long she was suffering, in her blind, ignorant way, down to the bone.
For discomfort she had bargained; for a hard life of work, since she
knew that the business of keeping the house and its three inmates
would after her marriage devolve upon her, she had bargained also;
for Lovel’s severity she had bargained, and with an obscure sense
of justice and fair play she had been prepared to accept without
complaint these things that she was voluntarily bringing upon herself
as the price of securing Lovel for her own, for her husband; but for
the torment of his kindness and his proximity she had not bargained.
The work she had envisaged with a practical eye; that was within the
reach of her capacity, but the emotional problem had altogether eluded
her anticipation. She had thought, if she thought at all, that once
she had got Lovel safely over that ticklish business of marriage, she
would have consummated her supreme ambition. She had not understood
that then and then only would her problem truly begin. It had been
easy, pitifully easy, to trick Lovel into marriage, easy to play upon
the double string of his dejection and his sense of honour; he had
allowed himself to be conducted through preliminaries and ceremony
alike with the same cold, trance-like indifference; that had been easy
for her; but how to dig through to the man beneath that blameless mask?
“Nicholas, will you take me to Bath some day, anywhen you’ve time?
I’ve never seen a bigger town than Marlborough,” and he would answer,
kindly, always kindly, but like a man who might well be dead before the
day for going to Bath arrived, “I’ll take you to Bath, my dear,” and
she would sidle up to him and say, “That’ll be a treat for you too,
Nicco?” and he would acquiesce, and at the same time, on some murmured
excuse, would put her gently away.
She waited hungrily all day for his return in the evening. His presence
exasperated and tortured her, but his absence left her in a perpetual
fret, swallowing up what she had anticipated as the principal trial of
her days, the sinister companionship of Olver and the old woman. Now
that she knew her way about the house,--knew the full squalor of the
old woman’s room,--had grown accustomed to the croak and the pointing
finger,--no longer started at Olver’s sudden laughter in the dark
passage,--she was not so much oppressed by them; but Lovel, Lovel, was
always what she wanted and what she could not have. At first she had
restrained herself, not knowing the temper with which she had to deal,
but, seeing him so kind, she slackened her restraint, and her affection
slopped increasingly over him. He could not be in the house but what
she must waddle after him, pawing at his hand or trying to entice him
into some friendly phrase. “You like having your house kept by me,
don’t you, Nicco? You like getting hot meals, don’t you, darling?” and
often she whined, “I love you, Nicco!”
It was not in her to suffer in silence. When she craved too strongly
for him to touch her, she would take his hand and hold it against her
full, warm breast. She would sit at his feet in front of the fire, as
Olver had been used to do, and lean her head against his knee with
sentimental sighs, for she quickly learnt that although he might ignore
her he would never repulse her. In the kitchen, when she did this,
Olver sat at the centre table squinting into his little mirror at the
reflected group of his sister-in-law, his brother, and the red glow of
the fire. He was content to sit doing this by the hour, but Daisy could
not endure it; she clambered to her feet,--for she was rapidly growing
more clumsy in her movements,--and went about the room finding small
unnecessary tasks to ease her discomfort. Sometimes she turned noisily
on Lovel:
“What are you thinking of, sitting there?”
He was mild in his reply, or else did not reply at all.
“Oh, _I_ know, _I_ know!” she would cry, in an access of jealousy, but
dared say no more.
Only once, when he caught her with his strong hand as she stumbled on
the stair, and uttered a word of caution, she turned on him and cried,
“You’re mighty careful of another man’s brat.” But it seemed that he
had set his will against being goaded into any retort.
The other man’s brat troubled her now, for she could not escape from
what seemed to her an absurd desire that it should be Lovel’s. The
Scouring had taken place in May; it was now December, so that she was
approaching her seventh month,--but Lovel must not know that: he must
think her only in the sixth month, for the incident with Olver in the
barn had happened in June; she must always be careful to remember
that, or the whole fabrication would be ruinously exposed. She must
run the risk of incomplete preparations,--a misled midwife, a probably
unavailable doctor should things go wrong. The resented child moved now
vigorous within her; she had a full-blown appearance without which she
still thought in her naïveté that she might have been attractive to
Lovel. In the autumn his bitch had whelped, and she had watched with
real anguish his tenderness towards the blind crawling puppies in their
wooden box, and later his patient hands teaching them to drink as they
crowded round and blew bubbles in the bowl of milk, and later still,
when they grew into fluffy balls, cuffing one another and snarling in
their small rage, she watched him dangling old cotton-reels for their
amusement, or saw him cross the kitchen with the little pack prancing
after him, and was shrewd enough to recognise that this was the first
thing which had given him pleasure for many months. Now, when he was
out at work, she watched them tumbling over each other on the flags of
the kitchen, staggering on their still uncertain legs, and the longing
grew within her that they should be babies instead, fat babies, hers
and Lovel’s, and the more she longed for this the less she welcomed
the child that struck so strongly against her flanks. It should be a
hearty child, conceived in laughter of healthy parents, a child that
would lie content and kick and crow; a little ploughboy; but already
she dreaded to see it with Lovel,--would he touch it with his hands
that were so light and loving to train and fondle all young things?
or would he avert his eyes from it? would it grow up to toddle always
after him in preference to any one else, while he endured it between
pity and loathing, and would it call him father, poor fraudulent little
stranger in a house where it had no right? Only in one degree less did
she speculate over Olver’s attitude towards it,--Olver who was being
passed off as its father,--would he believe himself the father or did
he know better? and would he croon in his odd slanting way over the
cot, with a grotesque affection? and would he later try to win over the
child and fill its head with queer lore? and here a fire of maternal
protectiveness and indignation flamed through her, rising suddenly from
the depth, as she discovered that she was not willing that her child
should come under the influence of Olver.
There were endless possible groupings to be foreseen about the tiny,
dangerous, controversial person of the child.
Its burden weighed her down more and more as the seasons deepened
towards winter. This child, so light-heartedly conceived on a day in
spring, its presence unnoticeable through the early summer, began to
oppress its mother in the saddening autumn, and with winter when the
days were dark and short and gloomy, she could no longer forget its
existence for a moment. The burden of the child and the burden of the
year moved together increasingly towards their culmination. She looked
back sadly to the easy days when the child had been light and even her
preoccupations had been leavened with hope. Now everything weighed upon
her, even the weather which was bleak and dismal: “I declare,” she
said fretfully to herself, “I’d be no worse off in the Kennet,” and
she skirted the idea, but lacked the desperation to execute it. She
was, however, by now quite sufficiently unhappy. She had nearly lost
any hope of gaining Lovel, her days were leaden, she lumbered about
the house in slovenly clothes, since at the beginning she had used
up all her poor finery by wearing her best every day in the hopes of
pleasing Lovel’s eye, but now in an access of dejection, she went to
the opposite extreme, and took a wilful pleasure in letting him see her
at her most sluttish and ungainly. But nothing, she noticed, caused him
to alter his manner towards her whether she presented herself in her
muslin, or in an old bodice made of some gray tartan-like material, not
joining on to her skirt, so that she appeared to be dressed in some
thrown-on coverings from off his mother’s bed. But he never varied in
his patience and his impersonal kindness; he neither retreated to a
greater distance, nor allowed himself to become more approachable.
Every evening he returned to his house to rejoin the company of Olver,
his mother, and the cumbersome and plangent woman, but by no word did
he betray either his nausea or his weariness. “Oh, yes, he’s a good
husband,” said Daisy bitterly to young Gorwyn, “he doesn’t drink, he
doesn’t hit me, and he gives me all his money. He’s a good husband
enough.”
Young Gorwyn lounged gracefully round the house-door.
“Then you’ve fallen soft,” he observed in his drawling voice, surveying
Daisy from head to foot as she stood just within the entrance to the
dark passage.
“I’ve fallen soft,” she echoed, full of sarcasm.
This was in October, and in the blue early dusk people were gossiping
at their house-doors, up and down the street. Young Gorwyn felt a
spice of adventure in philandering thus openly with the newly-wedded
wife of the redoubtable Lovel,--advertising to the whole street his
disregard of Lovel. Not that there was any glory in passing the time of
day with Daisy; everybody knew that Daisy was cheap and easy, giving
impudence for impudence, a joke for a joke. But in making free with
Lovel’s property there was glory, in being so near to Lovel’s house;
almost inside it, one might say; in dawdling there, treating it as any
ordinary house. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his breeches,
and lounged, and stared at Daisy. She was a good sort, and he had got
off cheap, were his dominant reflections; and was quite sure,--with a
grin,--that she read his thoughts and wholly sympathised with them;
would not have been shocked, in fact, had he voiced them and held out
his hand, thanking her for the escape she had allowed him. He did not
credit her perhaps with very much respect for him, but then he had
equally little for her.
“Let’s see our kid now and then,” he said.
“What?” she said sharply.
“Let’s see the kid now and then,” he repeated, so that she wondered
whether she had heard him right the first time.
“Oh,--maybe,” she replied, trying to show herself nonchalant about it
as he, being a woman who readily took her cue from men.
She remembered the wink in the porch of the church, and that small,
all-compromising word, so slily slipped into his phrase, seemed to her
a first cousin of the wink; they had the same family air of innuendo,
of confederacy. The impertinence! she thought, in her heart of hearts
frightened rather than indignant, and she had a good mind to have the
question out with him then and there, but, giving him a preliminary
look, she decided to hold her tongue; an admission, once made, could
not be recalled, whereas silence committed one to nothing. She was far,
however, from trusting young Gorwyn now that she came to examine him
more closely; he was strong and sleepy and graceful, lounging against
the door-post, but there was something of the cat in his face with the
broad cheek-bones, and the fair-lashed blue eyes so deep-set that when
he smiled they almost disappeared into two little slits, and the way
his fair hair grew so thick and low on his forehead; and she knew from
experience,--all too well,--how caressing were his hands, caressing
and heavy, when he reached them out towards a girl. A return of the
passing attraction he had had for her came upon her, and she had a
moment of queer disloyalty to Lovel, contrasting his slim darkness with
the square Saxon strength of Gorwyn, to whom she was really so suitably
mated. Their glances crossed; they understood one another too well, and
looked away. “I must be getting on,” said Gorwyn after a pause which
lasted a perceptible moment.
But that was in October, and she had not seen him again for any private
conversation, however evasive. Autumn had gone, winter had come, with
the violence and completeness to which dwellers on those uplands were
accustomed. Snow blocked the roads. Communication with Marlborough
was cut off, the inhabitants of King’s Avon resigned themselves to
rely upon their own store of provisions, the Downs lay around them,
white and enormous. They did not resent their isolation, but accepted
it, almost yearly, as coming in its turn in the nature of things. It
imprisoned them, more than ever self-contained, in their cup within
the earthwork, with their pagan stones, their Christian church,
their shops, and their Manor House, where Mr. Warrener was now their
only representative of gentry; snugly a homogenous community. Lovel
alone saw in the snow something more than a mere barrier against the
outside world, a barrier that was almost a defence; he saw the stones
standing up black out of a white field, the black trees powdered and
spangled; he knew that he could go up on to the Downs without the fear
of meeting any stranger riding there for pleasure. He could look from
the crest of the White Horse Hill out over the country, without seeing
the roads of civilisation, without seeing the White Horse itself, and
his shepherd’s hut was as rough a shelter as primitive man would have
devised. He took a certain pleasure in the discomfort and severity of
his winter life. Often he would be the only man to leave the village of
a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated
figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks
thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a
space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such
domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet
swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep
in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. Here, as he
stood alone with the spears of the weather driving through him, he
had a sense of triumph: he had got the better of the Downs, he had
got the better of his own soul. His physical and mental endurance
were alike strong enough to cope with the utmost rigours that Nature
and fate were able to devise for his trial. This grim satisfaction,
he felt, was the last luxury he permitted himself to indulge. For the
rest, he had stripped himself bare of soft superfluities as a man
could be; down to bone and sinew he had stripped himself. At times,
in his moments of strange, harsh exaltation, when the gale screamed
most piteously around him, he wished he might divest himself of his
clothing, outward symbol of protection, and stand naked to support the
lashings of the wind and the frozen hail; he thought proudly that no
harm would come of it to his lean body. But although he never allowed
himself to exploit the desires of this fanatical folly, he knew that
he had touched the apex of his conquest over himself and his country,
and, relaxing, he considered with a grin the superstitious amazement
of his fellow-villagers should they, passing below, chance to see upon
the skyline the naked figure of Lovel (whom they had always known for a
wizard) crucified against elements where horse and man might scarcely
hope to live.
He had his reward when the storm ceased, and, again alone upon the
heights, he surveyed, as though his will alone had imposed the calm,
the thick smooth quilt of snow and the blood-red sun descending towards
the beech-clump through the perfect stillness.
But in the direction of Starvecrow he never wandered, where Calladine
edged with some rare book closer to the fire, and Clare stood with her
face against the panes staring out of the window over the snowy Downs.
Daisy began now to cling to him more and more. Her child was nearly
due, but since she alone knew this,--and perhaps young Gorwyn, if he
took the trouble to reckon up the dates,--every one believed the birth
to be distant yet another month. Daisy was frightened; she dared not
tell Lovel that the child might now be born any day; but she dreaded
his long absences, for she feared that she might die without making her
confession or obtaining his forgiveness. If all went well, she had no
intention of confessing; but if she saw her life in any danger she had
made up her mind to barter the security of this life against that of
the next. Superstitious, she imagined that she would run more danger
through bearing this child that she had carried during the months of
deception and fraud, than she would through bearing a child honestly
conceived and carried. She was mortally afraid of death, and mortally
afraid of losing Lovel. She tried to sound him, “You’d be sorry if
anything happened to me, Nicco?”
Lovel had heard this a dozen times already.
“Why should anything happen to you?” he replied.
“I shouldn’t have gone with Olver,” she mumbled, twisting the corner of
her skirt.
“That’s a long time ago,--that’s over and done with,” he replied
patiently and cheerfully, feeling sorry for what he thought was her
genuine repentance.
“But this is the result,” she said, not consoled.
“Don’t distress yourself,” he said.
“Supposing I was tooken bad,” she began again.
“’Tisn’t for a month yet,” said Lovel.
“One doesn’t know always, with such things.”
“Will you see the midwife?” he asked, perceiving that she was worried.
But the whole subject, and Daisy’s very existence, though he spoke with
solicitude and bent a kindly gaze on her to discover what were the poor
creature’s real wishes,--the whole subject to him was utterly remote
and meaningless.
“The midwife over to Marlborough by this snow-fall!” she cried
disdainfully.
“I’ll ride over and get her if you like,--I’ll bring her out on a
pillion.”
“No, no, Lovel,” she said, shaking her head, “neither now nor when the
child is born,--I’ll die without midwife, or doctor, more likely.”
“You’re determined to see it in its blackest light,” said Lovel, but he
spoke good-humouredly, without losing his patience.
“Well, it isn’t of me or my baby you think, when you sit silent by the
hour, is it?” said Daisy, suddenly losing her temper, pulling herself
up with the help of the table, and wandering aimlessly around. “’Tisn’t
your baby, so why should you think of it? and if I come to die, well,
good riddance for you, and you’ll be able to think you did your duty
by me. But much you care now, when you go out into the snow like the
crazed gipsy you are,--to meet Miss Warrener, Mrs. Calladine, for all I
know,--much you care that I sit at home and think myself sick over the
danger I’ll run and the pain I’ll suffer, while you maybe won’t come
near home till it’s all over one way or the other.”
“When the time gets near I’ll stop closer to home.”
She wanted to cry out, “You dolt, you blockhead, the time is near
_now_,” but dared only repeat “One doesn’t always know ...” and began
to whimper.
“I won’t go far afield,” said Lovel, soothing her. He was full of pity
for all women in her condition, so that none of her words had power to
anger him.
A small remorse came over her when he was kind like this, a compunction
for having tricked him: would he have been so kind, so long-suffering
about the child had he not believed without question in his own
brother’s guilt? She tried to edge closer to him; “Nicholas, if
anything happened to me, you wouldn’t think too hardly of me, would
you?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” said Lovel, weary of the
discussion, but still patient and kind.
“You won’t go far, Nicco, will you?”
“No, if that comforts you.”
He was committed now, having given his promise; there would be no more
roamings for him; but he was willing to forgo their small solace,
negligible in the midst of his desolation, if thereby he might reassure
the poor contemptible creature.
“Nicco,” she said timidly, with an impulse of honesty, prompted by his
gentleness, “’tisn’t fair to ask you, hardly ... ’tisn’t your child,
after all’s said and done.”
“I’m responsible for my brother,” said Lovel, and she turned away from
him and wept, overcome.
“You’re an upright man, Lovel,” she cried through her tears, “too
upright for such as me.”
He had not understood her full meaning, of course; he had told her
again not to distress herself, he had assured her again that he would
not go far from home, he had even patted her shoulder, letting her
see nothing of the effort it cost him, and he had gone out then, to a
house down the street where he had a small carpentering job to finish.
Daisy remained alone in the kitchen, alone with the satisfaction of
having gained her point that he would abandon his long absences, but
still she was not satisfied as she expected; she sat on where he had
left her, bluntly probed by conscience, she whose conscience had never
troubled her until this contact with Lovel and his standards: what was
she doing to Lovel, she asked herself now? she had got him, but was
that all? was that enough for her? to have got him and to know she had
caught him by a trick? to see him inert under his dull unhappiness?
never to hear him complain, never to catch him at fault, but to see
him quiet as though his spirit was ebbing daily from him? Even she,
in her blundering insensitiveness, stirred uneasily at the thought
of his injuries. “But what was I to be at?” she cried to herself in
self-justification; “I wanted him, and all’s fair....” She moved in
her chair and twisted her hands. “Nicco, Nicco,” she moaned. “If he
knew how I wanted him he’d forgive me,” and with this reflection came
a deeper stab: it was probably true that he would indeed forgive
her,--that she had indeed broken him down to the extent of that
saint-like clemency. What would put anger and mettle back into him?
what would put life back into him? Clare, nothing but Clare, without
whom he was incomplete, only a gentle husk; and for a passing moment
her thoughts travelled to Clare, living out her life in some fashion
or another by Calladine’s side at Starvecrow. What, in her ignorance,
had she helped to bring about? She paused and drew back on the brink of
things she did not understand, taking refuge again in her own miseries,
comfortably familiar by reason of the many times she had pored over
them, with no dark corners or frightening perspectives, but all close,
small and personal, under the range of her poor niggling microscope.
And she was in the right frame of mind for such brooding, feeling
herself oppressed and full of foreboding, as she sat in the kitchen big
with the child, and big with the failure of her life, waiting indeed
for deliverance from the child, but seeing no solution to the greater
oppression, which she might expect to continue until she should grow
as spiritless and broken as Lovel and their existence should dwindle
to a grey twilight of apathy unenlivened even by anger or revolt. She
had rarely felt so dejected; the very stones of the kitchen walls
crushed her with their rude size; the child within her, usually so
active, so ironically vigorous, was so quiet to-day that she began to
wonder whether it were dead; the old woman overhead made no sound; and
all round the house lay the thick soft deadening pall of snow that
muffled the country from Thames to Severn. She wished that Lovel had
not gone out; disheartened though she now was, she still clung to the
tormenting comfort of his presence; it was almost a consolation to see
him suffering beside her. Since life held neither hope nor joy for
either of them, let her in her own pain at least be able to sneer at
the sight of his; let them be together in their separation. She grew
frightened at the wildness and virulence of her thoughts. They were
not so much thoughts, as impulses that floated a little crazily across
her mind. She was not well to-day; it was not surprising; it was cruel
of Nicholas to leave her alone. She stirred, and looked round, saw
no one, but fancied that eyes watched her. “Olver!” she cried out,
although she had seen nothing.