, and of eyes seeking hers until she was forced to look into their depths. It was not that she any longer felt resentment against the population her own imagination had evoked; no, the Downs were enriched by their company, and the calm heights acquired a new significance by contrast with their soft rustling tumult. It was that she feared the knowledge which would come to her if she spent many hours alone with those ghostly inhabitants whispering round her like dead leaves; she feared what she would learn; she would not probe her new half-guessed discovery. Things were a degree less terrible so long as they remained without a name.

But she could not fear for long. She had pushed them back, averting her head, into the shadows, and there they had taken up their abode. They would not leave her again. Not even in the midst of joy,--if joy should ever visit,--would they leave her, any more than the shadows were ever completely absent even in the midst of sunshine on the Downs. She was grateful to them for the way they had come, stealing in upon her, silent and gradual, not in a sudden irruption that would have broken her. But now that she no longer feared them, no longer feared the learning that solitude might bring, it was for solitude that she craved, and solitude, she found, was the thing that she might not have. Calladine, who was so content in her company, expected that she should be equally content in his. When she went out, he went with her; when he was not inclined to go out, he begged that she would remain at home. “It is a rough day, Clare; let us stay happily by the fire.” Or he would consent to pace the garden, sheltered now by a little wall, and together they would look at the bare winter beds, and he would talk cheerfully of the flowers that would blow there in the spring.

She renounced the Downs. Since she might not wander there alone, she restricted herself to the house and the square of garden, or to the green track that led to King’s Avon when she went to see her father. Even on this expedition Calladine accompanied her. He did not notice that she walked with her eyes bent upon the ground, never allowing them to lift and stray over the rolling country; or if he noticed he gave no sign. All the time he talked of minor things, and to his talk she made adequate response. Arrived at King’s Avon she would quicken her steps and pass rapidly down the village street, glancing about her only sufficiently to acknowledge the greetings of her humble acquaintances, and only when safe within the Manor House gates would she relax a little, and show herself gentle and affectionate towards her father, who, absent as ever, would presently forget that she was married and would invite Calladine to remain to dinner, “Clare and I, my dear friend, may so rarely welcome a visitor.” Through her laughter she looked at him wistfully; he was dear and familiar, his old beehive hat as wide and as shabby as ever, his spectacles still on his nose and his mild blue eyes looking out through them. She wondered how he got on without her, but Martha told her he did not seem to notice her absence much; only once, she had found him in Miss Clare’s old bedroom, wandering round, and touching everything in a gently puzzled way. Clare was glad that he should continue his busy, happy existence. Martha she could trust, “To be sure, Miss Clare, I look after him as though he was your own baby. It’s all I can do, not to powder him after his bath.” But she sometimes fancied that his eyes followed her a little sorrowfully down the avenue when she went away, as he stood watching their departure and waving his big silk handkerchief.

And they would set off on their homeward journey up the village street, along the road through the cut in the embankment, and along the road until it dissolved into the green track that led across the Downs. Still with her eyes upon the ground she walked rapidly, as though anxious to find herself once more safe within the shelter of Starvecrow. Calladine’s long legs easily kept pace with her; and she had the impression that, even were she to run, she could never escape from him. He strode beside her, talking of her father, talking of those minor things which, she had found, occupied so much of his attention, and always with the assumption that her interest equalled his own. Once or twice he wanted to leave the track and make their way home across country, but when he suggested this she always pretexed her anxiety to be once more ensconced in their own room. This invariably pleased him, and he acquiesced. She could not, no, she could not, stray across the Downs with him.

She renounced the Downs. She could not share them with Calladine; not even with his mere physical presence could she share them. She cramped herself within the house and the little garden. The moment came when Calladine commented upon it. “Don’t you want to go for a walk, Clare?” She did not;--she clung to their meagre patch of cultivation. “You are grown quite stay-at-home,” he prodded, fondly.

The great Downs,--that stealthy population out on the Downs. Waiting for her,--the call of nature, always, and now the call of humanity. Out there, she could respond, she could feel, she could learn. Once she had not wanted to learn. She had shirked knowledge. Now, she had acquired knowledge, and could bear a yet deeper learning. She was avid, indeed, for the deepest draught of knowledge. Those bare great Downs, they were not bare; they were peopled. She might learn the first lesson from their storm, and the ultimate lesson from their serenity. But it was not in Calladine’s company that she would learn it. Such lessons were learnt in the severest solitude, with the senses of the soul stripped to flagellation.

Therefore she clung to Starvecrow. “An uncouth name,” said Calladine discontentedly, after relishing it for years; “shall we change it?” But she begged him not to, without clearly knowing why. “Very well, we keep it,” said Calladine, smiling down at her, “as a contrast to the snug life we live beneath that uncomfortable label.” She smiled back; she could smile, always; it had become mechanical, costing her little. She clung to Starvecrow, without affection, but also without anything so precise as distaste; it, like Calladine, was negligible really, and she had never gone back on her first opinion of it,--that it was not austere enough to excuse its barrenness, and merely mean in its lack of comfort. It was no different from the Manor House, which, although at first sight incongruous perhaps in the midst of the village and its barbarous temple, was in truth no more incongruous than her old father, who pottered in his big hat about the garden, or peered through his big spectacles at the shards set out upon his desk.

But still she clung to Starvecrow; it was just bleak enough to match the bleak, small disaster of her life; just comfortless enough to accord with the blank at the root of her life with Calladine.

There had been the days of her engagement, when convention demanded that she should go over and at least appear to take an interest in her future home. She had gone, driven by Calladine himself through the village in the high dog-cart; holding on to her hat she had gone, rattling along the lanes behind the raw-boned animal, the gig rocking slightly from side to side, and the low branches of the trees almost sweeping against her as they passed. Calladine had looked fondly down upon her holding on to her hat, and in response to his murmur as he bent down towards her, she had looked up, and thought, in a detached way, that he was agreeable to look at, very gentlemanly and rather interesting, with his sallow, high-bred face, his many-caped driving coat, and his fine skilful hands encased in his gauntlets. She wondered, in the same detached fashion, what it would feel like when he stood tall by her side, and she could say “my husband.” Already she had had little foretastes of it, when he accompanied her to the village shops, and the shopkeepers said, in their familiar, respectful way, with an admiring gaze at the couple, “Here’s our best wishes, I’m sure, Miss Clare, to you and your gentleman.” And they had come to Starvecrow, where Mrs. Quince was waiting to receive them, and for all the smiles and curtseys and the insistence that Clare should inspect every cupboard, Clare had been conscious of the hostility of the elderly woman. But she had gone,--gone all over the house under the escort of Mrs. Quince, accompanied by Calladine as far as the first floor, where with his elaborate deferential manner he had retired, conveying by all that he left unsaid, that women were best left to themselves over household matters. There was in the manner of his retirement the indefinable condescension which to Clare was so subtly irritating. A wholesome male contempt she could more easily have pardoned.... But she had not stopped to think of that, in her dismay at finding herself alone with Mrs. Quince; she needed all her wits to balance the tension between herself and the housekeeper. Mrs. Quince seemed determined to outrage down to the least detail of her own feelings; all the doors of her most sacred cupboards were thrown open with a jingling of keys, and their immaculate depths revealed to Clare, who, her criticism being all the time slavishly invited, could respond with nothing but approval. “Though I am sure, miss, there’s many a thing in this house not carried out according to your ideas.” Mrs. Quince, indeed, seemed so anxious to be found fault with, that Clare, feeling that she must exhibit her own competence or forfeit from the outset the housekeeper’s respect, at last did offer some small disparaging comment. “Ah, there, what did I tell you?” said Mrs. Quince instantly, as though satisfied to have got finally what she had been expecting all along; “’tis not likely that old eyes and young ones should always see alike.” After this her urbanity and her constant return to the point that Clare had condemned became so excessive that Clare devoutly wished she might have forfeited all Mrs. Quince’s esteem for ever only not to be pursued by this constant reference and exaggerated subservience. And Mrs. Quince would spare her nothing, but led her up to the second storey, where, pausing on a landing carpeted with coarse matting and lit by a small skylight, she explained that “the girl” slept. Clare shrank; “Oh, no, Mrs. Quince, don’t disturb her if she is in her room.” “Indeed, and why not, miss?” said Mrs. Quince stoutly, advancing towards the door; “’tis only her room on sufferance, as you might say; and likely there would be something you would wish altered.” She threw open the door as she spoke, and Daisy Morland, rising in confusion, let fall on to the ground the scraps of white linen at which she had been stitching.

Clare recoiled on the threshold; she had known that Daisy Morland was in the house, but had not expected to come face to face with her. Nor had Daisy expected to see Clare,--whose arrival with Calladine she had watched on tiptoe from her little dormer window,--thus ushered into her room. The mischievous eye of Mrs. Quince superintended the clash between the two girls. She had manœuvred ably; she congratulated herself. Daisy,--Daisy was curtseying,--had recovered herself so far as to remember her curtsey,--what gall, what mockery, was in that curtsey!--Miss Warrener,--Miss Warrener was nodding to her,--saying something about “nice little room,” and looking sideways all the time at the pieces of linen fallen on the floor. Mrs. Quince folded her arms and superintended. She wore a smile,--outwardly benevolent, inwardly immensely ironical. The two girls,--much of an age. Daisy, blowsy and flustered, hardly able to repress her jeer; Clare, cool and wounded, but too proud to betray her wound. A lady: Mrs. Quince paid her that grudging acknowledgment. Well, Daisy had got the gipsy fellow, and Miss Warrener had got Mr. Calladine. As it should be.

They came out of the room together, Clare and Mrs. Quince. Mrs. Quince drew back a little, respectfully, to let her go first, and closed the door gently behind her. “I wouldn’t have taken you in there miss,” she began, “if I’d known what that shameless baggage was to be at,--stitching away at her own baby’s clothes a fortnight before her marriage. Perhaps I should not say such things to you,--but there, you’ll be married yourself before the month’s out. And I wouldn’t have kept Daisy Morland here, knowing about her what I do know now, but that I wanted to have the house well set to rights against your coming, and, thought I, why not make use of a pair of hands that’ll never do a turn of work again for honest folks, but only for herself and a shame-begotten brat and a ’scape-the-gallows husband. It’s a hard bit of luck for Farmer Morland and his wife,” continued Mrs. Quince as she followed Clare down the stairs, “after they brought their girl up decent; but what can you expect with such poachers and loafers and gipsy-like stuff hanging about the village? ’Twas the easiest thing in the world for Daisy to go sweethearting on the hills, and what with shepherds’ huts and hurdles handy there was all the chance of a bit of trouble. Well, and now she’s got it, and lucky for her, _I_ say, that Lovel’s ready to turn her into an honest woman, for there’s many stouter bred than him that hasn’t stuck to their girls, and I always say....” Here Calladine had come out of the sitting-room, hearing the sound of voices; he came pleasantly towards them, rubbing his hands together and bending towards Clare, “Tired, my dear? tired? a little bit, I think,--too bad, too bad, Mrs. Quince, we’ve tired her out between us; well, come in here and rest in this big chair....” he pressed her into the sitting-room, and Mrs. Quince with much solicitude settled cushions for her and placed her feet upon a footstool in spite of all Clare’s protests.

She had dreaded to find Daisy still at Starvecrow when she returned there after her marriage. It would have been simple for her to find out, but she lacked the courage to ask. And would Calladine know? would he know if one girl rather than another slept in the attic at the top of his house? She could have asked Martha Sparrow, but pride withheld her from making enquiries as to Lovel’s wedding. True, Mrs. Quince had mentioned a fortnight, but she did not trust Mrs. Quince; the elderly woman would relish laying a trap for her. But at the end of the fortnight she had known that Mrs. Quince had spoken accurately, for Martha Sparrow, coming into her room to call her that morning and whisking back the curtains along the curtain-rods, had said cheerfully, “A fine day for the gipsy’s wedding; and I wonder how many of the folk will turn out to see the customs a common Christian wouldn’t practise?”

But those folk, skulking round the church, had been disappointed. They had seen no swarthy women in scarlet handkerchiefs, no dark men with little gold rings in their ears. They had heard no gibberish, and seen no gestures of incantation or abracadabra. They had seen only Nicholas Lovel in his ordinary clothes, inaccessibly severe, with his young woman, all simpers and dimples, on his arm; and Olver Lovel in the nave, watching the scene at the altar, obliquely in that queer little round mirror he always seemed to carry. Not even the Lovels’ old mother had they seen; and for a glimpse of her they had greatly hoped, for surely, even of a witch and a gipsy, it might be expected that she would turn out to witness the marriage of her own son. But no, she had not caused herself to be wheeled as far as the church, the bedridden old woman; and, indignant because they were disappointed of their spectacle, the village folk muttered, “Unnatural,--but what would you expect?”

Disappointed though they were, they had remained to watch the ceremony. Some of the bolder spirits had gone to the church, edging their way, sheepish but defiant, along the pews; but the majority had crowded near the door, peeping, nudging, jostling backwards whenever Lovel up at the altar threatened to turn round. There had been none of the coarse, friendly atmosphere that surrounded most village weddings. There had been, instead, an atmosphere of curiosity and fear; and at Daisy looks were thrown, full of commiseration and a fearful respect, by the villagers as at one of their own comfortable number, about to cut herself adrift from them and to become enrolled among an alien community. They fully expected that Daisy, hitherto so plump and jolly and normal, would be initiated into dark rites beyond their imagination when once she had been swallowed up into the shadows of the dim, tunnel-like passage of the Lovels’ house and the Lovels’ door closed behind her. They never expected to see her emerge again in precisely the semblance of herself familiar to them. Or would Lovel deny his secrets even to his wife? Would he keep her there, in his dark house, as a servant and a convenience, to wait on his old mother, to cook his meals and obey his behests, and above all things to hold her tongue as to all the unexplained things she might happen to witness in the course of years? Would she be no more than a terrorized servant in that house they thought so vaguely sinister? There was Olver Lovel, too; was he a sort of accomplice to his brother, a sort of sly malignant accomplice, who in his brother’s absence would bully his brother’s wife by deputed authority, so that she would be at the mercy not only of the elder Lovel, who was an unknown quantity if ever there was one, but against whom nothing but his practices in defiance of the game laws was definitely known,--not only would she be at his hard mercy, but also at that of his younger brother, of whom the blackest and most cunning arts might be believed. There were a hundred ways, they decided, talking it over between a horrid fascination and a still more horrid relish, in which Olver might exercise his nasty talents upon Daisy. John Sparrow even went so far as to predict that the day would come when she would be found wandering, as crazy as Olver himself, upon the Downs, but others more sagely replied that if indeed she were to lose her wits she would never be allowed to escape from the house. And that opened up another series of pictures, in which Daisy, crazed and foolishly happy, went about her work singing little ditties, and the door of the dark house was closed daily by Lovel upon the three inmates, the mother, the brother, and the wife, and the key lay close within his pocket.

But in the meantime the spectacle before their eyes was quite different from those evoked by their imaginations. It might be true that Lovel looked lean and stern, and that Olver followed the ceremony in that slanting way within his little round mirror, but the words the clergyman uttered were the same that they were accustomed to hear at all respectable unions, and as for Daisy, she was the picture of all a bride ought to be, muslin flounces and coyness, and if her figure was a little oddly thickened, why, that also was a thing that had been seen before at village weddings. She looked pleased with her young man; she kept glancing proudly at his height; she sniggered with content as he repeated the beautiful threadbare words after the priest, repeated them gravely and firmly, but as though he were utterly indifferent to the obligations they imposed upon him. There was nothing very startlingly unusual about the wedding. True, neither Daisy’s father nor her mother were present, but the whole village knew that Lovel was marrying the girl because he had got her into trouble, and it was not likely that the Morlands, steady and decent folk, would be present to give the sanction of their approval. Perhaps later on, when the child was born, they might come round; for the moment, no doubt,--and very naturally,--they were sore over both the cause of the marriage and the son-in-law imposed upon them. Daisy did not seem to care. Ever since the publication of her banns she had gone about flaunting as though her marriage were a reason for pride rather than for shame and apology. Not that the village saw much shame in circumstances so common. It had, rather, a certain respect for Daisy, who, having set her heart on the gipsy,--a strange taste, but that was her business,--had at last got him to the altar. There was a tacit convention that a girl was justified in using all her weapons if she could not otherwise carry her point: and there was also, in the present instance, a peculiar satisfaction in feeling that the gipsy had been worsted. So grand, so stuck-up, Nicholas Lovel, but a girl had got the better of him in the end.

When the bridal pair came out of the vestry and proceeded down the aisle, there was a scattering in the little crowd at the church door; a lane opened, and Lovel and his wife passed out between the craning, curious faces. Lovel looked neither to left nor to right; his arm was crooked to allow Daisy’s hand to rest within it, but that was the only concession he made to his newly-married state. She, on the contrary, sought eagerly for the faces of her friends; she dragged upon Lovel’s arm, but he moved unyielding forward. Daisy, who was trying to lag, had to take a little run, like a child that cannot keep pace with the advance of a grown-up person. With her head half-turned, her eyes still lingered over the little crowd that was once more closing in behind them. There were not many girls in the party; she knew why, and a sense of triumph came over her; they might affect to despise Lovel, but for all that they did not care to see him married to one of their own number,--ah, how clever she had been!--not many girls; two men, doddering on their sticks; and a group of young men, the lounging, insolent handsome young men, with their hands stuck into the belts of their smocks, chewing straws for all the world as though they had been in the Waggon of Hay and not on the threshold of a church. It was then that an incident occurred, the recollection of which was frequently to dash Daisy’s triumph into a sinking of uneasiness; towering behind the group she caught sight of Peter Gorwyn’s grinning, good-humoured face on the top of his enormous proportions, and as she looked at him in a sort of terror of recognition that _he_ of all men should have come to attend her wedding, he very slowly winked, so slowly that time seemed to be suspended between the beginning of the wink and the completion of it; and in that suspension of time, while her eyes had leisure to dwell in fascination upon the subtle and quite unambiguous process of a wink, her mind had leisure also to take in its whole significance: Peter Gorwyn _knew_. In that wink the day of the Scouring was evoked; the fun they had shared; the irresponsibility, the momentary drunkenness. There was no reproach in the wink; there was no reproof; there was not even a threat; there was simply the amusement of a confederate, of one who knew himself quite well to be a party to a hoax. There was humour in it too; in that broad, ruddy face and blue eyes there was humour; there was even congratulation, a kind of silent applause; and a hint of gratitude to Daisy for having let him off so easily,--for having got Lovel to stand there in his place. This was all very re-assuring; there was such a phrase as honour among thieves, and big Peter, with her, was a thief if he was willing to let Lovel take his place and pay the price which should have been exacted of his own responsibility. But at the same time that wink came as a sharp shock to her, the shock that a second person shared her hoaxing secret. She thought that presently, when she had had time to settle down a little in her new life, she would catch young Gorwyn for an interview, and, without giving herself away, make quite sure, that, although he had guessed what she had concealed, he was ready to grin and hold his tongue. She thought this in a flustered way, as she came out of the church on Lovel’s arm into the warmth of the sunny morning, and they proceeded down the path between the grave-stones, a stiff little group, robbed momentarily even of the slight relief of the bride’s simpering, with Olver bringing up the rear. Daisy shivered for the first time; this wedding was not being conducted according to her idea of weddings; there were no emotional relatives, no weeping mother, no bells pealing from the calm grey spire overhead, no bridesmaids, no best man,--only Olver shambling behind them as they proceeded between the grave-stones, Olver so slightly and indefinably mis-shapen, a solitary evil attendant, shambling as though he might at any moment break into a fawning gambol around them, a senseless dance full of irony and mischief. And Lovel, himself, dearly as she had set her heart upon him, was throwing a chill by his demeanour over the occasion; he had not once looked at her, he had offered her his arm in a coldly civil way,--less he could not do,--he had stood up stern and unbending; she was afraid of him, and discouragement began to cloud over her triumph.

They were walking now down the street towards his house, and the shopkeepers came to their doors to stare at them as they passed. Still Lovel marched on, undeviating, and Daisy began to feel herself a captive being led towards her prison. She clasped her fingers tighter round Lovel’s arm; it was hard and sinewy, typical of his lean strength. Here was a harshness she would find tough to propitiate; and jealousy shot through her; had he shown himself harsh towards Miss Warrener? or had she discovered an unguessed marvellous Lovel? What secret understanding had they shared? Daisy scarcely understood the pain. “The minx!” she muttered; it was the only analysis she could find of her sudden twist of anguish, blind and inarticulate. Up to the present she had been too much occupied with securing Lovel; in future she would have leisure to dwell upon those memories of his which would lie for ever concealed from her. “We’re married now, aren’t we, Nicholas? I’ve got you?” she said, looking up into his face.

He took her into his house, where during the whole time of their engagement he had never allowed her to come. They were in the dark cold passage, at the end of which, in the sun, opened the little square of garden where Lovel like any other cottager grew his cabbages, his patch of flowers, his gooseberries, and his beans. Daisy became excited again; she forgot Gorwyn, she forgot her discouragement and her jealousy; she was a woman brought for the first time to her home. She peered about her with interest, while Lovel shut the door, and the passage became quite dark but for the door at the further end opening bright arch-wise on to the garden. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “I can’t see and it’s cold; leave open the door.” “For all the village to spy in upon us?” he returned, and she perceived that in this as in everything else he would have his way. “It’s more friendly,” she ventured, but he did not move towards it, and she desisted: after all, she had got him, she had fooled him, the score so far was heavily in her favour; if she let him have his way now, she would get him more completely in the end. “It’s rather cold,” she said nevertheless, repressing a shiver, and, hearing a small chuckle in the shadows behind her, she turned and saw Olver crouched up against the wall.

“Take me into the kitchen!” she cried, pressing herself against Lovel.

Kitchen! the word was reassuring; her mother had kept a spruce, spacious kitchen, where bottled fruit stood ranged on shelves, and trays of floury scones stood on the scrubbed deal table, and the big Parliament clock tick-tocked in comfortable regularity against the wall. Very different was the room to which Lovel sarcastically admitted her; she stopped with the dismay of the conventional person suddenly confronted with rebel views. She was shocked as at something unseemly and profane. “Oh,” she cried, “but this isn’t a kitchen?”

She turned as though to make her escape; before her was the room with its walls of rough stone, its rafters, shadows and cobwebs, behind her was Lovel in the doorway and the dark passage beyond him, with Olver crouching in it. She stared round her, and was met everywhere by silence. “I don’t like it!” she cried in shrill terror. Lovel continued to look at her without speaking. “Mother! dad!” she cried, “I want to go home!” She rushed to Lovel and beat her hands against his chest. His physical contact recalled her, and she began to sob. “Nicholas, Nicholas,” she sobbed, “I love you, I don’t understand.” She sobbed against him.