Chapter VIII: Part TWO: Part Two (2)

He stood still, hard and carven, while the waves of her panic broke over him. Presently a loud tapping sounded overhead, and she raised her face, mouth moist and wide open, to listen. “What’s that?” she uttered. “My mother,” he replied grimly. “Then she _is_ alive?” breathed Daisy, her common curiosity coming back to her, and she felt suddenly important, since she was about to see,--redoubtable privilege,--the legendary figure of the village witch. Speaking over his shoulder, Lovel said, “Olver, go you and tell her I am bringing Daisy up in a moment,” and she heard Olver shuffle off, and knew the mysterious suggestion of hearing footsteps mount an unknown stair, and the voice of an unvisualised person speaking in the recesses of an unknown house.

“Must I go up?” she said to Lovel, between fear and desire.

She wondered when she would have the chance of pouring into the ears of one of her confidential friends the account of her first entry into the old woman’s room. Not that she could be so very old in years,--not more than sixty or sixty-five, Daisy hazarded,--but her bedridden condition and the squalor of rugs and coverings under which she croaked and feebly moved lent to her an appearance of almost fabulous age. Dirty and tattered, a heap on the bed in the corner of the dark room, her grey locks straggled about her face, her shaking fingers crooked themselves at Daisy, and her mouth mumbled out unintelligible phrases, in which the words, “A hard son to me, Nicco ... a hard husband ... you’ll see,” alone detached themselves with any significance to the bride. She was herself too much overawed to speak, but stood close to Lovel, who, forbidding though he was, was yet the only familiar landmark in the whole of that house. For his part, he said nothing, not a word to help Daisy out of her fear or her embarrassment; he stood there, and had he not appeared so utterly indifferent she would have said he seemed resigned; he stood there waiting while his mother mumbled out her accusations,--how many years was it since she had had the opportunity of doing so save to Olver?--willing to wait although scorning to justify himself; and it was clear that he cared no more for his wife’s opinion than he did for his mother’s or anybody else’s, but had within himself a reserve of some unknown, unexplained quality, whether pride, or contempt, or self-communion, or all three, but which in any case left him invulnerable and as though he could close his ears at will when he did not choose to hear.

But although even through her fright Daisy was thinking of the succulent story she would make out of this first glimpse of the old woman, the closing incident was one she would not retail. No, she would not tell any one that when the mumble had finally died away, the mumble and the bursts of laughter, she would not tell any one that as she and Lovel had started to move towards the door the old woman had raised herself up on her extraordinary mountain of sacks and pillows, heaving herself up under all the rugs, and pointing an accusing finger at her daughter-in-law, had cried in an access of malevolent amusement, “Big already, my lass, and on your wedding-day!” She would not tell any one that. She could not, even had she been willing, have described the effect that the old woman’s words, uttered in such a tone of discovery and delight, produced upon her. Hitherto she had not thought very much about her condition; it was an inconvenient consequence that often overtook girls of her class when they had omitted to behave with too self-righteous a prudery; and in her own particular case she had been able to turn her “trouble” to excellent account. But with that witchlike cackle a whole future of foreboding rushed up at her, a whole revelation of mischievous malignity. The cackle and the wink--Gorwyn knew her secret; did Lovel’s mother know it too? she was credited with sly powers; did Lovel’s brother know it? and would they sit for years upon their knowledge until one day it should hatch out, sudden and disastrous? Or had Lovel told them both that the child was Olver’s child? Olver would accept that, surely; he had the memory of the scene in the barn to convince him. What had Lovel told them? she would never dare to ask him, and his inscrutability gave her no hope of discovering by chance.

And then she had been astonished to find how gentle he could be towards her. It was true that he was stern in his injunctions,--no tales of his house to be carried about the village, he said, and poor Daisy saw her one consolation evaporate,--but in his personal dealings with her he was uniformly gentle. Distant always, never relaxing, never easy; but kind with a kindness that wrung the very heart of her love for him. It was as though he pitied her, and was kind to her as he would have been to an animal; although she thought bitterly, there would have been more of love and less of duty in his kindness towards the meanest animal. She could not cajole herself with the idea that anything but duty lay beneath his kindness to her. He was equally gentle, she observed, with his brother Olver, and with his mother, never betraying by any sign his repulsion or his impatience; and Daisy thought sometimes with terror that she herself might be as repulsive to him as the old woman must surely be, but never would she know it, for he would never allow it to appear. And at moments, loving him, she could forget herself sufficiently to be sorry for him in his loneliness and his unrelaxing self-command.

She began to know the full significance of suffering. Before very long she was suffering, in her blind, ignorant way, down to the bone. For discomfort she had bargained; for a hard life of work, since she knew that the business of keeping the house and its three inmates would after her marriage devolve upon her, she had bargained also; for Lovel’s severity she had bargained, and with an obscure sense of justice and fair play she had been prepared to accept without complaint these things that she was voluntarily bringing upon herself as the price of securing Lovel for her own, for her husband; but for the torment of his kindness and his proximity she had not bargained. The work she had envisaged with a practical eye; that was within the reach of her capacity, but the emotional problem had altogether eluded her anticipation. She had thought, if she thought at all, that once she had got Lovel safely over that ticklish business of marriage, she would have consummated her supreme ambition. She had not understood that then and then only would her problem truly begin. It had been easy, pitifully easy, to trick Lovel into marriage, easy to play upon the double string of his dejection and his sense of honour; he had allowed himself to be conducted through preliminaries and ceremony alike with the same cold, trance-like indifference; that had been easy for her; but how to dig through to the man beneath that blameless mask? “Nicholas, will you take me to Bath some day, anywhen you’ve time? I’ve never seen a bigger town than Marlborough,” and he would answer, kindly, always kindly, but like a man who might well be dead before the day for going to Bath arrived, “I’ll take you to Bath, my dear,” and she would sidle up to him and say, “That’ll be a treat for you too, Nicco?” and he would acquiesce, and at the same time, on some murmured excuse, would put her gently away.

She waited hungrily all day for his return in the evening. His presence exasperated and tortured her, but his absence left her in a perpetual fret, swallowing up what she had anticipated as the principal trial of her days, the sinister companionship of Olver and the old woman. Now that she knew her way about the house,--knew the full squalor of the old woman’s room,--had grown accustomed to the croak and the pointing finger,--no longer started at Olver’s sudden laughter in the dark passage,--she was not so much oppressed by them; but Lovel, Lovel, was always what she wanted and what she could not have. At first she had restrained herself, not knowing the temper with which she had to deal, but, seeing him so kind, she slackened her restraint, and her affection slopped increasingly over him. He could not be in the house but what she must waddle after him, pawing at his hand or trying to entice him into some friendly phrase. “You like having your house kept by me, don’t you, Nicco? You like getting hot meals, don’t you, darling?” and often she whined, “I love you, Nicco!”

It was not in her to suffer in silence. When she craved too strongly for him to touch her, she would take his hand and hold it against her full, warm breast. She would sit at his feet in front of the fire, as Olver had been used to do, and lean her head against his knee with sentimental sighs, for she quickly learnt that although he might ignore her he would never repulse her. In the kitchen, when she did this, Olver sat at the centre table squinting into his little mirror at the reflected group of his sister-in-law, his brother, and the red glow of the fire. He was content to sit doing this by the hour, but Daisy could not endure it; she clambered to her feet,--for she was rapidly growing more clumsy in her movements,--and went about the room finding small unnecessary tasks to ease her discomfort. Sometimes she turned noisily on Lovel:

“What are you thinking of, sitting there?”

He was mild in his reply, or else did not reply at all.

“Oh, _I_ know, _I_ know!” she would cry, in an access of jealousy, but dared say no more.

Only once, when he caught her with his strong hand as she stumbled on the stair, and uttered a word of caution, she turned on him and cried, “You’re mighty careful of another man’s brat.” But it seemed that he had set his will against being goaded into any retort.

The other man’s brat troubled her now, for she could not escape from what seemed to her an absurd desire that it should be Lovel’s. The Scouring had taken place in May; it was now December, so that she was approaching her seventh month,--but Lovel must not know that: he must think her only in the sixth month, for the incident with Olver in the barn had happened in June; she must always be careful to remember that, or the whole fabrication would be ruinously exposed. She must run the risk of incomplete preparations,--a misled midwife, a probably unavailable doctor should things go wrong. The resented child moved now vigorous within her; she had a full-blown appearance without which she still thought in her naïveté that she might have been attractive to Lovel. In the autumn his bitch had whelped, and she had watched with real anguish his tenderness towards the blind crawling puppies in their wooden box, and later his patient hands teaching them to drink as they crowded round and blew bubbles in the bowl of milk, and later still, when they grew into fluffy balls, cuffing one another and snarling in their small rage, she watched him dangling old cotton-reels for their amusement, or saw him cross the kitchen with the little pack prancing after him, and was shrewd enough to recognise that this was the first thing which had given him pleasure for many months. Now, when he was out at work, she watched them tumbling over each other on the flags of the kitchen, staggering on their still uncertain legs, and the longing grew within her that they should be babies instead, fat babies, hers and Lovel’s, and the more she longed for this the less she welcomed the child that struck so strongly against her flanks. It should be a hearty child, conceived in laughter of healthy parents, a child that would lie content and kick and crow; a little ploughboy; but already she dreaded to see it with Lovel,--would he touch it with his hands that were so light and loving to train and fondle all young things? or would he avert his eyes from it? would it grow up to toddle always after him in preference to any one else, while he endured it between pity and loathing, and would it call him father, poor fraudulent little stranger in a house where it had no right? Only in one degree less did she speculate over Olver’s attitude towards it,--Olver who was being passed off as its father,--would he believe himself the father or did he know better? and would he croon in his odd slanting way over the cot, with a grotesque affection? and would he later try to win over the child and fill its head with queer lore? and here a fire of maternal protectiveness and indignation flamed through her, rising suddenly from the depth, as she discovered that she was not willing that her child should come under the influence of Olver.

There were endless possible groupings to be foreseen about the tiny, dangerous, controversial person of the child.

Its burden weighed her down more and more as the seasons deepened towards winter. This child, so light-heartedly conceived on a day in spring, its presence unnoticeable through the early summer, began to oppress its mother in the saddening autumn, and with winter when the days were dark and short and gloomy, she could no longer forget its existence for a moment. The burden of the child and the burden of the year moved together increasingly towards their culmination. She looked back sadly to the easy days when the child had been light and even her preoccupations had been leavened with hope. Now everything weighed upon her, even the weather which was bleak and dismal: “I declare,” she said fretfully to herself, “I’d be no worse off in the Kennet,” and she skirted the idea, but lacked the desperation to execute it. She was, however, by now quite sufficiently unhappy. She had nearly lost any hope of gaining Lovel, her days were leaden, she lumbered about the house in slovenly clothes, since at the beginning she had used up all her poor finery by wearing her best every day in the hopes of pleasing Lovel’s eye, but now in an access of dejection, she went to the opposite extreme, and took a wilful pleasure in letting him see her at her most sluttish and ungainly. But nothing, she noticed, caused him to alter his manner towards her whether she presented herself in her muslin, or in an old bodice made of some gray tartan-like material, not joining on to her skirt, so that she appeared to be dressed in some thrown-on coverings from off his mother’s bed. But he never varied in his patience and his impersonal kindness; he neither retreated to a greater distance, nor allowed himself to become more approachable. Every evening he returned to his house to rejoin the company of Olver, his mother, and the cumbersome and plangent woman, but by no word did he betray either his nausea or his weariness. “Oh, yes, he’s a good husband,” said Daisy bitterly to young Gorwyn, “he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t hit me, and he gives me all his money. He’s a good husband enough.”

Young Gorwyn lounged gracefully round the house-door.

“Then you’ve fallen soft,” he observed in his drawling voice, surveying Daisy from head to foot as she stood just within the entrance to the dark passage.

“I’ve fallen soft,” she echoed, full of sarcasm.

This was in October, and in the blue early dusk people were gossiping at their house-doors, up and down the street. Young Gorwyn felt a spice of adventure in philandering thus openly with the newly-wedded wife of the redoubtable Lovel,--advertising to the whole street his disregard of Lovel. Not that there was any glory in passing the time of day with Daisy; everybody knew that Daisy was cheap and easy, giving impudence for impudence, a joke for a joke. But in making free with Lovel’s property there was glory, in being so near to Lovel’s house; almost inside it, one might say; in dawdling there, treating it as any ordinary house. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his breeches, and lounged, and stared at Daisy. She was a good sort, and he had got off cheap, were his dominant reflections; and was quite sure,--with a grin,--that she read his thoughts and wholly sympathised with them; would not have been shocked, in fact, had he voiced them and held out his hand, thanking her for the escape she had allowed him. He did not credit her perhaps with very much respect for him, but then he had equally little for her.

“Let’s see our kid now and then,” he said.

“What?” she said sharply.

“Let’s see the kid now and then,” he repeated, so that she wondered whether she had heard him right the first time.

“Oh,--maybe,” she replied, trying to show herself nonchalant about it as he, being a woman who readily took her cue from men.

She remembered the wink in the porch of the church, and that small, all-compromising word, so slily slipped into his phrase, seemed to her a first cousin of the wink; they had the same family air of innuendo, of confederacy. The impertinence! she thought, in her heart of hearts frightened rather than indignant, and she had a good mind to have the question out with him then and there, but, giving him a preliminary look, she decided to hold her tongue; an admission, once made, could not be recalled, whereas silence committed one to nothing. She was far, however, from trusting young Gorwyn now that she came to examine him more closely; he was strong and sleepy and graceful, lounging against the door-post, but there was something of the cat in his face with the broad cheek-bones, and the fair-lashed blue eyes so deep-set that when he smiled they almost disappeared into two little slits, and the way his fair hair grew so thick and low on his forehead; and she knew from experience,--all too well,--how caressing were his hands, caressing and heavy, when he reached them out towards a girl. A return of the passing attraction he had had for her came upon her, and she had a moment of queer disloyalty to Lovel, contrasting his slim darkness with the square Saxon strength of Gorwyn, to whom she was really so suitably mated. Their glances crossed; they understood one another too well, and looked away. “I must be getting on,” said Gorwyn after a pause which lasted a perceptible moment.

But that was in October, and she had not seen him again for any private conversation, however evasive. Autumn had gone, winter had come, with the violence and completeness to which dwellers on those uplands were accustomed. Snow blocked the roads. Communication with Marlborough was cut off, the inhabitants of King’s Avon resigned themselves to rely upon their own store of provisions, the Downs lay around them, white and enormous. They did not resent their isolation, but accepted it, almost yearly, as coming in its turn in the nature of things. It imprisoned them, more than ever self-contained, in their cup within the earthwork, with their pagan stones, their Christian church, their shops, and their Manor House, where Mr. Warrener was now their only representative of gentry; snugly a homogenous community. Lovel alone saw in the snow something more than a mere barrier against the outside world, a barrier that was almost a defence; he saw the stones standing up black out of a white field, the black trees powdered and spangled; he knew that he could go up on to the Downs without the fear of meeting any stranger riding there for pleasure. He could look from the crest of the White Horse Hill out over the country, without seeing the roads of civilisation, without seeing the White Horse itself, and his shepherd’s hut was as rough a shelter as primitive man would have devised. He took a certain pleasure in the discomfort and severity of his winter life. Often he would be the only man to leave the village of a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. Here, as he stood alone with the spears of the weather driving through him, he had a sense of triumph: he had got the better of the Downs, he had got the better of his own soul. His physical and mental endurance were alike strong enough to cope with the utmost rigours that Nature and fate were able to devise for his trial. This grim satisfaction, he felt, was the last luxury he permitted himself to indulge. For the rest, he had stripped himself bare of soft superfluities as a man could be; down to bone and sinew he had stripped himself. At times, in his moments of strange, harsh exaltation, when the gale screamed most piteously around him, he wished he might divest himself of his clothing, outward symbol of protection, and stand naked to support the lashings of the wind and the frozen hail; he thought proudly that no harm would come of it to his lean body. But although he never allowed himself to exploit the desires of this fanatical folly, he knew that he had touched the apex of his conquest over himself and his country, and, relaxing, he considered with a grin the superstitious amazement of his fellow-villagers should they, passing below, chance to see upon the skyline the naked figure of Lovel (whom they had always known for a wizard) crucified against elements where horse and man might scarcely hope to live.

He had his reward when the storm ceased, and, again alone upon the heights, he surveyed, as though his will alone had imposed the calm, the thick smooth quilt of snow and the blood-red sun descending towards the beech-clump through the perfect stillness.

But in the direction of Starvecrow he never wandered, where Calladine edged with some rare book closer to the fire, and Clare stood with her face against the panes staring out of the window over the snowy Downs.

Daisy began now to cling to him more and more. Her child was nearly due, but since she alone knew this,--and perhaps young Gorwyn, if he took the trouble to reckon up the dates,--every one believed the birth to be distant yet another month. Daisy was frightened; she dared not tell Lovel that the child might now be born any day; but she dreaded his long absences, for she feared that she might die without making her confession or obtaining his forgiveness. If all went well, she had no intention of confessing; but if she saw her life in any danger she had made up her mind to barter the security of this life against that of the next. Superstitious, she imagined that she would run more danger through bearing this child that she had carried during the months of deception and fraud, than she would through bearing a child honestly conceived and carried. She was mortally afraid of death, and mortally afraid of losing Lovel. She tried to sound him, “You’d be sorry if anything happened to me, Nicco?”

Lovel had heard this a dozen times already.

“Why should anything happen to you?” he replied.

“I shouldn’t have gone with Olver,” she mumbled, twisting the corner of her skirt.

“That’s a long time ago,--that’s over and done with,” he replied patiently and cheerfully, feeling sorry for what he thought was her genuine repentance.

“But this is the result,” she said, not consoled.

“Don’t distress yourself,” he said.

“Supposing I was tooken bad,” she began again.

“’Tisn’t for a month yet,” said Lovel.

“One doesn’t know always, with such things.”

“Will you see the midwife?” he asked, perceiving that she was worried. But the whole subject, and Daisy’s very existence, though he spoke with solicitude and bent a kindly gaze on her to discover what were the poor creature’s real wishes,--the whole subject to him was utterly remote and meaningless.

“The midwife over to Marlborough by this snow-fall!” she cried disdainfully.

“I’ll ride over and get her if you like,--I’ll bring her out on a pillion.”

“No, no, Lovel,” she said, shaking her head, “neither now nor when the child is born,--I’ll die without midwife, or doctor, more likely.”

“You’re determined to see it in its blackest light,” said Lovel, but he spoke good-humouredly, without losing his patience.

“Well, it isn’t of me or my baby you think, when you sit silent by the hour, is it?” said Daisy, suddenly losing her temper, pulling herself up with the help of the table, and wandering aimlessly around. “’Tisn’t your baby, so why should you think of it? and if I come to die, well, good riddance for you, and you’ll be able to think you did your duty by me. But much you care now, when you go out into the snow like the crazed gipsy you are,--to meet Miss Warrener, Mrs. Calladine, for all I know,--much you care that I sit at home and think myself sick over the danger I’ll run and the pain I’ll suffer, while you maybe won’t come near home till it’s all over one way or the other.”

“When the time gets near I’ll stop closer to home.”

She wanted to cry out, “You dolt, you blockhead, the time is near _now_,” but dared only repeat “One doesn’t always know ...” and began to whimper.

“I won’t go far afield,” said Lovel, soothing her. He was full of pity for all women in her condition, so that none of her words had power to anger him.

A small remorse came over her when he was kind like this, a compunction for having tricked him: would he have been so kind, so long-suffering about the child had he not believed without question in his own brother’s guilt? She tried to edge closer to him; “Nicholas, if anything happened to me, you wouldn’t think too hardly of me, would you?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” said Lovel, weary of the discussion, but still patient and kind.

“You won’t go far, Nicco, will you?”

“No, if that comforts you.”

He was committed now, having given his promise; there would be no more roamings for him; but he was willing to forgo their small solace, negligible in the midst of his desolation, if thereby he might reassure the poor contemptible creature.

“Nicco,” she said timidly, with an impulse of honesty, prompted by his gentleness, “’tisn’t fair to ask you, hardly ... ’tisn’t your child, after all’s said and done.”

“I’m responsible for my brother,” said Lovel, and she turned away from him and wept, overcome.

“You’re an upright man, Lovel,” she cried through her tears, “too upright for such as me.”

He had not understood her full meaning, of course; he had told her again not to distress herself, he had assured her again that he would not go far from home, he had even patted her shoulder, letting her see nothing of the effort it cost him, and he had gone out then, to a house down the street where he had a small carpentering job to finish. Daisy remained alone in the kitchen, alone with the satisfaction of having gained her point that he would abandon his long absences, but still she was not satisfied as she expected; she sat on where he had left her, bluntly probed by conscience, she whose conscience had never troubled her until this contact with Lovel and his standards: what was she doing to Lovel, she asked herself now? she had got him, but was that all? was that enough for her? to have got him and to know she had caught him by a trick? to see him inert under his dull unhappiness? never to hear him complain, never to catch him at fault, but to see him quiet as though his spirit was ebbing daily from him? Even she, in her blundering insensitiveness, stirred uneasily at the thought of his injuries. “But what was I to be at?” she cried to herself in self-justification; “I wanted him, and all’s fair....” She moved in her chair and twisted her hands. “Nicco, Nicco,” she moaned. “If he knew how I wanted him he’d forgive me,” and with this reflection came a deeper stab: it was probably true that he would indeed forgive her,--that she had indeed broken him down to the extent of that saint-like clemency. What would put anger and mettle back into him? what would put life back into him? Clare, nothing but Clare, without whom he was incomplete, only a gentle husk; and for a passing moment her thoughts travelled to Clare, living out her life in some fashion or another by Calladine’s side at Starvecrow. What, in her ignorance, had she helped to bring about? She paused and drew back on the brink of things she did not understand, taking refuge again in her own miseries, comfortably familiar by reason of the many times she had pored over them, with no dark corners or frightening perspectives, but all close, small and personal, under the range of her poor niggling microscope. And she was in the right frame of mind for such brooding, feeling herself oppressed and full of foreboding, as she sat in the kitchen big with the child, and big with the failure of her life, waiting indeed for deliverance from the child, but seeing no solution to the greater oppression, which she might expect to continue until she should grow as spiritless and broken as Lovel and their existence should dwindle to a grey twilight of apathy unenlivened even by anger or revolt. She had rarely felt so dejected; the very stones of the kitchen walls crushed her with their rude size; the child within her, usually so active, so ironically vigorous, was so quiet to-day that she began to wonder whether it were dead; the old woman overhead made no sound; and all round the house lay the thick soft deadening pall of snow that muffled the country from Thames to Severn. She wished that Lovel had not gone out; disheartened though she now was, she still clung to the tormenting comfort of his presence; it was almost a consolation to see him suffering beside her. Since life held neither hope nor joy for either of them, let her in her own pain at least be able to sneer at the sight of his; let them be together in their separation. She grew frightened at the wildness and virulence of her thoughts. They were not so much thoughts, as impulses that floated a little crazily across her mind. She was not well to-day; it was not surprising; it was cruel of Nicholas to leave her alone. She stirred, and looked round, saw no one, but fancied that eyes watched her. “Olver!” she cried out, although she had seen nothing.

In a pause that followed her cry she breathed heavily, staring round with eyes that dared not flutter into a blink. Her eyeballs became tense and dry, her hands strained at the edge of the table. For all that she knew, her brother-in-law might have been in the room all the time; she was still startled by his soft appearances and vanishings, as by his sudden meaningless laughter, and by the arrows of shrewdness that would dart across his erratic brain. “Olver?” she whispered next, half-expecting him to answer from under her very feet, and little as she desired his company, she thought that any answer would be preferable to the continued silence in the room and to the doubt as to whether Olver was there or not.

She was coming to the conclusion that her instinct had been a mistaken one, since five minutes had certainly elapsed while she stared and peered round the room, and she was about to relax from her strain of looking and listening for Olver, when she heard a faint tap on the window, and, looking round, she saw his face pressed against the window pane from outside. Her fright gave way to petulance; she called out to him to give over his tricks, and at the same time she beckoned imperiously to him to come into the house. Well-accustomed to him by now, she felt relief when he materialised out of the silence. “How long had you been watching me?” she asked.

“That’s my secret,” he replied.

She struggled, impatient of the little mysteries he liked to make.

“Anyhow, Nicholas isn’t here,” she observed, turning away from Olver and tapping her fingers irritably upon the table.

“I don’t want Nicholas,” said Olver, “I want you.”

He came further into the room, while she looked at him in enquiry.

“Oh, you’ve found an old bird’s nest you want to show me,” she said disdainfully.

“That’s as far as you can think,” replied Olver with equal disdain. He came up to her. “Have you ever thought that there’s things you’ve no idea of going on all round you?”

“Why,” she said, fright again overtaking her, “that’s what I was thinking just now.”

“But you didn’t like to think too close on it?”

“No, perhaps I didn’t. Let me be, Olver; I’ve troubles enough without you moidering me.”

“And are you the only one to have troubles?”

“Let me be, Olver, I tell you.”

“No, I won’t let you be. I’ve a grudge against you. I’ve thought it out.”

“I’m not well, Olver; keep your grudge till I’ve got my baby. Then I’ll have it out with you if I must.”

“You hadn’t any pity on Nicco.”

“Oh, that’s how the land lies, is it?”

“No use being brazen about it, Daisy. I’m here to speak for Nicco, and nothing you say’ll stop me.”

“If you don’t let me be, I’ll tell Nicholas, and he’ll be angry with you.”

“I’m not afraid of Nicco.”

“Oh, yes, you are. We all are. Even me,--and I’m his wife.”

“A pretty wife. Nicco can kill me if he likes; I’ll speak first. I know better what’s good for him than he knows himself. You’ve broken his heart.”

“Not me, Olver, not me only. His heart would have been broken anyhow. And God knows he’s breaking mine.”

“Who cares about yours? Nicco’s worth everything.”

“I know that, do you suppose I don’t know that? It’s making me mad, Olver. Can’t you have a little pity on me and leave me to myself?”

“I wouldn’t have any pity for you, not if you were dying.”

“Well, I shall be dying before very long, if that’s any consolation to you.”

“You aren’t the sort that dies. Nicco’ll have you stuck to him for years; he’ll leave you before you leave him.”

“Don’t say that, Olver; he’s strong; different, but as strong as me.”

“Oh, his body’s strong enough, but there’s something burns him away inside. Look at his eyes.”

“Olver, don’t say such terrible things. What do you know? I never can tell how much you know,--you’re simple, aren’t you? He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t complain to you, does he?”

“He’ll die, but he won’t have complained once. And we shall never know. He’s good to us both, isn’t he?”

“Good,--yes, he’s good; but you don’t understand, Olver, you needn’t rub it into me how good he is or how much he’s worth. I know it already, I love him so much it makes me sick and mad. It’s almost too much for me, what I have to put up with, what with one thing and another.... Now go away, can’t you? I’ve told you, I’ve admitted it all to you; I can’t put it more plainly.”

“He’s good to you just as he’s good to me; he hasn’t a ha’pennyworth of feeling for you.”

“I know, Olver, I know; can’t you leave me alone? I’m not well, I tell you; it isn’t the moment to come baiting me.”

“There’s another woman he wanted....”

“You shan’t speak of her!” screamed Daisy.

“Oh, yes, I will,” said Olver, seizing her by the wrists. “Do you call to mind what you once told me, that you saw them together, and it seemed a week wasn’t enough for all they had to say? Where are they now. Three miles apart, yet they haven’t seen one another for six months,--from the time the Downs were green to the time the Downs are white. And do you suppose he’s left her for a moment in thought, or she left him? Not they. They used to slip together to the Kennet, those two, and they’ve been suddenly divided. And you whine to me because you’re unhappy. You say you’re not well. Not well! You! Who cares? You could whelp a litter and be none the worse, and you can stand a bit of unhappiness just as well as you can stand your baby. I’ve no pity for you. But Nicco,--he’ll break,--he’ll die inside.”

“Don’t, Olver, don’t; what’s the good of torturing me now. What can I do?”

“What can you do? You can clear out, can’t you? Go and have your baby in a ditch, somewhere where Nicco can never find you again,” he said brutally.

“Where would be the good of that? She’s married herself, Miss Warrener is, and I love Nicco, I keep on telling you; I can’t give him up,” cried Daisy, confused and hunted to the last extremity; and she thought of something she could say to Olver, something which would either silence him or else force him to throw down all his cards upon the table, “Whose fault is it, anyhow, that Nicco had to marry me, to save me from the shame his own brother brought upon me?”

“You think you can trick me like you tricked him,” cried Olver, horrible with rage. “Why don’t you say the shame Peter Gorwyn brought on you? You might be a little nearer the mark.”

“Peter Gorwyn?”

They faced one another, all civilisation gone from them. They struck blindly at one another, keeping nothing back.

“I saw you, oh, I saw you, the day of the Scouring.”

“I loved Nicco, I do love him; I had to have him!”

“_You_ love him?--you’re killing him.”

“He couldn’t have got Miss Warrener,--not with a brother like you. Do you hear? ’Tisn’t me that keeps him from her; it’s you, you, you.”

“Me?” shouted Olver.

“You, did you never think of that before? It doesn’t matter whether my baby is your baby or Peter Gorwyn’s baby. It’s you that spoil his life for him, you and your mother, you mischievous dolt, and your dirty blood in him. He’s tainted, and he knows it. ’Tisn’t me. I came long after; I’m just an extra. ’Tis you and your mother destroyed him, from the day he was born.”

She clasped her hands suddenly to her side and fell back on to her chair.

“You’ve done for me,” she groaned.

The door opened and Lovel stood upon the threshold. Olver ran to him, touching him all over with his hands, reaching up to pass his hands even over his brother’s head.

“Look at her, Nicco; she’s tricked you, the brat isn’t mine, it’s Peter Gorwyn’s, and she says ’tis I that kept you from Miss Warrener. Why don’t you kill her, Nicco? and I’ll go right away if it’s true; I love you better than she does; you shall have Miss Warrener.”

“What’s all this?” said Lovel. He put Olver’s passionate fumbling hands aside, and went over to Daisy. “You’re ill,” he said in a practical voice; “What is it? has Olver hurt you?”

“You heard what he said,” she replied, looking up at him with terrified and pain-racked eyes.

“Never mind about that. Are you ill? Let me help you up.”

“She’s tricked you, Nicco,” cried Olver, fawning round him.

“Hold your tongue, Olver; she’s in pain. You poor fool, why didn’t you tell me? Heaven knows if I can get to Marlborough through this snow with darkness coming on. Lean on me, I’ll take you upstairs. Lean on me; never mind anything else.”

Olver was pulling frantically at him.

“Is it true, Nicco? is it me? Oh, my poor Nicco,--first me and then her,--what can I do?--but I’ll do something,--I’ll find something to do,--oh, my head, my heart.”

“The pain, the pain!” cried Daisy.

“Lean on me,” said Lovel, putting his arm round her.

“Gorwyn’s child!” screamed Olver in a frenzy. He followed them to the foot of the stairs, where he stumbled and fell on the lowermost step, still calling incoherently after Lovel, who was persuading his wife up to her room, saying meanwhile, “Lean on me, Daisy, I won’t let you fall, don’t be afraid, it’ll all be over soon.”

The word was quickly passed down the village street that Daisy Lovel’s time was come, and that Lovel begged the kindness of some charitable woman to remain near his wife while he rode to Marlborough in search of the midwife. “There’s a chance for somebody,” said one woman, “to see the inside of that house for herself.” “And there’s a come-down for Gipsy Lovel,” said another, “to have to beg for one of us to go into his place. Where would he be if we all refused?” “Her time come already? and she married,--let me see,--four, five months, is it?” said a third. But in spite of these and other scornful remarks, volunteers were forthcoming, and even those who had lagged most behind, or who had recommended that Lovel be left to suffer now the penalty of his years of unneighbourliness, watched enviously the departure of Mrs. Blagdon for the house of mystery and evil legend. They saw her received at the door by Lovel, drawn in and swallowed up, as to their imagination Daisy herself had been swallowed up on the day of her wedding.

They continued, however, to observe Lovel’s house for some time, glancing at intervals between the lace curtains which decked their own windows, and saw a light spring up in the room they assumed to be Daisy’s, and a gigantic shadow passing to and fro upon the blind. Evening had come, swiftly to be followed by night; the snow had begun to fall again in large flakes; very soon the street was white, unbroken by footmarks, since every soul was within doors. The women idly watching between their curtains saw Lovel emerge from his house, close the door behind him, and pass down the alley between two houses to the shed where he kept his horse. They saw him emerge again, leading the horse; they saw him swing himself into the saddle and ride away, his coat collar turned up high against the snow, tall and spare as he disappeared silently into the thick dusk. The women said, “He’s off to Marlborough to find the midwife. Things can’t be going,” they added with relish, “as well as they should.” The men only growled, “He must be crazed to think he can find the road to Marlborough on a night like this; he’ll break his own neck and his horse’s legs.” But the women had a curious faith in Lovel’s efficiency.

Few village confinements were honoured with so much interest. The darkness in the street was now intense, heightened by the snow that continued to float down in large, soft flakes; only the little yellow lights in the windows broke it, all on the ground-floor level but for the significant exception of Daisy’s window, whose lighted rectangle on the upper storey threw its beams out against the falling snow. All was silent in the Lovels’ house; ever Mrs. Blagdon seemed to have fallen into the clandestine habits of her hosts, for she had not once run out across the street in an interval for a moment’s gossip with a neighbour; only the shadow passed upon the blind, enormous and suggestive, to show that any life stirred within the house. The snow fell thicker; the few black holes left by the hoofs of Lovel’s horse had been long since blotted out, and Lovel himself had disappeared into the night as completely as though he had no intention of ever coming back. Hours had passed, suppers were finished and cleared away in all the little lighted kitchens, still the good wives were reluctant to move upstairs to bed, while careful to conceal their reluctance from the men. And Mrs. Blagdon, when she finally threw up a window in spite of the steely cold, to call out in an irritable and impatient voice, “Anybody seen anything of Lovel?” was answered by a dozen voices in negation.

“How’s things, Mrs. Blagdon?”

“Turned round the wrong way,” came the reply laconically.

The street fell back into its silence after the small disturbance. Women who had been through the experience gave a moment’s pity to Daisy. Gorwyn, the smith, knocking out his pipe against his hearthstone, reiterated the opinion that Lovel would not be seen again that night. Peter, his son, stirred uneasily. “Is it all up with her, would you think, mother?” But Mrs. Gorwyn was contemptuous. “Lord, no; a solid girl like Daisy’d stand a deal more than that.”

Country news, that most unaccountable traveller, spread even to Starvecrow in its isolation. Mrs. Quince was full of it,--she who towards Clare had kept herself so very prim and respectfully reserved. “You will remember, madam, the girl you saw in the attic bedroom here, Daisy Morland by name?”

“I remember perfectly, Mrs. Quince; what of her?”

“You will remember she was stitching at some baby-linen,--she was married to that good-for-nothing Lovel,--Gipsy Lovel, they call him,--a fortnight later,--a matter of three weeks before you were married yourself, madam.”

“Yes, Mrs. Quince?”

“She was brought to bed of a son in the early hours of this morning, madam,” said Mrs. Quince importantly.

“Really. I hope she is well?”

“Well enough; these country girls make nothing of it. Lightly born as lightly come by, I always say. Yet at one time it was a question whether they could save the baby.” Mrs. Quince added some details. “Yes, madam. Her husband had to ride to Marlborough and brought the doctor out a-pillion, and how he could ha’ done it with the night as black as pitch, and the snow falling, and the roads hedge-deep in snow, is what the folk are all asking themselves. They saw him start, but no one saw him come back, but sure enough when they went to unbar their doors this morning there were the tracks of a horse up the street. A fine boy, they say. It’s fortunate he hasn’t taken after his Uncle Olver.”

“Yes,” said Clare.

“It’s my opinion, madam, I don’t know if it’s yours too,--that people like that have no business to get children. ’Tisn’t fair, as a matter of conscience, when you don’t know what dark blood you may be handing on. Anybody has only got to look at the Lovels to know there’s no good in them,--well, they ought to restrain themselves, that’s what I say.”

Seeing that Clare did not reply, Mrs. Quince resumed after a moment, “There always were things about those Lovels that weren’t natural. Now here’s another thing: how did he ride from King’s Avon to Marlborough and back on a night like last night, if something unholy wasn’t in league with him? No other man in the village could have done it, and there’s not many that would have tried. No, let the baby go, they’d have said, and the woman too, if need be. And he’s always out on those hills; if he had to go after sheep there would be some sense in it, but he just goes straying alone when most men are glad enough to keep their fireside. He’s been seen on the top of White Horse Hill, in the middle of a blizzard fit to cut you in half. And I have heard it told, that after he’s passed by, the Grey Wethers have been found uncovered; yes, even though they were at the bottom of the deepest drift there they’ll be, sticking up black in the middle of the snow.”

“You can’t believe everything you’re told, Mrs. Quince.”

“Well, that’s as it may be, madam. All the same, I stick to it that there is something unholy about those Lovels; it’s easy to say the younger one is daft, but there’s nothing daft about Nicholas,--far from it. So why does he look so dark and queer? and why must he pass on his sly Egyptian blood to an English girl? if he must get children, let him get them on one of his own sort, that’s what I say.”

Here Calladine came in.

“Secrets?” he asked in his most urbane manner, seeing Mrs. Quince become silent in the midst of garrulity.

“No,” said Clare. “Mrs. Quince was telling me that Lovel’s wife has had a son, and that Lovel had to go to Marlborough in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor.”

“Dear me, that’s a daring, uncomfortable thing to do,” said Calladine, smiling in a patronising way.

“Yes,” said Clare, looking at him. “Not many people would have cared for the job, I think.”

Calladine laughed negligently.

“You always had a weakness for your poacher,” he replied.

“Would you be wanting me any more, madam?” enquired Mrs. Quince.

“If Lovel’s wife is in need of anything I can send her, please let me know, Mrs. Quince.”

“Yes, madam. Very good of you, madam.”

When the housekeeper had left the room, Calladine said, “I never question your actions, as you know, Clare, but do you think it judicious to encourage these people? The woman was married not very long before ourselves, yet she already gives birth to a baby; the man is well-known as an undesirable in the whole neighbourhood.”

Clare went up to him. “Oh, Richard,” she cried gaily, “are they worth talking about any longer?” She pushed him down into his armchair and knelt at his feet. “What are we going to do to-day, tell me?”

“To do?” repeated Calladine in surprise. “Why, what is there that we could possibly do on a day like this? What a restless spirit it is--always crying out to be up and doing--when I am quite content if I may sit and look into your eyes.”

“That’s very pretty, Richard, but it doesn’t mean much; don’t you ever want to be out, moving, riding, anything! anything but sit cooped indoors day after day with books?”

“I confess I haven’t much desire to be riding into snow-drifts on this particular morning,” said Calladine, glancing at the white-and-leaden prospect out of the window.

“And you wouldn’t allow me to do so either, if I had a mind to?”

“Such a wild child!” said Calladine fondly, stroking her hair. “How fortunate that you should have a staid, elderly husband to look after you.”

“How do you think I looked after myself for nineteen years, then, Richard?”

“Heaven knows,” said Calladine in mock dismay; banter with Clare was a form of conversation he particularly enjoyed. The morning promised to pass agreeably; there was nothing he liked better than for Clare to kneel at his feet, as she was doing now, sitting back on her heels, while he looked at her fresh youthfulness with that fond and tender glance of his, and rallied her gently, or caressed her with the courtly phrases she had heard from him alone among men. “How _did_ you look after yourself?” he repeated. “You always escaped from old Martha Sparrow, and even the poacher cannot always have been at hand for a ready rescue, and in any case he is scarcely my idea of a knight-errant.”

“No,” said Clare, “he hasn’t such pretty manners as you, Richard.”

“Now you’re laughing at me,--are you, or aren’t you? I never know,” and he caught her to him and began flecking her face and hair with quick kisses, but desisted to say more seriously, “You’re so exquisitely a woman, Clare, so deliciously a child; I realised that you were both from the day you first came to visit me here.”

The phrase had a vague echo of familiarity for Clare; “so exquisitely a woman”; she felt sure that she had heard him say that, or something very like it, before; and she thought with the hardness that was becoming habitual to her where he was concerned, that from no woman would he demand anything further.

“What a toy I am to you, Richard,” she said idly; “what a toy you like to make of me.”