for the rest, no, I don’t think I have wondered. I don’t see why you
shouldn’t lead the life that pleases you best.”
“Nevertheless,” he said, “I should like to give you my explanation,
if you will be patient enough to listen. I loved a woman once,” he
said, in a low mournful voice, as though he were disinterring the
memory of the dead from his very bowels, and while he spoke he kept
his eyes averted from Clare and held his unseeing gaze upon the clump
of beeches on the high skyline; “she was wholly a woman, yet every
great quality of woman she lacked; I mean to say, that in every mood
of capriciousness and grace she was as wholly and divinely a woman
as any woman who ever enchanted man and coloured the loveliness of
his days, but under the test of all graver issues her fluidity turned
to falseness and she slipped between my fingers. I never held her;
no, though I held her in my arms she eluded me; even while I thought
to possess her, her soul slid away from me in some new protean
shape, and danced and laughed and mocked my pursuit. Oh, she was a
will-o’-the-wisp dancing across the marshes of my life. For my life was
indeed a marsh in those days; I sank in quicksands; I struggled out
on to a tussock; I trusted myself again on what I took to be firmer
ground, I sank once more, I was sucked back at every step, I was
tempted to let myself sink for ever from sheer weariness and despair.
But she,--she was at home among the treacheries and miasmas where she
had led me; that light, vain soul could skim where I could only sink.
Do you wonder,” he said, letting his eyes travel slowly round the clean
sweep of the Downs, bare of all softness, and bringing them at last
to rest upon her face, “can you wonder that I came to repair my life
in this old, hard country? You may believe me or not, as you choose,
but I got that image of the marsh so firmly fixed in my mind that to
this day I can’t bear to walk across a bit of swampy ground, or even
along a muddy lane. You have water here, in your country, that’s true,
and plenty of it; but it’s straightforward water: running rivers, and
dew-ponds up here on the heights.”
“It’s true,” she said; “’tis an old, hard country; and such ghosts as
there are are bleached bones by now, dry and clean; there’s no decay
about them. Why, I think that the ghosts that walk among the stones
must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”
“And mine too,” he replied, considering her; “and if anywhere the
uneasy dead return from their sleep,--though I am not saying that I
believe it to be so,--it should surely be hereabouts, for in the last
century there were enough tales current of witches and wise men, and
similar fascinations of the simple, to raise the longest-dead of old
Britons from his grave. But I scarcely think the local folk are much
troubled with such ideas. They come more readily to you and me, for I
am a stranger, as strangers are reckoned in country districts, where
the years only begin to count as they pass into centuries; the space of
time for an acorn to grow into an oak; and even you, who have been here
all your life long, are not native born. The spirit of this country
does not come to either of us as a natural right. We have learnt it,
and so must remain always more conscious of it than those to whom it is
as native speech.”
She looked at him with the faintly puzzled expression of one who is out
of his depth.
“Yes,” she murmured uneasily, looking down at the ground, and kicking a
lump of chalk into powder with the toe of her shoe. She deeply resented
this association of herself and him as strangers to the country; Lovel
would not have spoken so!
“You and I,” he went on, for it caressed his soul merely to utter
those words thus coupled, “tread at least as reverent intruders among
the rings and barrows. We do not rest among them, as the shepherds
do, simply for shelter against the winds and sleets. I came to them
for healing; and you, even had you not been born with the capacity
for awe,--as you were, oh, as indeed I know you were!--would have
learnt it from that wise old man, your father. I have thought watching
him at that delicate fingering of his shards, how he had dealt out
to you the store of his scholar’s brain. To him, neat, tabulated,
chronological, precise, but filtering through to yours in a strange
jumble,--the painting of a bison on the wall of a cave, a man in thongs
and bearskins sharpening a flint, slow glaciers crawling over England,
kings buried on horseback in full panoply under a mound.”
“And did you find healing?” she inquired, catching on to the remark she
could pursue with the least resentment.
“Oh, I found it, yes, I found it,” he replied, morosely, “if I may call
that healing, which but exchanges one wound for another,--a poisonous
wound, let us say, for a clean sharp one. Yes, I may call it healing,
I suppose, for although my heart’s blood ebbs away through the fresh
wound, there is no longer any gangrene in my system. I am purified;
true, I may be dying, but at least I am purified. Yes, I found healing.”
“Dying?” she exclaimed.
“Oh, I spoke figuratively,” he replied with a toss of his hand; “don’t
be afraid, Miss Clare, that in the course of your rambles you will come
upon my body toppled down the side of a barrow,--though how should
that distress you, indeed, beyond the ordinary shock of stumbling
across a man recently dead? I am healthy enough of limb for a man of my
age. Fifty, I am, you know,--old enough to be your father. It was kind
of you to ask whether I found healing, and I am thankful to be able to
tell you that I did find it; the winds of my first winter, which nearly
blew my head off my shoulders and sent it bowling along these slopes,
blew away my noxious thoughts. I told you I was led into miasmas; well,
I brought them up here, clinging about me like a cloud, and the wind
blew them away.”
“Yet you spoke of that woman just now with a good tang of bitterness,”
she said shrewdly.
“Ah, well, I grudge the wasted years,” he returned, as though desirous
of dismissing it thus lightly. “You may take my word for it, Miss
Clare, that I have never bared that story to a soul except yourself;
and probably should never have bared it to you but for some foolish,
trivial reason I was anxious that you should hear it. Now that you
have heard it you shall not be troubled with it again, I promise you.
It is, moreover, an old story now; a score of years old, I should say,
though I have forgotten the dates, and in the ordinary way of things I
never think of it now. But people hereabouts have gossiped about me, I
know, as was only natural, and lest any story should come to your ears,
I prefer you to know the true one. You know it now; you know I am
neither a prisoner escaped, nor a deserter from the army, nor a hunter
of buried gold, nor any of the things which I have no doubt the village
has credited me with, but simply a man once disappointed in love, as
the saying goes, though Heaven knows whether those who coined that
saying knew what they were talking about, or to what tragedy they were
putting a name.”
“All that’s said for my benefit,” said Clare sturdily; “you do think
on it now, and you haven’t forgotten the date; though maybe you will
cease to think on it, since you’ve spoken it out; and it’s no longer
simmering in your heart.”
He was gratified that she should so readily have caught that inflection
in the voice which was meant to convey courage under sorrow, rather
than forgetfulness after the passing of years.
“And should trouble come upon _you_,” he said very earnestly, “would
you place your confidence in me? I ask it as a favour,--as a slight
return. Whatsoever a duty a man might perform for you, will you call
upon me and no other? You cannot know how happy your promise would make
me. You are youth incarnate amongst these ancient hills.” He dared not
say more, but continued to gaze at her with urgent and beseeching eyes.
“Why, I think I can promise that,” she said slowly, though puzzled
again and perplexed by his earnestness. “I think one could place
confidence in you, although you are so strange and unaccountable
both in your ways and talk. I think you would be as vehement in your
friendship as you seem to be in your thoughts. I think you would grieve
very much,” she continued, examining him, “if you were to fail in
carrying out a mission for a friend.”
“For you,” he interjected. “My service is not so freely placed at
everybody’s disposal. You will have no rival claimant on my obedience.”
“Well, I will give you my promise,” she said, “though I would have you
understand, Mr. Calladine,” she added with a childish importance, “that
I am not in the least likely to make any call upon you. I am very well
able to take care of myself, nor is any trouble, as you say, likely to
come upon me.”
“Hush, don’t boast,” he cried, looking fearfully round, and half in
mocking he added, “Who knows what sardonic spirits may be listening to
your boasting? Anyway, you have given me your promise, and I should
like you to seal it. Give me your hand,--not so reluctantly,”--for he
had felt it struggle faintly like a caught bird,--“we are friends, you
know,--and for one who professes to have confidence in me, I declare
you give proof of having very little,--now lay your hand upon this
stone, and I will put mine over it,--now repeat this vow after me....”
“No, no,” she said, frightened, and trying to draw her hand away;
“it’s profane; that may be a sacrificial stone for all we know....”
“And so resent the invocation of a Christian God?” he completed for
her with a laugh, but the extreme agitation of his manner underneath
his laughter alarmed her. “Or is it of me, and not really of the
stone, that you are afraid? Surely you cannot think that your own Grey
Wethers would harm you? So it must be of me,--a bad beginning to your
confidence! Why, before very long you will be giving the same promise
to another man lest you should require defence against myself.”
“I was never afraid of any one yet,” she said, flaming up, “Mr.
Calladine, and as a proof of it there is my hand; now do what you like
with it. I think that you are very bitter and wild, but I am sure that
you would not make the worse ally for that. And no woman would say less
than that you were wild and bitter, if she had heard you talk the way
I have often heard you talk; but that does not mean that I am afraid
of you, for I am not, nor of any one in this world,” she repeated,
challenging him to contradict her.
“No, daughter of the Downs,” he said with much gravity, still holding
her hand in his own.
She stamped her foot.
“You laugh at me, Mr. Calladine; well, if you treat me as a child, why
exact such promises from me as the one you have just asked for? But I
am not a child; I am nineteen,” she said.
“My dear,--my dear young lady,” he said, amending the endearment into
that conventional phrase, “it is only because you are, or soon will be,
so very much of a woman that I besought your promise. Come, solemnize
it without any further delay; swear, not by the Christian God, but by
the Grey Wethers themselves, by their age, and their mystery. You will
have the advantage of me if you can devise an oath more potent or more
occult.”
He laid her hand, which he had not relinquished, palm downward upon the
stone. The stone was cold to her touch, but Calladine’s hand pressed
over her own was by contrast dry and burning. She swore as he had
commanded her to do, half in derision of his fancifulness, half still
in the lurking alarm she was too proud to betray. He appeared to be
satisfied, and released her, though not without reluctance at letting
her hand go, and for a moment he wished he had never taken possession
of it, when he noted the alacrity with which she took it back, and
the surreptitious rub she gave it on the side of her riding-coat. “So
that is how she feels about my touch!” he said to himself, but only
a greater gentleness stole into his manner as he thanked her for her
compliance and held her stirrup for her to mount her pony. She sat
easily, boyishly, in her saddle, looking down on him, and a certain
melancholy, that was not without its solicitude on her part, and its
wistfulness on his, overcame them both in reaction to the overcharged
scene which had taken place between them.
“I don’t want you to be unhappy,--indeed I don’t,” she said, “Mr.
Calladine; and please do not think it impertinence on my part to
assume that you are. I know of course that I am too young to pry into
your affairs; I haven’t the wisdom necessary; in fact I haven’t any
qualification except sympathy, and I do ask you to believe that I have
that. We have been friends for such a long time,” she said, looking
down at him as though she felt a passing though true impulse to come
closer to the bitterness of his spirit.
His hand resting on her pony’s neck, he looked up with a rueful
gratitude, by no means displeased that she should use the words “wild”
and “bitter” about him, or treat his sorrows with so much veneration.
He had not the heart to break her illusion of her own kindness with
scornful words, but gave her a smile, which cost him a greater effort
than he would have cared to acknowledge, and which he hoped would be
adequate to reassure her. She smiled back at him, brightly; and with a
touch of the heel put her pony into motion. He watched her ride away,
along the ridge of Down, her slight figure swaying easily to the pony’s
walk; and presently he saw her break into a canter, and heard the beat
of the pony’s hoofs on the hard turf, until she was carried out of
sight and hearing over the curve of the hill.
It was so characteristic of Nicholas Lovel to keep away from the
Scouring! Clare thought how the rest of the villagers must dislike
him for his detachment. Not that he cared what the villagers said,
beyond wishing that they would leave him and his affairs alone as far
as possible,--a vain hope. Clare knew quite well that she could never
have inveigled him into making friends with her but for their very
early friendship when she was a child and he little more than a boy,
when, in fact, he could not fear a rebuff from her, and, meeting her
on the Downs, he had told her how to ride her pony, how to read the
signs of the weather, and a dozen scraps of country craft which she had
assimilated with great respect for his wisdom. They had drifted into
a curious, desultory intimacy. Because they knew each other only in
this detached way,--etherialised, as it were; stripped of the ordinary
routine of friendship;--because she knew nothing of his life, and he
nothing of hers; each knowing only the other’s Down-life; each admitted
only into the other’s solitude, a part of that solitude rather than an
intrusion; because they were really strangers to one another,--there
existed between them a complete ease and understanding. All formalities
were absent; they never thought of greeting one another when they met;
they never thought of talking except when they could continue the
current of their thoughts aloud. When they sighted one another upon
the Downs, they simply converged until their horses fell into pace
side by side. Often their first remark, spoken after long preliminary
silence, was without context or explanation, like a bubble rising to
the surface from what had been going on within their minds beneath. To
be together was like being alone. Clare never talked to Lovel about
her father, or about the Manor House; Lovel never talked to her about
his difficulties, or about his pursuits, legitimate or illegitimate.
At times their talk was purely practical, when he would show her how
to cast a fly, or how to throw a sheep for shearing, or how to twist a
rough basket out of osiers; at other times it was all theoretical, and
there was no puzzle, discontent, or aspiration they would not touch on
or thrash out. Quite abruptly, sometimes, he would break off and leave
her. She never thought of asking him, next time, why he had done so,
any more than she would have thought of asking the breeze why it had
dropped. There were weeks together in which she never saw him at all;
he came and went in her life like the rover that he was. When they
passed each other in the village, they gave no sign of recognition;
they had never alluded to this, yet each knew that the other was
amused by the tacit convention. She knew, of course, where he lived,
though the site, appearance, and actuality of his dwelling seemed to
her singularly unimportant. Half way down the village street stood
a house, small, but very massively built of grey stones, quarried,
in point of fact, barbarously from the monoliths that had been the
constant resource of the local builders. The front door, when it stood
open on to the street, showed to passers-by a long dark passage,
like a tunnel, at the further end of which opened suddenly the light
and glow of the square walled garden, with its brilliant green turf,
its one dark cedar, and its patches of sunlit flowers. The front door
was surmounted by a porch, resting on two round columns; along the
architrave of this porch was painted in neat black lettering the name:
NICHOLAS LOVEL. It might have seemed curious to a stranger that no
further indication should follow on to this superscription; there was
nothing to inform the ignorant whether Nicholas Lovel was by trade a
farrier, a joiner, a shoesmith, a tailor, or even the keeper of an inn;
whether one might enter by the open door, and, taking one’s seat at a
table within, rap against a glass and call loudly for the landlord. But
strangers were few and far between, and among the habitual population
of the village the circumstances of the Lovels had been threshed out so
often that you might have imagined the topic would fall upon wearied
ears. There were few trades to which young Lovel could not turn his
hand. He could plough a field,--and in straight furrows, too,--he could
build a rick, and thatch it when it was built, he could repair a waggon
or repaint a gig, he could get the better of a horse-coper at his own
job, or of a pedlar at his own chaffering, he could cure a sick ewe and
bring back to life a weakling lamb, he could cane a chair and twist
up a basket of osiers in less time than it takes to tell, he could
snare a rabbit and slip under the very nose of the keepers, he could
drink most men under the table and walk most men off their legs, and
amongst the girls of the village there was not one who at one time or
another had not set her cap at young Lovel, and got from him in return
neither a civil nor an uncivil word. Yet for all these, and other,
accomplishments, there was no one trade which he regularly practised.
Any man might call him in for a stray job, whether as a farm-hand,
a carpenter, or a shepherd, and many were the bribes which had been
offered to induce him to accept regular employment: he declined them
all. Gipsy Lovel, they called him in the village; whether on account
of his name, his looks, or his vagrant practising, was not defined,
probably all three. In appearance he was dark and lean; his Roman
features bronzed to a polish, so tightly his skin seemed stretched
over his bones; and with the brown corduroy breeches of an ordinary
yeoman he usually wore a dark red shirt, which accentuated his already
outlandish appearance. In speech he was reserved and sardonic, as might
be expected by those who knew,--at least by report,--the circumstances
of his life at home. Except by report, none could know them, for no one
was ever invited to cross that most inhospitable of thresholds.
And further, there was Nicholas Lovel’s younger brother Olver, by the
kind-hearted given occasional employment on odd jobs of carpentering,
house-painting, and the like, for he was skilful enough as a workman,
and could be trusted to carry out his directions with the fidelity of
that kind of brain commonly known as “simple.” He might have passed
as a good-looking youth, with tight, chestnut curls and eyes of a
curiously pale blue, rimmed with black round the iris, but for the
oblique and cunning expression that was apt to cross his face like a
cloud drifting across the moon, and the slight hint of deformity that
clung about him,--a deformity so indefinite, that it was impossible to
say precisely where it lay, whether in his neck being slightly sunk
into his shoulders, or in his head being slightly too large for his
body, or in his hands being slightly too well-formed, too sensitive
for the hands of a workman, or in his tread being slightly too catlike
for one of his build and bulk. He had in the village the reputation
of slyness, a sudden shrewdness, that was disquieting and therefore
repulsive in one whom mere simplicity would have entitled to the
charity of all men. From this reputation of cunning the legend had
grown in the village, as such things grow always in that fertile virgin
soil of ignorance, the legend had grown into a variety of sinister
shapes, all ornamented with copious and more or less picturesque
detail: Olver Lovel’s grandmother had been burned for a witch; his
mother, who was kept in such seclusion now by the severity of Nicholas,
was a witch also; Olver himself practised wizardry; he went out of
his mind when the moon was full; he was mortally feared by all
animals,--this indeed was true, and a matter of common knowledge;--he
controlled his evil impulses only through fear of his brother, but
if his brother were to be taken away, then God help them all! These
were only a few of the things that were openly uttered about Olver
Lovel. Nicholas himself was not above suspicion. He had the same eyes
as his brother, of the palest blue with those curious black rims,
and the effect in his dark face, with his black hair, was certainly
very strange. But people did not fear Nicholas as they feared Olver.
Nicholas was a straight-forward man, reserved and uncompromising
because his pride had so much to suffer, and no doubt his endurance
too, living as he did between his two unusual relations; they had, on
the whole, a good deal of sympathy and respect for Nicholas. It was
no life, they said, for a young man. But who could help him? He would
let no one near him, either literally or figuratively; pride was the
hardest defence to deal with. A harsh young man; but he had much to put
up with. And if he was harsh towards himself and forbidding towards
other men, let them at least do him the justice to say that towards
dumb beasts he had the gentleness of a woman for a child; ay, and the
instinct too: the quick kind touch, and the certain remedy.