I
If the floods would but retreat! If the winter would but dissolve and
allow spring to break over the land! Then the rich black loam of the
fields would appear in the place of the water,—that flat and cruel,
unprofitable water,—and the country under the blush of green would cease
to be so mournful, rayless, and forbidding. The floods were so dead;
dead brown, dead level; there was no life in them, except sometimes
under the red sun, a fierce, angry sort of life, and sometimes when the
wind beat them; but now gray rainy day succeeded gray rainy day, mild
indeed, but not spring, not the spring of clear sunlit showers and
rainbows! It would be a dark, fertile country that came to light,
curiously un-English in its effect of unboundaried acreage, wide ditches
marking off the fields in the place of hedges. Ditches and dykes would
remain as the scar and testimony of the floods, the dykes that like some
Roman aqueduct stretched away into the flat and misty distances.
Yearly Nan lived through the winter in the hope of such a spring, and
almost yearly it failed her. She was drawn towards spring with an
instinct of unsatisfied youth. It appeared to her like a vista cut in
the darkness of the life she led between Silas and Gregory.
The population of her world was so restricted; in very early days she
had been sharply taught that Gregory would neither welcome his wife’s
friends at his fireside, nor allow her to go to theirs. She had never
forgotten the written message he had left for her on the table in the
first week of their marriage, having found her laughing in the kitchen
with another girl: “No _prying eyes_ here, missis.” The Denes, she
learnt, were as sensitive as they were savage and solitary, and, so
strong was the legend that they had created around themselves, that she
had found herself quickly alienated from the rest of the village and
definitely regarded as of the company inhabiting the lonely cottage.
Silas, Gregory, Linnet Morgan, Donnithorne sometimes, Mr. Calthorpe.
That was all. The two dominating figures were Silas and Gregory; she was
more frightened of Silas than of Gregory, because of her secret
knowledge, but Gregory was like a stranger to her; she was submissive to
him but felt no nearness, no intimacy; he was more closely allied to
Silas than to her. Of Linnet Morgan she thought with shy and oddly
pleasurable evasion. Of Calthorpe, with confidence; she liked his
well-brushed hair, precisely parted down one side, and the close pointed
beard that gave him a certain robust dignity and rather the appearance
of a sailor; thinking of Calthorpe was like leaning up against a solid
and stable building. He looked at her with great kindliness now, when
she talked to him; she had always wanted somebody to look at her like
that. It awoke, too, in her a certain pride: she had trained this big
man in the part she wanted him to play; she, so small, had taught him,
so large, a trick, and whenever she brought him her confidences, and he
responded with that look so full of kindliness, he was doing the trick
she had trained him, against his will, to do. This gave her a
proprietary sense in him. She found him very docile. He, on his part,
loved her for her little domineering manner.
It was only when she returned to Silas and Gregory that she was made to
realise her own futility. Against the weak pushing of her hands they
remained immovable....
Then she fell sometimes into despair, and her courage crumpled. For days
she would be silent, then with an effort she would bring out her zither
and sing, until before their contempt her voice would trail away again
miserably into silence.
She longed for the retreat of the floods and the end of the winter,
because now the country and the year seemed to be conspiring with Silas
and Gregory.