that she should go over and at least appear to take an interest in
her future home. She had gone, driven by Calladine himself through
the village in the high dog-cart; holding on to her hat she had gone,
rattling along the lanes behind the raw-boned animal, the gig rocking
slightly from side to side, and the low branches of the trees almost
sweeping against her as they passed. Calladine had looked fondly
down upon her holding on to her hat, and in response to his murmur
as he bent down towards her, she had looked up, and thought, in a
detached way, that he was agreeable to look at, very gentlemanly and
rather interesting, with his sallow, high-bred face, his many-caped
driving coat, and his fine skilful hands encased in his gauntlets. She
wondered, in the same detached fashion, what it would feel like when
he stood tall by her side, and she could say “my husband.” Already
she had had little foretastes of it, when he accompanied her to the
village shops, and the shopkeepers said, in their familiar, respectful
way, with an admiring gaze at the couple, “Here’s our best wishes,
I’m sure, Miss Clare, to you and your gentleman.” And they had come
to Starvecrow, where Mrs. Quince was waiting to receive them, and
for all the smiles and curtseys and the insistence that Clare should
inspect every cupboard, Clare had been conscious of the hostility
of the elderly woman. But she had gone,--gone all over the house
under the escort of Mrs. Quince, accompanied by Calladine as far as
the first floor, where with his elaborate deferential manner he had
retired, conveying by all that he left unsaid, that women were best
left to themselves over household matters. There was in the manner of
his retirement the indefinable condescension which to Clare was so
subtly irritating. A wholesome male contempt she could more easily
have pardoned.... But she had not stopped to think of that, in her
dismay at finding herself alone with Mrs. Quince; she needed all her
wits to balance the tension between herself and the housekeeper. Mrs.
Quince seemed determined to outrage down to the least detail of her
own feelings; all the doors of her most sacred cupboards were thrown
open with a jingling of keys, and their immaculate depths revealed to
Clare, who, her criticism being all the time slavishly invited, could
respond with nothing but approval. “Though I am sure, miss, there’s
many a thing in this house not carried out according to your ideas.”
Mrs. Quince, indeed, seemed so anxious to be found fault with, that
Clare, feeling that she must exhibit her own competence or forfeit from
the outset the housekeeper’s respect, at last did offer some small
disparaging comment. “Ah, there, what did I tell you?” said Mrs. Quince
instantly, as though satisfied to have got finally what she had been
expecting all along; “’tis not likely that old eyes and young ones
should always see alike.” After this her urbanity and her constant
return to the point that Clare had condemned became so excessive that
Clare devoutly wished she might have forfeited all Mrs. Quince’s
esteem for ever only not to be pursued by this constant reference and
exaggerated subservience. And Mrs. Quince would spare her nothing, but
led her up to the second storey, where, pausing on a landing carpeted
with coarse matting and lit by a small skylight, she explained that
“the girl” slept. Clare shrank; “Oh, no, Mrs. Quince, don’t disturb her
if she is in her room.” “Indeed, and why not, miss?” said Mrs. Quince
stoutly, advancing towards the door; “’tis only her room on sufferance,
as you might say; and likely there would be something you would wish
altered.” She threw open the door as she spoke, and Daisy Morland,
rising in confusion, let fall on to the ground the scraps of white
linen at which she had been stitching.
Clare recoiled on the threshold; she had known that Daisy Morland was
in the house, but had not expected to come face to face with her. Nor
had Daisy expected to see Clare,--whose arrival with Calladine she
had watched on tiptoe from her little dormer window,--thus ushered
into her room. The mischievous eye of Mrs. Quince superintended the
clash between the two girls. She had manœuvred ably; she congratulated
herself. Daisy,--Daisy was curtseying,--had recovered herself so far
as to remember her curtsey,--what gall, what mockery, was in that
curtsey!--Miss Warrener,--Miss Warrener was nodding to her,--saying
something about “nice little room,” and looking sideways all the time
at the pieces of linen fallen on the floor. Mrs. Quince folded her arms
and superintended. She wore a smile,--outwardly benevolent, inwardly
immensely ironical. The two girls,--much of an age. Daisy, blowsy and
flustered, hardly able to repress her jeer; Clare, cool and wounded,
but too proud to betray her wound. A lady: Mrs. Quince paid her that
grudging acknowledgment. Well, Daisy had got the gipsy fellow, and Miss
Warrener had got Mr. Calladine. As it should be.
They came out of the room together, Clare and Mrs. Quince. Mrs. Quince
drew back a little, respectfully, to let her go first, and closed
the door gently behind her. “I wouldn’t have taken you in there
miss,” she began, “if I’d known what that shameless baggage was to be
at,--stitching away at her own baby’s clothes a fortnight before her
marriage. Perhaps I should not say such things to you,--but there,
you’ll be married yourself before the month’s out. And I wouldn’t
have kept Daisy Morland here, knowing about her what I do know now,
but that I wanted to have the house well set to rights against your
coming, and, thought I, why not make use of a pair of hands that’ll
never do a turn of work again for honest folks, but only for herself
and a shame-begotten brat and a ’scape-the-gallows husband. It’s a hard
bit of luck for Farmer Morland and his wife,” continued Mrs. Quince
as she followed Clare down the stairs, “after they brought their girl
up decent; but what can you expect with such poachers and loafers and
gipsy-like stuff hanging about the village? ’Twas the easiest thing in
the world for Daisy to go sweethearting on the hills, and what with
shepherds’ huts and hurdles handy there was all the chance of a bit
of trouble. Well, and now she’s got it, and lucky for her, _I_ say,
that Lovel’s ready to turn her into an honest woman, for there’s many
stouter bred than him that hasn’t stuck to their girls, and I always
say....” Here Calladine had come out of the sitting-room, hearing
the sound of voices; he came pleasantly towards them, rubbing his
hands together and bending towards Clare, “Tired, my dear? tired? a
little bit, I think,--too bad, too bad, Mrs. Quince, we’ve tired her
out between us; well, come in here and rest in this big chair....” he
pressed her into the sitting-room, and Mrs. Quince with much solicitude
settled cushions for her and placed her feet upon a footstool in spite
of all Clare’s protests.
She had dreaded to find Daisy still at Starvecrow when she returned
there after her marriage. It would have been simple for her to find
out, but she lacked the courage to ask. And would Calladine know?
would he know if one girl rather than another slept in the attic at
the top of his house? She could have asked Martha Sparrow, but pride
withheld her from making enquiries as to Lovel’s wedding. True, Mrs.
Quince had mentioned a fortnight, but she did not trust Mrs. Quince;
the elderly woman would relish laying a trap for her. But at the end
of the fortnight she had known that Mrs. Quince had spoken accurately,
for Martha Sparrow, coming into her room to call her that morning and
whisking back the curtains along the curtain-rods, had said cheerfully,
“A fine day for the gipsy’s wedding; and I wonder how many of the folk
will turn out to see the customs a common Christian wouldn’t practise?”
But those folk, skulking round the church, had been disappointed. They
had seen no swarthy women in scarlet handkerchiefs, no dark men with
little gold rings in their ears. They had heard no gibberish, and
seen no gestures of incantation or abracadabra. They had seen only
Nicholas Lovel in his ordinary clothes, inaccessibly severe, with his
young woman, all simpers and dimples, on his arm; and Olver Lovel in
the nave, watching the scene at the altar, obliquely in that queer
little round mirror he always seemed to carry. Not even the Lovels’ old
mother had they seen; and for a glimpse of her they had greatly hoped,
for surely, even of a witch and a gipsy, it might be expected that she
would turn out to witness the marriage of her own son. But no, she had
not caused herself to be wheeled as far as the church, the bedridden
old woman; and, indignant because they were disappointed of their
spectacle, the village folk muttered, “Unnatural,--but what would you
expect?”
Disappointed though they were, they had remained to watch the ceremony.
Some of the bolder spirits had gone to the church, edging their way,
sheepish but defiant, along the pews; but the majority had crowded
near the door, peeping, nudging, jostling backwards whenever Lovel
up at the altar threatened to turn round. There had been none of the
coarse, friendly atmosphere that surrounded most village weddings.
There had been, instead, an atmosphere of curiosity and fear; and at
Daisy looks were thrown, full of commiseration and a fearful respect,
by the villagers as at one of their own comfortable number, about to
cut herself adrift from them and to become enrolled among an alien
community. They fully expected that Daisy, hitherto so plump and jolly
and normal, would be initiated into dark rites beyond their imagination
when once she had been swallowed up into the shadows of the dim,
tunnel-like passage of the Lovels’ house and the Lovels’ door closed
behind her. They never expected to see her emerge again in precisely
the semblance of herself familiar to them. Or would Lovel deny his
secrets even to his wife? Would he keep her there, in his dark house,
as a servant and a convenience, to wait on his old mother, to cook his
meals and obey his behests, and above all things to hold her tongue
as to all the unexplained things she might happen to witness in the
course of years? Would she be no more than a terrorized servant in that
house they thought so vaguely sinister? There was Olver Lovel, too;
was he a sort of accomplice to his brother, a sort of sly malignant
accomplice, who in his brother’s absence would bully his brother’s wife
by deputed authority, so that she would be at the mercy not only of the
elder Lovel, who was an unknown quantity if ever there was one, but
against whom nothing but his practices in defiance of the game laws was
definitely known,--not only would she be at his hard mercy, but also at
that of his younger brother, of whom the blackest and most cunning arts
might be believed. There were a hundred ways, they decided, talking it
over between a horrid fascination and a still more horrid relish, in
which Olver might exercise his nasty talents upon Daisy. John Sparrow
even went so far as to predict that the day would come when she would
be found wandering, as crazy as Olver himself, upon the Downs, but
others more sagely replied that if indeed she were to lose her wits she
would never be allowed to escape from the house. And that opened up
another series of pictures, in which Daisy, crazed and foolishly happy,
went about her work singing little ditties, and the door of the dark
house was closed daily by Lovel upon the three inmates, the mother, the
brother, and the wife, and the key lay close within his pocket.
But in the meantime the spectacle before their eyes was quite different
from those evoked by their imaginations. It might be true that Lovel
looked lean and stern, and that Olver followed the ceremony in that
slanting way within his little round mirror, but the words the
clergyman uttered were the same that they were accustomed to hear at
all respectable unions, and as for Daisy, she was the picture of all
a bride ought to be, muslin flounces and coyness, and if her figure
was a little oddly thickened, why, that also was a thing that had been
seen before at village weddings. She looked pleased with her young man;
she kept glancing proudly at his height; she sniggered with content as
he repeated the beautiful threadbare words after the priest, repeated
them gravely and firmly, but as though he were utterly indifferent
to the obligations they imposed upon him. There was nothing very
startlingly unusual about the wedding. True, neither Daisy’s father
nor her mother were present, but the whole village knew that Lovel was
marrying the girl because he had got her into trouble, and it was not
likely that the Morlands, steady and decent folk, would be present to
give the sanction of their approval. Perhaps later on, when the child
was born, they might come round; for the moment, no doubt,--and very
naturally,--they were sore over both the cause of the marriage and the
son-in-law imposed upon them. Daisy did not seem to care. Ever since
the publication of her banns she had gone about flaunting as though her
marriage were a reason for pride rather than for shame and apology.
Not that the village saw much shame in circumstances so common. It
had, rather, a certain respect for Daisy, who, having set her heart on
the gipsy,--a strange taste, but that was her business,--had at last
got him to the altar. There was a tacit convention that a girl was
justified in using all her weapons if she could not otherwise carry
her point: and there was also, in the present instance, a peculiar
satisfaction in feeling that the gipsy had been worsted. So grand, so
stuck-up, Nicholas Lovel, but a girl had got the better of him in the
end.
When the bridal pair came out of the vestry and proceeded down the
aisle, there was a scattering in the little crowd at the church door;
a lane opened, and Lovel and his wife passed out between the craning,
curious faces. Lovel looked neither to left nor to right; his arm was
crooked to allow Daisy’s hand to rest within it, but that was the only
concession he made to his newly-married state. She, on the contrary,
sought eagerly for the faces of her friends; she dragged upon Lovel’s
arm, but he moved unyielding forward. Daisy, who was trying to lag,
had to take a little run, like a child that cannot keep pace with the
advance of a grown-up person. With her head half-turned, her eyes
still lingered over the little crowd that was once more closing in
behind them. There were not many girls in the party; she knew why, and
a sense of triumph came over her; they might affect to despise Lovel,
but for all that they did not care to see him married to one of their
own number,--ah, how clever she had been!--not many girls; two men,
doddering on their sticks; and a group of young men, the lounging,
insolent handsome young men, with their hands stuck into the belts of
their smocks, chewing straws for all the world as though they had been
in the Waggon of Hay and not on the threshold of a church. It was then
that an incident occurred, the recollection of which was frequently
to dash Daisy’s triumph into a sinking of uneasiness; towering behind
the group she caught sight of Peter Gorwyn’s grinning, good-humoured
face on the top of his enormous proportions, and as she looked at
him in a sort of terror of recognition that _he_ of all men should
have come to attend her wedding, he very slowly winked, so slowly
that time seemed to be suspended between the beginning of the wink
and the completion of it; and in that suspension of time, while her
eyes had leisure to dwell in fascination upon the subtle and quite
unambiguous process of a wink, her mind had leisure also to take in its
whole significance: Peter Gorwyn _knew_. In that wink the day of the
Scouring was evoked; the fun they had shared; the irresponsibility, the
momentary drunkenness. There was no reproach in the wink; there was no
reproof; there was not even a threat; there was simply the amusement
of a confederate, of one who knew himself quite well to be a party to
a hoax. There was humour in it too; in that broad, ruddy face and blue
eyes there was humour; there was even congratulation, a kind of silent
applause; and a hint of gratitude to Daisy for having let him off so
easily,--for having got Lovel to stand there in his place. This was all
very re-assuring; there was such a phrase as honour among thieves, and
big Peter, with her, was a thief if he was willing to let Lovel take
his place and pay the price which should have been exacted of his own
responsibility. But at the same time that wink came as a sharp shock
to her, the shock that a second person shared her hoaxing secret. She
thought that presently, when she had had time to settle down a little
in her new life, she would catch young Gorwyn for an interview, and,
without giving herself away, make quite sure, that, although he had
guessed what she had concealed, he was ready to grin and hold his
tongue. She thought this in a flustered way, as she came out of the
church on Lovel’s arm into the warmth of the sunny morning, and they
proceeded down the path between the grave-stones, a stiff little group,
robbed momentarily even of the slight relief of the bride’s simpering,
with Olver bringing up the rear. Daisy shivered for the first time;
this wedding was not being conducted according to her idea of weddings;
there were no emotional relatives, no weeping mother, no bells
pealing from the calm grey spire overhead, no bridesmaids, no best
man,--only Olver shambling behind them as they proceeded between the
grave-stones, Olver so slightly and indefinably mis-shapen, a solitary
evil attendant, shambling as though he might at any moment break into
a fawning gambol around them, a senseless dance full of irony and
mischief. And Lovel, himself, dearly as she had set her heart upon
him, was throwing a chill by his demeanour over the occasion; he had
not once looked at her, he had offered her his arm in a coldly civil
way,--less he could not do,--he had stood up stern and unbending; she
was afraid of him, and discouragement began to cloud over her triumph.
They were walking now down the street towards his house, and the
shopkeepers came to their doors to stare at them as they passed.
Still Lovel marched on, undeviating, and Daisy began to feel herself
a captive being led towards her prison. She clasped her fingers
tighter round Lovel’s arm; it was hard and sinewy, typical of his lean
strength. Here was a harshness she would find tough to propitiate;
and jealousy shot through her; had he shown himself harsh towards Miss
Warrener? or had she discovered an unguessed marvellous Lovel? What
secret understanding had they shared? Daisy scarcely understood the
pain. “The minx!” she muttered; it was the only analysis she could
find of her sudden twist of anguish, blind and inarticulate. Up to
the present she had been too much occupied with securing Lovel; in
future she would have leisure to dwell upon those memories of his which
would lie for ever concealed from her. “We’re married now, aren’t we,
Nicholas? I’ve got you?” she said, looking up into his face.
He took her into his house, where during the whole time of their
engagement he had never allowed her to come. They were in the dark cold
passage, at the end of which, in the sun, opened the little square
of garden where Lovel like any other cottager grew his cabbages,
his patch of flowers, his gooseberries, and his beans. Daisy became
excited again; she forgot Gorwyn, she forgot her discouragement and
her jealousy; she was a woman brought for the first time to her home.
She peered about her with interest, while Lovel shut the door, and the
passage became quite dark but for the door at the further end opening
bright arch-wise on to the garden. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “I can’t
see and it’s cold; leave open the door.” “For all the village to spy in
upon us?” he returned, and she perceived that in this as in everything
else he would have his way. “It’s more friendly,” she ventured, but he
did not move towards it, and she desisted: after all, she had got him,
she had fooled him, the score so far was heavily in her favour; if she
let him have his way now, she would get him more completely in the end.
“It’s rather cold,” she said nevertheless, repressing a shiver, and,
hearing a small chuckle in the shadows behind her, she turned and saw
Olver crouched up against the wall.
“Take me into the kitchen!” she cried, pressing herself against Lovel.
Kitchen! the word was reassuring; her mother had kept a spruce,
spacious kitchen, where bottled fruit stood ranged on shelves, and
trays of floury scones stood on the scrubbed deal table, and the big
Parliament clock tick-tocked in comfortable regularity against the
wall. Very different was the room to which Lovel sarcastically admitted
her; she stopped with the dismay of the conventional person suddenly
confronted with rebel views. She was shocked as at something unseemly
and profane. “Oh,” she cried, “but this isn’t a kitchen?”
She turned as though to make her escape; before her was the room with
its walls of rough stone, its rafters, shadows and cobwebs, behind
her was Lovel in the doorway and the dark passage beyond him, with
Olver crouching in it. She stared round her, and was met everywhere by
silence. “I don’t like it!” she cried in shrill terror. Lovel continued
to look at her without speaking. “Mother! dad!” she cried, “I want to
go home!” She rushed to Lovel and beat her hands against his chest.
His physical contact recalled her, and she began to sob. “Nicholas,
Nicholas,” she sobbed, “I love you, I don’t understand.” She sobbed
against him.
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.