oh, there is nothing to do after dinner,” she finished lamely.
“What do you do as a rule?” he inquired, with a passing curiosity.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sometimes he talks to my father,
sometimes we walk in the garden, sometimes I sing.”
“You sing,” he repeated. “You sing.”
“Sometimes he and my father go over the things in my father’s cases,
and they forget me, and I sit in a corner with some stitching.”
“Yes,” said Lovel, “and the windows are open down to the floor, and the
moths and cockchafters fly in from the garden towards the lamps, and
you let your stitching fall into your lap while you watch them.”
Clare was utterly startled.
“How do you know?” she murmured.
“Oh, I know,” he replied. His vision of the room, and of the three, was
so sifted and precise. “Sometimes you sing?” he prompted her.
“Mr. Calladine leans over the piano, when I sing,” she said, looking at
him big-eyed.
“That frightens you?” he said, more as a statement than as a question.
“A little,” she said, telling him what she had thought she could never
tell to a soul. “He seems so soft, and yet so hungry.” Her voice sank.
Lovel understood; he nodded.
“If he would sit away in the corner,” continued Clare, “I should not be
afraid of him. It is his leaning over me like that. It makes me look at
him all the while I sing. But he likes my singing; he asks me to do it,
and he will not let me refuse.”
“And sometimes you walk in the garden,” he said, still in the same
voice, as though he were looking at a tiny picture seen down the end of
a long vista; “does he frighten you then?”
“Less out of doors; less when we are not shut in. I avoid the trees;
being under them is more like having a ceiling over our heads. I keep
to the lawn.--He is more in his place, within doors,” she said, making
a discovery which answered many of her problems.
“Lamplight suits him,” said Lovel, his perceptions very clear and
malicious.
She saw Calladine leaning over the piano; she saw his greying hair and
his fine hands lying loosely clasped on the ebony lid. She heard the
notes under her own fingers playing a slow gavotte; it was the music he
liked. She felt her eyes coming round again and again in fascination
drawn towards his face. A breeze fanned her cheek; and she saw herself
standing with Lovel on the earthwork, the stars above their heads, and
the red glow of the dying flames deepening the shadow of his brow.
“We have always been in the open together,” she murmured involuntarily.
“I have never seen you in a room,” Lovel corroborated.
“The day that I found you on the Downs,” she said painfully, “the day
when I last saw you,--you tried to hide from me among the beeches. Why
was that? Did you hope that they would protect you? Did the sense of
enclosure give you strength? Would the Downs have compelled you to be
more honest? I believe it was that. One can lie better,--can’t one?--in
a room; and as you had no room you took the shelter of the trees. You
couldn’t tell me lies out on the Downs?”
“Is that why Calladine prefers a room?” he enquired.
“Mr. Calladine tells me no lies,” she said, with a small flicker of
pride.
“Oh, no,” said Lovel easily; “he only tells lies to himself. Through
and through. Or are they lies? Romances, perhaps. Only romances. And
you are part of them. But they couldn’t thrive in sunshine.”
“We are not in sunshine now,” she said; “only in star-shine, and losing
our heads a little. I am going to marry Mr. Calladine, you know, Lovel.
So perhaps I should not talk about him to you as I have been talking,
or ... or indulge myself in these fancies. You asked me what I had told
him about yourself and me; I answered that there was nothing to tell;
nor is there.”
“But if I had not gone into the beech-clump ...” began Lovel. He was
suddenly Puckish, mischievous; or so she thought.
“But you did go into it!” she cried out.
“And stayed in it till you were out of sight. But Calladine,” he
resumed, disregarding her effort to restore the balance of their
conversation, “Calladine will get you into a room for the rest of your
life. It will be a dim room, with the light shrouded from it. He will
talk in it, and you will listen, and his talk will seem to you less and
less unconvincing. Presently you will accept it as natural talk; you
will answer in the same key. You will play sad old tunes, and Calladine
will lean over the piano. But he will grow less graceful and more
ungainly, and his joints will crack when he stoops over your hand to
kiss it. And always you will be in the house,--in the room.”
“Lovel!” she cried.
“The dimness of the room will bleach your spirit,” he said finally and
remorselessly.
What strange mood possessed him? Were the legends true? had he the gift
of prophecy? His very language had a sonorous, almost a Biblical, ring.
It was true that the occasion fostered it, and that he might be taken
for a prophet, standing there on the elevation, ringed with darkness,
and with that pool of dying fire at his feet.
“Is it kind, Lovel, is it kind to put these thoughts into my head?” she
cried, distressed.
“Kind,” he said scornfully. “When did ever you want kindness from
me? I haven’t given you kindness, or romance like Calladine’s. I keep
kindness for Olver.”
“And for animals,” she interjected, remembering. The remembrance
softened her marvellously towards him.
“And for animals. But for you....” He scanned her from head to foot,
as though the term for what he had given her were inexpressible. “Not
kindness for you,” he finished up.
A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down
the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small
black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men
closed round it and hid it from view.
“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t
sacrifice them on the stones,--not they. They’ll all be chivvied back
into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I
wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village
will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. See, now, they
are beating out the fire.”
The last sparks flew large and red in the darkness.
“Fire and wild beasts and the stones,” murmured Lovel dreamily. “How
many centuries is it, do you think, since those three things have met
together here? The place will get a bad name among owners of circuses.
They will say that it clamours for its natural prey; that the circle
is under a curse; that it scents blood; and a hundred such fabulous
things.” He laughed as he spoke, but Clare, looking at him, thought
that the fantastic creature half believed it himself. “What will you
say, when they want to know where you have been?” he asked. “You won’t
dare own up to the gipsy fellow. You’ll say you watched the fire, and
let it be understood that you were alone,--isn’t that so?”
“Of course I shall say I have been with you; why not?” said Clare.
“Ah, but I’d rather you didn’t,” he said earnestly. “Keep it a
secret,--that we stood and talked unseen while the rest beat the fire
out down below. I had not thought that I should see you again, and now
I know that I shall not see you again,--in the distance, perhaps,--and
hear the bells for your wedding,--and see you driving by,--Mrs. Richard
Calladine,--but I shall never stand again with you alone as in this
hour. Let us keep it a secret. I don’t care what you think of me. Look,
the fire has gone out now, and it is quite dark, but the time I spent
with you was lit by the fire. I will walk round with you to the Manor
House, and let you go.”
In silence they started off to walk round the top of the earthwork
towards the Manor House. The village lay below them in its strange cup,
and around outside the circle lay the Downs hunched in the starlight.
Where the road intersected the circle they ran down the slope and
crossed it, their footsteps briefly crunching on the gravel, but on
the opposite side they scrambled up again and silenced steps on the
turf and continued side by side along the high ridge above the ditch.
A breeze from the Downs blew cool against their cheeks; they knew it
well, it was a friend pleading with them, calling them back to the
open. They both knew the Downs so well that in their consciousness
they were all the time aware of the country’s geography, stretching
before them like a foreshortened map; the long roads, the little
English towns with their broad main-street that was only a section
of the Roman highway, the ancient green tracks over the hills, and
the angular spatchcock landmark of the White Horse, straddling on the
hillside. Neither of them had thought sufficiently beyond these things
to be tormented by the further world. But, on the other hand, they
had attained a degree of familiarity and concentration undiminished
by any scattering of their faculties. They had not sprinkled their
interest over other lands and other folk. They had dwelt only on their
country and on themselves, so that the breeze came to them direct as a
messenger from the Grey Wethers lying out derelict on the hills, and
the sickness of the desire of each to respond to the call found an echo
in the soul of the other.
So vivid was the call, so absurd the refusal, that as they reached the
point above the trees of the Manor House garden, Lovel stood still and
laughed out loud.
“So you go back to rooms,” he said, and laughed again, but more
bitterly. “You!” he said, charged with contempt.
They were closer in understanding than ever they had been in their
lives. He began to speak low and rapidly, “Clare,” he said, “there is
no more softness in you or in me than there is in this soil. There is
no flabby flesh, only bone. No trappings, only the hard skeleton. We’ve
pared away.... If I had not taken shelter in the beechwood,--and it
was the nearest approach to shelter I could get,--I might have taken
you by the hand and galloped away with you; you would have come. That
would have been mad. I have got my mother and Olver, and not only that,
but I’ve got their blood in me. I want to have sons, and I may not,
because of that blood. That was why I said I envied Calladine having
only himself to overcome, when here am I as hard as flint, who might
beget sons with that soft squelch in them that has rotted Olver. A
bad stock, I said to myself; be strong; let it die out. And then the
irony ... well, you know nothing about that, and even that seems not to
matter now. Never be surprised, now, if you hear that I have been borne
a son or a daughter, only don’t judge me too harshly. But how could I
have brought you to my mother and Olver? and our children, yours and
mine,--how could I, Clare? What chance had I but to cease from seeing
you? Oh, if it had not been for them and my blood, then there would
have been the Downs for you and me, Clare. Don’t share the Downs with
Calladine; he lives among them, but he isn’t strong enough to endure
them. There are some countries that it takes a strong man to endure.
They don’t generate strength, and they crush weakness. Calladine should
have lived in towns. But now that he has got you he may be rescued.”
“You know that Mr. Calladine has not got me, and never will have me,
except in name,” said Clare.
“That’s true,” replied Lovel, not disputing her statement. “Let him
live with you by his side, you listening, listening patiently, for as
long as he chooses to discourse, and looking at him with the eyes of
a stranger. I don’t say that I envy him. (“How you despise him!” she
breathed.) And yet,” he said, “don’t I envy him a little? Can I help
myself? He will see you every day, he will be able to call your name
through the house at any moment and hear your answer. Don’t I envy
him that? Wouldn’t I change places with him for that?--But he’ll tire
of you, perhaps,” he added, dropping from his sudden anguish into the
old whimsicality, “tire of you even though he has never got you. No, I
don’t envy him. I’ll be less lonely,” he said with a fine insolence,
“than he.”
“I must go, Lovel,” cried Clare.
He stepped back from her instantly.
“Go to Calladine,--in name. Go from me,--in name,” he said, out of his
torn heart. “Only go,--go,--go!” he added, turning away from her and
laying his arm across his eyes.
She left him then, feeling, although he had not once touched her, as
though she had slipped all on fire from his clasp, so close had been
their communion in spite of their immense separation. She did not know
where he would go, or how long he would remain, gazing after her,
standing on the height of the circle. For her own part she ran down
amongst the trees, across the lawn, and entered the study by one of the
French windows, to find her father absorbed in his work, not having
noticed her absence, and blissfully unaware of any excitement or of his
daughter having been in the slightest degree in danger. He said, “Bless
me! bless me!” several times while she flung herself with exaggerated
animation into a description of the fire, and pushed his spectacles up
on to his forehead, and stared at her with an absent-minded interest
as though she had just come straight out of the heart of the flames.
“Dear, dear, and where’s Calladine?” he said at last. “There was
something very curious I’ve come across and particularly wanted to show
him. It quite corroborates my ideas. I made sure he’d bring you home.”
“But you don’t understand, father: the circus-tent caught fire, and
we got separated.” “Of course, to be sure,” said Mr. Warrener mildly.
“Well, I daresay he’ll come over to-morrow, and I can show it him then.
It’ll interest you too, Clare....”
Clare lay awake for a long time. The windows of her room were open, and
outside the breeze sighed, a plaintive spirit trying to get into the
house. The world outside was crying to her, endeavouring to reach her,
sending its gentle messengers to plead with her. The heavy-foliaged
trees rustled, as it seemed, with an unwonted nearness to her window,
and the room was full of the insects of the night, which as soon as
she had turned out her lamp woke into life and fluttered against her
cheek and thudded softly against the ceiling like small downy ghosts.
A moth imprisoned beneath her hand struggled for freedom; she shook
it off with a gesture between tenderness and revulsion. Several times
she lit a match, and the little creatures became still, flecking the
bed with their long mottled bodies and closed wings, but no sooner
had darkness fallen again than they returned in greater numbers to
their soft wheeling and the bruising of their voiceless plea. She lay
now shivering in spite of the summer warmth, awed to her very soul
by the deepened significance of night. Darkness by shutting away the
visible and reassuring world opened the field to all finer perceptions,
to all the mysterious relationships, to the purified intuition of
essential unity. That sense,--the sense of unity, the discarding of
all irrelevancies,--was an unexpressed link between herself and Lovel;
she was not sure, everything else being sifted down to its last bare
expression, that it was not _the_ link. Out in the night somewhere an
owl hooted, and she heard the distant baying of a dog; the spacious
presence of the Downs opened out before her widened senses, their
loneliness, and the secret of their ancient tombs; their untilled
defiance rolling eternally under the stars. Where was Lovel now? Was he
still standing like a sentinel on the dyke, between the Downs and the
sleeping village, with only the vault of the black sequined sky above
his head? as she fancied him there he seemed to grow in stature until
in his heroic proportions he became an embodiment of that open country
which called to her, and his voice rose harmoniously in a long cry
above the soughing of the breeze in the trees. Or had he plunged down
from the circle after she had left him, to roam across the uplands, a
wisdom in his feet, a swiftness that lifted him above fatigue? That he
was out somewhere in the night she was sure; no house would confine
him, not even a house whose walls were built of the sarsen stones. He
was out somewhere, and every moth that bruised itself so plaintively
and so impotently against her was his envoy; every sound that reached
her, whether the whisper of the breeze or the churning of a night-jar,
bore the burden of its message from him to her. If she called back to
him “Lovel! Lovel!” surely in one form or another her voice would find
him among the hills.
PART TWO
_Part Two_
She had been married for four months to Calladine.
Evening after evening they sat opposite to one another over the fire
at Starvecrow. Often they played chess,--a pastime to which he seemed
tirelessly addicted.
He would rarely go out; he shivered and said that it was cold,--it
was true that snow lay upon the Downs and that the wind blew
incessantly,--and why should a man face the bitter cold of March when
no necessity compelled him and when a pleasant fire could console him
within doors? Nor did he like her going out without him. So they stayed
in, until she felt that she could have sent walls and ceiling flying by
one extravagant gesture of her arms.
But he,--oh, how content he was! He had lost his melancholy; he had
brought out for her benefit from cases and cupboards numerous objects
wherewith to beautify their rooms, but her inability to distinguish
among the various artists was a source of infinitesimal friction
between them; “No, no, my dear; _Clodion_, not _Houdon_,” he would say,
and she would accept the correction meekly with a little laugh implying
that the matter was not of very great importance after all, and with
that little laugh would undo all the merit of her meekness.
At first he had enjoyed making these corrections. It flattered him to
think that he had brought into an atmosphere of artistic refinement
this child of the hills whose knowledge although so thorough as far
as it went, was concerned with such rude things as rocks and skulls
and antlers, supplemented by a working experience of shepherds’ and
woodman’s lore. Certainly he had always been ready to take an interest
in Mr. Warrener’s work, and to entertain a respectful admiration for
the old gentleman’s scholarship, but that was a different matter: it
was a tabulated profession, archæology was a branch of study suitable
to gentlemen, especially old gentlemen; Mr. Warrener contributed papers
to the journals of several societies; he was a distinguished and
accepted authority. That was quite another matter. It had been amusing,
even, to find Clare dabbling her fingers in the same research; amusing
to hear the terms so glib upon her lips; surprisingly instructive,
sometimes, to catch the odd bits of information she let fall while
out riding with him on the Downs. But what had been amusing in the
child was insufficient, even unbecoming, in the married woman. To
dilettantism, _per se_, he had no objection; he was a believer in
dilettantism; but in the name of all good taste let it be dilettantism
in graceful and becoming subjects! So he tried to interest Clare
in _terres cuites_, in crystals and in the bindings of books. She
looked at them at first with pleasure, they were exquisite; she had
never seen such things before, or suspected their existence; she
exclaimed over them, marvelled at their workmanship, fingered them,
discovered new loveliness in them as she turned them this way and
that. Calladine was enchanted by her appreciation; he thought he might
venture further; he tempted her with subtler baits. But she returned
to the fragile eighteenth century statuettes. He let her have her
way, tolerant, determined not to force her interest. He watched her.
There was about the little terra cotta groups a false paganism, a
windy grace, that intrigued and allured her. Here was something that
she could nearly understand; nearly, if not quite; not quite, for
there was still something, or the lack of something, which troubled
her; she could not put a name to it, consider how she might, with a
pucker between her brows. These dimpled children, with the thighs
and hoofs of goats,--these girls with draperies blown by the wind at
the moment when the sculptor caught and fixed them motionless for
ever,--these young men with slanting eyes and laughing mouths,--of what
did they remind her? and in what were they so evasively deficient?
She circled round the table on which they stood. Calladine’s eyes
followed her in amusement. She was puzzled, this nymph who was so much
more like a nymph than any nymph that Clodion ever made, puzzled by
the drawing-room _faroucherie_ of these false fugitives. “A little
self-conscious, you find them?” he had murmured at last.
But the artistic education of Clare proved a game that had palled. She
had gone clean through his objects of virtue, and had come out the
other side. She seemed to have been briefly deluded by them, then to
have sized them up, to have detected their essential fraud, and to have
discarded them from her interest. Mortified though he was, he perceived
somewhere in himself a respect for her pure, uneducated instinct.
Still, as this was a thing he could not, out of self-respect, admit, he
continued at intervals his efforts to guide her feet into the paths he
himself found so pleasant. He liked to sit within doors re-ordering his
books and his treasures, while the snow drifted up against the windows
and the wind cried unappeasably across the Downs. “Why are you staring
out at that ugly landscape, Clare? Don’t you like the fire better, and
a chair, and a book to read?” But she read very seldom; only once,
when she had been reading, he saw to his consternation that tears were
falling silently down her cheeks, and, going up behind her, he had seen
over her shoulder that Shelley lay open on her knee:
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear,
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!...
“Clare, why so silent? I declare, you’ve grown more meditative than
I,--where’s your irresponsibility? is the dignity of marriage so heavy
upon you? Were you as silent with your friend Lovel? didn’t you prattle
to _him_? eh, tell me?”
“What funny questions you ask, Richard. Lovel? I don’t remember. No, I
don’t think I ever talked much to Lovel.”
“Well, but in all those hours you spent, riding with him, fishing, and
I don’t know what else....”
“Well, we were busy, Richard; too busy to talk.”
“And he was a common fellow, wasn’t he? it’s not to be expected you
would have talked much to him? eh?”
“He certainly wasn’t fine like you, Richard.”
“Now how do you mean that? Too fine, am I? And he,--a poacher, wasn’t
he? a bit of good-for-nothing? You don’t answer. A queer fellow, not
without good looks; oh, I wouldn’t deny him that. A romantical sort of
fellow, Clare?”
“Practical as he could be, on the contrary.”
“Maybe; none the less, there was something romantical about him....”
So he tormented himself by this small constant nagging about Lovel,
liking to dress the man’s personality up in the lyrical words of his
own choosing; but for the rest he appeared satisfied, living with Clare
a captive under his roof.
But sometimes she eluded his company. Then he roamed about the house,
up and down stairs, out at the front door, down to the little wicket
gate in the new wall, holding his muffler close under his chin, for
the wind tore at his coverings, tweaking his scarf, flapping his coat,
freezing his fingers, blowing his grey hair about in wild strands. He
stood at the little gate, vainly trying to smooth his hair, gazing
round the expanse of the hills, and calling from time to time as loudly
as he could call, “Clare!” The wind took his voice and dispersed it
like smoke; instantly tattered, it streamed away on the wind. No hope
that Clare should hear that futile call, and it seemed to him that the
empty Downs must from her childhood onwards have accumulated the echoes
of voices crying “Clare! Clare!” A bell-like and doleful name, so
cried; a name made to ring out; a wailing appeal; a name to cry after
a gay truant, knowing that no answer would be returned. A gay truant,
marked out for tragedy, dancing away, while those who remained behind
cried after her and broke their hearts.