for they knew nothing of the friendship between him and Miss Warrener.
They knew, certainly, that he sometimes went fishing with her down
to the Kennet, but they thought nothing of that, for any young lady
might be expected to take a man to carry her rod and landing-net, to
fix her bait, and to deal with her catch. It wasn’t likely that even
Miss Warrener would care to dabble in a mess of worms, or to get her
fingers covered with scales, slime, and cold blood. No, nor to have
the troublesome job of killing a pike, who of all the animal creation
surely clung the most tenaciously to life. What they did not know of
was the Down-life shared by Clare and Lovel; for on those splendid,
solitary heights they could meet and meet again, unobserved by any save
the sheep, the larks, and the circling hawks, indifferent to the pacing
side by side of the two horses over the bitten turf. Various were the
avocations which took Lovel to the Downs, and if occasion required he
would call on Clare to lend him a hand, ordering her about, and she,
meekly, followed his directions as an apprentice. She had even been in
his shepherd’s-hut with him all day during the lambing season, when
a blizzard swept across the hills, and he had his hands so full with
his poor ewes that must be tended and sheltered that he had no time
left for niceties to spare Clare’s feelings. With set teeth she had
helped him that day, and had counted his brief comment at the end as
a well-earned reward. And she had ridden away in the evening with her
head held down against the driven sleet, and her pony’s mane blown
right across his neck with little lumps of ice in the rough hair, and
behind her the yellow light that shown in the window of Lovel’s hut had
grown smaller and more distant, and she had known that during the whole
of the night and of many days and nights to follow he would keep the
vigil attendant upon his trade, and would lay on the straw beside his
little paraffin lamp the poor weak new-comers into so unpropitious a
world.
In all seasons and weathers she had known the Downs with him, and like
sailors at sea they had accepted the bad with the good, without thought
of avoidance. Like all English country people, they disliked extremes
of heat as well as extremes of cold; a high summer’s day, when the
heat winked along the ridge of the hills, held for them none of that
poetic quality it holds for the idle. Their point of view was sober
and practical; if feed grew short, they hoped for rain; if the corn in
the lowlands were flattened by rain, they hoped for fine weather; it
was simple. If the day were a holiday,--that is to say, if Lovel had
taken no job,--then they were as content as any other idlers to lie
soaked in sun upon the most exposed flank of upland they could find.
They would pull the long grass to nibble it down to the juice at the
end, or Lovel with a blade of grass drawn taut between his thumbs would
shrill the empty air with strange whistlings, or they would tease the
ants and small insects by walling them in with a circle of miniature
chalk cliffs. Their laughter spread with the song of the larks as
fresh and clear as water, and the great spaces lay all around them with
the cloud-shadows chasing one another down and over the slopes, and
creating in their overhead passage the perpetual variety of mood and
colour of the Down-country.
Down-country, so temperamental; in halcyon days bright and blithe;
candid in its well-being, wholesome in its wind-cleaned delight; yet
keeping in the valleys and sweeping folds the deeper shadows which
gave it tone like the soberness of some latent melancholy. Upon the
heights it would receive the sun, and glitter and rejoice like a woman
in love, but the cup of the valleys was deep with a greater richness,
with remembrance, and foreboding. So, although simple and large in
outline, the country,--to Clare and Lovel personal, not inanimate,--was
not simple with a shallow or trivial simplicity; not the simplicity
of ignorance or emotional poverty; but with a wisdom that still
had the courage to be gay,--the reckless gaiety of the profoundly
tragic. No monotony was possible over that landscape of sunburnt tan,
of blue distances, and stains of a lowering purple. No monotony,
no sentimentality; the moods all visible at once over the range of
country, all definite and certain of their intention, whether the naked
sunburnt heights, or the brooding plunge of shadow.
Only in winter that ever-present reminder of tragedy fulfilled
itself. In summer and in autumn it robed itself in peacock colours,
blue and bronze, a sorrow as sumptuous as the sorrow of a queen. But
in the winter the splendour was gone, only an austerity like stone
remained; grey disillusioned Downs, shaven by the winds, shelterless,
inconsolable. Then came the snow; and up here, where no trees but
the beech-clumps broke the white, where no hedges strove with their
little maudlin pretence of security to lessen the rigour of the country
towards the softness of man, here no flinching availed; grief was
naked as joy had been naked, to be met and fought with, until that
despondency should pass and the heights leap out once more into the
sun of spring, with only the reverberations of the storm rolling still
about the valleys.
Lovel, who resembled the Downs themselves both in his exuberance of
spirit with the threat ever-lurking, and in his despair, which was so
extravagant and so profound when it overcame him that it seemed he
could never again lift himself out of the slough,--Lovel who for all
his thought and his reading had never looked into himself or named what
he would have found there,--Lovel who could no more control his moods
than the Downs could forbid the sun to burnish their gold-brown slopes
or the blizzard to rack them with a hell-ride of gale and sleet,--Lovel
came upon Clare standing in the sun knee-deep in a dew-pond on one of
the highest ridges of the Downs.
Her patient pony, well-accustomed, strayed and browsed near at hand;
he snuffed the dry thymy turf; he plucked with disdain at a tuft of
grass fit only for sheep-pasture. This was not horse-pasture, this
bare beggarly brown turf up here in the glitter of the sun, beneath
the exposed and unsheltered windiness of the sky. Open country, open
country; no higher peaks to climb; miles of open rolling country
on every side. The clean and airy liberty of open country under a
blue-and-white heaven. Clare stood in the circle of the dew-pond
holding her skirts picked up above her knees. She was laughing; she had
seen first the ears of Lovel’s horse prick up over the rim of the hill,
then she had seen Lovel himself, not looking to find her, then the
shoulders of his horse, breasting the sharp climb, then the complete
slim silhouette of horse and rider and two dogs at heel. And she had
hailed him; a shout of laughter mingled in with his name; she had
hailed him. At the top he had drawn rein, shading his eyes against the
sun, and looking down he had seen her, standing down in the bowl of the
dew-pond. He had caught her in the act of hesitation, afraid lest she
should venture out of her depth. Capless, she stood in the dew-pond,
holding up her skirts, and her white legs disappeared just below the
knee into the water. She laughed up at him, holding her head a little
on one side in the way he knew well, which gave her a fleeting and
elusive appearance, so that her mouth and eyes seemed to slant upwards
with a fugitive and sylvan air, which materialised but rarely,--or
when, as now, he caught her at an angle,--but which always hovered
there, not always willing to be revealed, but ready to glance out at
the right summons, to whomsoever should hold the shibboleth to produce
it.
He drew rein, looking down at her, and her pony whinnied a recognition,
and strayed loose to join Lovel’s horse.
“Not deep!” he called to her.
She ventured a few steps further.
“You have seen it empty,” he rallied her.
“Do you know the secret?” she asked, stopping. The water, disturbed by
her advance, rippled round her knees.
“Very few know it,” he replied cryptically.
“Ah, but you, Lovel, you know all those secrets. How do they puddle the
clay? How, to hold the water? I am sure you know it, Lovel! Are you a
dowser, too? they say so, in the village. They say you can pace over
the country until the hazel-twigs jump in your hand. Is it true?”
“They say a lot of things in the village,” he replied laughing.
“Does it matter to you what they say?”
“Not when I’m up here,” he replied, tossing his head, and his horse
tossed his head too, and the bridle jingled.
“Well, but tell me the secret of how they make the dew-ponds,” she
persisted, kicking with her foot into the water.
“The secret would soon be a secret no longer,” he answered, putting
her off. “And I never said I knew it.”
“Ah, but you do,” she said; and thought that those who knew the secret
of the dew-ponds got their knowledge in a straight line of tradition
from the earliest inhabitants of those regions. “Oh, I do envy you,
Lovel,” she said, forgetting that she stood in water and stamping with
her foot so that it splashed up round her, “I do envy you all the queer
things you have got behind you,--they all seem to run into your fingers
with your blood.”
He laughed again,--he seemed to be in a good humour to-day, and well
he might be, with the bright grass glistening round his horse’s feet,
and over his head the bright blue-and-white spaces where the kestrels
hovered like little specks, and the green pattern of the fields far,
far below. He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s
muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two
horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the
dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she
were a nymph,--a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and
sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. The olive and the myrtle were
alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat;
the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a
young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both
represented their own particular aspect of romance, each to the other.
“Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical
well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.
It was some days after this that Clare received from Calladine an
invitation to visit him at Starvecrow. Although she was immediately
aware that she would not reply with a refusal, she felt a shiver of
chill as though she had been beckoned in from the warm sunshine to a
cold and cavernous place. The impression was alarmingly vivid both
in generality and detail. She had met the groom coming up the short
carriage-drive of the Manor House, and after reading Calladine’s note
looked up at the gaunt, raw-boned animal that the groom was riding, at
its ugly quarters, and long melancholy head; she looked into the basket
in which Calladine had sent her an offering, and saw the trout lying on
their bed of long grasses, neatly ranged, pointed nose alternating with
forked tail. The gift seemed to her gruesome and faintly absurd; trout,
cold, plump, and dead. Yet on the evenings when she had gone fishing
with Lovel under the willows, the trout as they laid them in the long
lush grass had seemed gleaming and iridescent, cool from the water, and
together they had examined the scales on the meshes of the landing-net.
Lovel had lifted up their gills with his fingers, and had compared
them to the under-side of a mushroom. But these trout of Calladine’s
were merely dead; their eyes protruded; their gills were closed. She
glanced up at the groom, and fancied that a despondency clung about
him as about his horse, an absence of joy; and then she thought that
this gloom came upon Calladine’s possessions because he revelled in
having it so; the very name of his house, Starvecrow!--had he taken the
house for the sake of its name! had he bought this horse because of its
starting bones and dejected droop? engaged the groom for his sallow,
unshaven appearance and lank hair? dismal envoys that he might send in
reminder from Starvecrow out into a cheerful world?
She turned slowly towards the house, carrying the basket of trout on
her arm. She had sent back a message of thanks to Calladine with an
intimation that she would visit him on the following day, and already
the prospect of this visit was hanging over her, damp and chill.
Listlessly, when the afternoon arrived she put on her muslin frock and
her big straw bonnet, listening meanwhile for the sound of wheels on
the gravel; she saw her own reflection in her mirror, saw herself cool
and outwardly serene, but the picture gave her little pleasure. This
with Calladine was one of the few appointments she had ever made in
her free life, and it irked her curiously. From the first moment of
her waking in the morning she had felt tied. Like a hobbled colt she
wanted to kick herself free. That her afternoon should be restricted,
ordained in advance,--in the midst of her resentment she had laughed
at her childishness, had been ashamed of her egoism. What would become
of her were she suddenly to find herself bound for life? She had been
content to look after her father’s innocent wants; she had not shown
herself selfish towards him; she could absolve herself from that
charge; but then, he had not encroached on her comings and goings; she
had given freely from love what she might have refused from duty. This
appointment with Calladine was a duty; now she was tied; she could not
take her pony or her fishing-rod this afternoon if the whim seized
her. No, she must wait obediently for the arrival of Calladine’s gig;
she must climb into it and sit meekly beside the sallow groom while
he drove her to Starvecrow. Arrived there, Calladine would be waiting
for her, and his pleasure would be her irritation. The appointment
which had been a restraint to her would have been only a delight to
him. A sulky child, she stared out of the window for the approach of
the gig. She heard it now; the scrunch of the wheels, the clop-clop
of the horse’s trot, and now it came into sight, the familiar high,
ramshackle affair, gaunt horse and all, clanking up the carriage-drive
and stopping in its abrupt, dislocated way in front of the door. Clare
went down. Martha Sparrow was in the hall; she crooned over Clare in
her lilac-coloured gown. “A flower come to life, my pretty child....”
Mr. Warrener came out of his study; he saw Clare standing in the
shadowy hall with Martha fingering round at her flounces; he pushed his
spectacles on to his forehead. “Why, Clare, where are you going?” “To
Mr. Calladine, father, I told you.” “Ah, to be sure, to be sure; well,
he has all the luck; you’re a pretty thing to see.” She kissed him,
laughed, sprang up into the gig, it started off clumsily, swaying from
side to side, and the Manor House was lost to sight behind the trees.
The gaunt horse spanked along the lanes; Clare did not talk to the
groom, who drove with a serious concentration which promised no
unbending. She wondered whether all the servants with whom Calladine
surrounded himself were as unprepossessing. She was often more than
a little impatient with Calladine for his deliberate mournfulness;
but, more especially since he had told her in so strange a manner the
history of his life’s passion, she had tried to school herself into a
reverent sympathy. She felt that she was very young and consequently
ignorant, and that he was old, sad, experienced, and entitled to her
respect. Instinctively she folded her hands in her lap, and sat demure.
But in a moment she was again laughing at herself, and, although she
tried to reprove herself for the levity, at him. The vexation of the
appointment was lifting from her; her spirits rose, now that she
was out in the lanes and could watch the caterpillars hanging from
the oaks; she would not be affected by Calladine’s gloom, by his
soberness, his measured smiles. Of what use could she be to him if
she allowed herself to become as repressed in his presence as he was
himself? Turning to the groom, she began to talk to him, persevering
until she got a response, and even some growls of information about
Mr. Calladine’s stable; as Clare uncovered her own knowledge, the man
became less grudging, and presently as their argument developed along
lines of expert interest he was impelled to say that Miss Warrener
evidently knew a horse when she saw one. Clare laughed merrily, and
valued the compliment extremely. What she knew, she replied, she had
learnt from experience and from Gipsy Lovel,--for she was glad of an
opportunity of pronouncing his name. Ah, that was a chap for a horse,
he said; or indeed for anything that went on four legs; that was the
chap to go to a horse-fair with; Miss Warrener would never be cheated
if she had Gipsy Lovel to give her advice. He seemed to have a feeling
about horse-flesh; no need to pull their mouths open or run his hand
over their fetlocks. He, the groom, wondered that Lovel didn’t set up
as a horse-dealer himself. He would guarantee that Lovel could take
in most men in the county; yes, and the whole West of England, for
the matter of that. Clare triumphed in his sudden loquacity. Even
the gaunt horse seemed to be sharpening its pace,--though possibly
that might be only because they were drawing nearer to Starvecrow.
The groom laid the whip across its withers, and it broke into a sort
of bundling half-canter which rocked the gig up and down and obliged
Clare to cling on to her big hat; she was amused, because she thought
that this was the effect of Lovel. They had come now to a particularly
deserted tract of country, along the foot of the Downs; and, after
climbing the slope a little way, they saw a group of buildings upon an
eminence, sheltered,--if shelter it might be called,--by a thicket of
wind-blown thorn upon the easterly side. Other trees there were none,
nor any other houses within sight, nothing but the tan rolling of the
Downs and the road that climbed the hill and was lost to sight over the
other side. She descried Calladine there at his gate, waiting for her,
exactly as she had expected to find him. “I hesitated between coming to
fetch you myself, and remaining here to welcome you when you arrived,”
he said, as he came forward to help her out of the gig.
She knew at once how pleased he was to see her. There was no
affectation about his pleasure. It was a tremendous event for him
to receive her at his house, and he conducted her with infinite
solicitude, and a half-hesitation which, she knew, was intended to
give her the opportunity of noticing and commenting upon every detail.
By a curious process now all the naïveté of her childishness and her
upbringing dropped from her, and she became as delicately gracious as
any skilful woman; she remained a little aloof from him, receiving
his deference as though it were her due, rewarding him in exchange
with her friendliness and her interest, smiling at his eagerness with
an amused and sympathetic smile, placing here and there the word of
approval he most desired, and bestowing upon his possessions the
appreciation or the gentle derision which for ever after would advance
them in his eyes. He had never before seen her in this mood. He was
bewildered and charmed. He had known her delightful and inconsequent,
wayward and perplexing; he had seen her as a child, he had thought
of her as a spirit, he had never yet seen her as a woman. Her very
gestures, he thought, were different; quieter, more secure; and yet she
had not lost that fugitive air of hers, that shy grace; the combination
enchanted him. He followed her into the house; he was sure, now, that
Starvecrow was pleasing her; he need not have been so apprehensive. To
rest his eyes upon her in his little hall, so cool in her lilac frock,
filled him with the deepest and most disturbing joy. It was he, now,
who grew tremulous and at a loss, while she remained so exquisitely
self-possessed. Seeing that he scarcely knew how best to carry on his
hospitality,--for he seemed incapable of anything but of gazing at
her,--it was she who led the way into the inner room, and touched his
books and looked at the pictures on his walls, and at the view out of
his window. Had he but known it, she was thinking Starvecrow worthy of
its name, a desolate place, in a situation without the grandeur to
compensate for its austerity, and without the comfort to excuse its
meanness.
“You should plant some cottage roses against your house,” she said,
“and some bushes of Old Man’s Beard.”
“It shall be done,” he replied, without taking his eyes off her.
She sat down in his worn old leather chair, took off her hat, and
hung it on the chair-knob. She seemed to him to light the room by her
presence, the room which was dingy if not actually poor, and which had
never before had in it anything so delicate and fresh as Clare with
her muslins and her small yellow head leaning against the chair-back.
But he was afraid almost of speaking to her, lest he should scare her
away, so like was she to some small shy animal which by wary gentleness
he should have enticed into his home. “You are wearing all the colours
of the dawn,” he said, “lavender and primrose,” and ceased because he
dared not go on to the blue of her eyes, that he thought like the blue
of the early sky.
She smiled at him. “You have made no garden here, in all your twenty
years,” she said. “You should build a wall round a square enclosure,
and fill the beds between your paths. The wall would protect you
against the wind and you should grow lupin and iris and tulips,
honesty, sweet sultan, and snapdragons, and a path down the centre
between cottage lilies and China roses.”
She was speaking against her own convictions; she infinitely preferred
her Downs uncultivated; but her instinct, strangely indulgent towards
Calladine, told her what would most comfort him.
“I have no heart to do such things,” he replied, “but since you order
it I will set about it immediately.”
“Mr. Calladine,” she said, leaning forward, “when you answer me so
gravely, are you indeed serious, or are you laughing at me in your
sleeve?”
“Serious! you can have no idea how serious,” he exclaimed, tempted to
speak out his whole heart, as he had never before been tempted, by the
sight of her earnest eyes; and he got up, and walked about the room.
“Don’t you know, that your caprice would be my only interest? my only
law? You are the only person,” he said, recollecting himself, “that has
taken an interest in my poor concerns,--cared whether I steeped myself
in sorrow or dragged myself out into the wholesomeness of a new life.”
(“Ah,” cried Clare’s conscience within her, “how little I have cared!”)
“But for you,” he went on, “I should have continued in my dejection;
only your encouragement, lately, has revived me, and I have realised
that I was not the old and finished man I had resigned myself to be. If
you order me a garden, I will turn gardener at fifty,--if you, that is,
will be my critic and my adviser, if you will command me to do this and
do that.”
She saw, then, how easily swayed he was, and how an idea could take
possession of his mind, for beyond an occasional kindness she could not
be said to have interested herself at all in his concerns or to have
encouraged him to forsake the gloomy ways of retrospect or his solitary
habits of life. Still she was very glad that his imagination should be
able to thrive on such meagre nourishment; it did her no harm, and she
was glad if it might do him good.
“You have surely thought for long enough about the past,” she said idly.
Again he seized upon her words, and she reflected with some amusement
that she had never imagined any one so susceptible to suggestion.
“I will act on what you say,” he exclaimed. He went across to his
writing table and took from his drawer an etching of a woman, slightly
tinted, with coarse curly hair, cruel eyes, and a large beautiful
mouth. Calladine tore it into fragments; he flung the pieces on the
ground and stamped on them. “I never had the courage to do that
before,” he said, staring at Clare and breathing heavily; he looked
really frightened at what he had done, and she knew that he wanted
her to reassure him. For her part she wanted to laugh, but knew that
she must not. “You should have done it years ago,” she said sensibly,
“instead of living in the house with that locked into your drawer.”
“I used to take it out in the evening and pore over it until it nearly
came alive,” whispered Calladine. He kicked the fragments with his
toe. “You are my angel,--my guardian,” he said, turning passionately to
Clare.
She saw that the contradictory being was greatly shaken by what he
had done. “He will regret it, and be glad,--be glad, and then regret
again,” she thought shrewdly to herself. She wondered whether she had
done wisely in not stopping his hand: would he be freed henceforth, or
would he be haunted? “Now burn those pieces,” she said with authority,
“or I shall think of you trying to piece them together again, when you
sit alone here in the evenings.” The idea was half-frightening to her,
and half-absurd. “Burn them,” she repeated, pointing to the grate.
There was no fire, but Calladine obediently gathered up the fragments
and burnt each one separately, holding its corner to a lighted match.
Clare watched him, thinking how familiar must once have been to him
those shredded features, how he must have kissed that beautiful mouth
and imagined that he sought for truth in those narrow eyes which only
returned him mockery. He knelt beside the grate, burning carefully, and
crumbling the charred paper between his fingers, piece by piece. She
felt sorry for him suddenly.
“You must not be lonely without your picture,” she said with great
gentleness.