IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND DOWN
SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE
It was on a balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le
Pettit. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday's aunt, Senath
Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never
able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast
took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant,
soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, for
Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more sensibility than was
good for one in her position, and each time Aunt Senath was forced to
sell the cow, Loveday behaved as though she had as good a right to sit
and cry herself silly as any young lady with whom nothing was more
urgent than to spoil fine cambric with salt water.
This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday
was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the
hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated
upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in
her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over
the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was
hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason,
connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what
the two girls were guarding so closely. Yet she was aware of bitterness
also--for it was ever so when she appeared. Maids ceased their gossip,
boys laughed and pointed after her. She was "different."
Not in being a love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but
their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then
the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women
about whom other people talk so much.... She would live by the harbour
plying a trade which allowed her to have a love-child or so without it
being an occasion for undue remark, or, if she did not descend to those
depths where no one expects anything better and censure consequently
ceases through ineffectiveness, then at least everyone knew the author
of her fall to be an honest, loutish Englishman, no worse than most of
his neighbours.
Loveday was without either of these two rights to existence. Her mother
had been a respectable girl till her fall, and, as far as anyone was
aware, since, for she had died of the fruit of her guilty connection,
and though her portion was doubtless hell-fire, there is nothing to
show that one cannot keep respectable even under such disquieting
circumstances. The elder Loveday had clung obstinately to her
self-respect under circumstances which her neighbours had tried to
render nearly as trying on earth. She had died, as she had lived,
impenitent and only crying for the foreigner who had seduced her,
while he was then lying, had she but known it, in the lap of his first
mistress, the sea, who, perhaps from jealousy at his straying, had taken
him forcibly into her embrace on the same night that Loveday the younger
was born.
Old Madgy, the midwife, who was also more than suspected of being
somewhat of a witch, declared that the expectant mother _did_ know
it--that she had been made aware, through a supernatural happening, of
the loss of her lover, and that that was why the babe saw the light in
such undue haste, and the mother took her departure almost as swiftly
to that place where alone she could ever hope to rejoin him. For, as
evening drew on, Madgy, having called to see how Loveday did, though
nothing was thought of yet for a clear week, found her in the dairy
(the Stricks had not yet fallen on that poverty which came to their roof
under Aunt Senath's shrewish management) standing as one wisht beside
the great red earthen pan of scalded cream.
"And 'ee can b'lieve me or no as it like 'ee, my dears," old Madgy would
say to many a breathless circle in a farm kitchen during the intervals
of her duties overstairs, "but there was the cream in the pan a-heavin'
up an' down in gurt waves, like a rough sea, and her staring at 'en like
one stricken, as she was poor sawl, sure enough. Eh, it was sent for a
sign to her, and a true sign, for that avenen' her man was drowned on
his way to her, with his fine cargo of oil and onions and all. And there
was the cream heavin' in waves for a sign of the rough seas that took
him, though wi' us the skies was fair and the water in the bay as smooth
as silk."
A story that filled simple souls in kitchens with awe, but naturally was
treated more scornfully in drawing-rooms, where it was felt that signs
and portents would hardly be sent to inform a cottage girl of the death
of an onion-seller. For, after all, that is what he amounts to, and the
horrid secret is out.... An onion-seller ... the very words stink in
the nostrils and are fatal to romance.
Fatal to romance in the minds of the fastidious, fatal to respectability
in those of the common people, for only foreigners sold onions. Strange
men with rings in their ears and long, dark curls like a woman's, and an
eye that was at once bold and soft.
Loveday the younger had that eye, save that it had never learned from
life to be bold, and her face was milken white instead of showing the
blown roses of the other girls, though the back of her slender neck was
stained a faint golden brown as by the inherited memories of sun. She
was most immodestly "different," and even the Vicar's lady, who had
charitably seen to her baptism, had difficulty in bringing herself to
believe the girl could be a Christian.
Cherry and Primrose stared up at her as she stood with the red jar in
her hand, and, seeing her look so black, so white, so thin, they leant
their yellow heads together and drew their two aprons closely over their
plump laps.
Seen thus, fronted by Loveday, they seemed amazingly alike, because of
the completeness of her differing, yet a longer look showed that, in
spite of their sleek, fair heads and rounded shoulders, there was
between them the deepest division there can be between women.
Cherry was a maid, thoughtless, blowsy, still untouched enough for
wonder; Primrose had been a wife, though only seventeen, these three
months; in another three was to be a mother. Her eyes, blue as her
friend's, showed an even greater assurance, because it was based on
positives and not on a mere negation. Dark-circled as those eyes were,
her glance, as it passed over Loveday, was the more merciless, because
it came from behind the shelter of a ring-fence.