“You’ll be happy soon: you’ll have the spring,” Silas said to Nan. He
did not speak with the customary note of derision in his voice,—this was
the newer Silas,—but she thought she detected it very painstakingly
concealed.
She went away from him, and her going was after the manner of a flight.
Had she followed her impulse, she would have gone running, with her head
bent down between her protecting hands. It seemed that she could keep
nothing from Silas; he laid his grasp without mercy upon her shyest
secrets. She had tried to keep her joy in the coming spring a secret;
although reserve was hard of accomplishment to her, she had achieved it,
hiding her delight away in her heart, or so she believed, not knowing
that her laughter had rung more clearly, or that she had been singing so
constantly over her work in the two cottages. She was conscious of no
impatience and no desires. She would not, by a wish, have made herself a
month older. She was happy now, she told herself, because the country
would presently become a refuge from the factory, instead of its dismal
and consonant setting, wide and level as the sea itself, in its centre
the sinister hump of the abbey and the factory. By walking a little way
in the opposite direction, and turning her back upon the village, she
would dismiss the factory and look across the liberated country, as it
was impossible to do in these days when the floods accompanied the
factory for miles around as a reflection of its spirit. She told herself
that she wanted nothing more. She knew that she could be happy,—perhaps
not indefinitely, but she did not look far ahead, the present was too
buoyant and suspended,—happy for the moment if Silas would but leave her
alone.
V
For a few days he kept up his new smooth-spoken tone; it was “little
Nan” this, and “little Nan” that, and whenever he could get hold of her
hand he stroked and patted it, and joined his fingers round her wrist,
saying that it was fragile. “You’re very slight, Nan,” he said, feeling
her arm and shoulder, and once he laid one hand against her chest and
the other against her back, and said that there was no thickness in her
body. She withdrew herself, shuddering, from his touch. “I’m blind, you
know,” he whined, and then laughed, “Bless you, blind or not blind, I
know any of you in the room before you’ve spoken; there’s very little
Silas doesn’t know. I know all about you, Nan, and I’m a good friend to
you, too.” “But Silas ...” she began desperately. “Hush!” he said,
putting his fingers to her lips and looking mysterious, “no need to say
anything; we understand one another.” Just then Linnet Morgan came in,
throwing aside his cap, and Nan clasped her hands in terror lest Silas
should continue. “Linnet?” said Silas instantly, “you’re back early
to-day.”
Linnet had work which could as easily be done at home. He began at once
getting books and papers out of his cupboard, and disposing them on the
table. He and Nan observed one another stealthily and quickly; he saw
that she wore her dark red shirt and black skirt, and that on his
entrance she had become silent as though confused, but meanwhile he
talked to Silas and made him laugh, and ran his fingers backwards
through his hair. Nan noticed that his crisp hair was quite golden at
the roots, and that a fine white line followed the beginning of its
growth. He was very fair-skinned, and the back of his neck where it
disappeared into his collar was covered with a fine golden down. He was
always busy; when he was not working he was talking and laughing; Nan
supposed that he had never in his life had time to think about himself.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” began Silas, resting his
arms upon the table as though he were watching Nan and Linnet, “what
were you two doing here the night Martin came? while I was at the
Abbey?”
“The night the donkey was maimed?” asked Morgan.
“Why, fancy you remembering that!” said Silas negligently.
“I was clearing up, and we talked for a bit,” Nan put in.
“There was nothing to clear up; it was Sunday evening and you’d been
singing and playing your zither. You talked mostly,—now, didn’t you?”
“Why not?” asked Morgan. He was very rarely sharp in speech, but he saw
Nan’s discomfort.
“Why not, indeed? you and Nan are much of an age,” Silas replied. They
considered him wonderingly; was he well-intentioned or infinitely
malign? As they considered him he got up and went towards the stairs.
“Back in a moment,” he said. They heard his tread upon the steps, then
moving overhead. They looked at one another.
“Why did you say that about the donkey?” Nan asked.
“You think, like me, that Silas did it,” he answered, as a statement.
“Don’t look so frightened,” he went on, his eyes softening into his
ready smile; “I assure you, you need never be frightened of Silas.
There’s no muscle in his violence. Nothing will ever come of it—beyond
maiming donkeys. Oh yes, it’s horrible, I know, because it’s so futile.
No, don’t shake your head—your pretty head,” he added inaudibly. An
impulse came over him to cry “You tiny thing! you slip of fragility!”
but he repressed it.
She uttered the most treacherous remark she had ever breathed about
Silas, something which fringed the frightful truth, “I know better,”
then terrified of her indiscretion, added, “Oh no, I mean nothing.”
“You are afraid of him, aren’t you?” he said, coming round the table
closer to her, his attitude very sympathetic and protective, and
differing by a shade from Calthorpe’s attitude. “You must not be that.
One can only be sorry for Silas, who has grown warped and crooked, and
who talks because there is nothing else he can do. Whenever I think of
Silas, I feel so lucky in mind and body.”
She glanced at him gratefully. He had had the tact not to urge an
explanation of her injudicious remark, and she knew that she could
always depend upon this gentle tact; moreover, he had rescued her soul
from the terror she so dreaded, and had by his words set Silas in a sane
and pitiful light. It suited her temperament to have Silas drawn down
from the uncomfortable heights where he seemed to dwell in perpetual
strife with elements. It was no longer Silas who brooded over them, but
they who endured and even loved Silas with widened charity. She was very
grateful to Linnet for this. What he had done once he could do again; he
could soothe her terrors. She had not yet thought of him in so human,
companionable a way.
He continued the line that he had taken up, giving her time to command
herself fully, making no demands upon her and pretending that nothing
had been amiss. He swung himself on to the table, and talked easily,—
“I feel so lucky and thankful for having whole limbs and a sane mind. I
don’t covet genius, but I do covet sanity; in fact, I’m not sure that
the broadest genius isn’t the supreme sanity. Balance and justice! I
think those two things are magnificent and grand,” (but he himself, she
knew, would in practice always be merciful rather than just).
“I wish I had your book-learning,” she said; “you ought to stick to
books.”
“Oh no,” he replied, “I like chemistry better, and those things.
Science.... If I hadn’t to earn my living I shouldn’t be working on
scents in this factory. No! I’d be in a country cottage with a
laboratory.”
“You do your best as it is,” she said, touching his stack of scientific
books.
“I had a bit of training at Edinburgh University,” he said, in wistful
reminiscence, “but one ought to dedicate years....”
“Who was your father?” she asked after much deliberation whether she
might venture the question. She knew Morgan only as an isolated person,
who had arrived one day into the world of the factory, and had never
mentioned home or relations. She knew only that he was Scotch; he had a
very slight Scotch accent.
“He was an Inverness crofter,” he replied vaguely, “I used to keep the
sheep on the hills in mists and snows, and properly I hated it. The days
were short, and I thought it was always winter. I used to sit shivering
on the brae-side, huddled in a plaid for shelter under a boulder, trying
to read while I kept one eye on the sheep. The pages of my book used to
get damp and limp, and the print got blurred when I tried to dry the
page with the corner of my jacket. Then somebody found out that I wasn’t
getting any education, and reported it, so I was sent back to school,
and was happy again. And you—you haven’t lived here always, have you?”
“Since I was ten,” she replied, sighing, “we used to live in the south
before that ... I liked that,” she said, “it was a pretty place,
Midhurst, near Arundel—perhaps you know it?” She thought innocently, and
rather in the fashion of a child, that every one must know what she
knew.
“I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Oh, it’s under the Downs. Do you remember the day we walked with Silas
to Thorpe’s Howland? that put me in mind of Midhurst; there were woods
round about Midhurst.”
“You enjoyed yourself that day, didn’t you?”
He expected a little burst of rhapsody from her, but she only said
quietly, “Yes, I did,” and he was aware of disappointment, and at the
same time of the little stinging charm of her occasional unexpectedness.
“We both come from sheep country, then,” he said, but the images evoked
in their minds were different: his of rough hills with their summits
lost in mist, and lochs lying amongst the windings at their base; of
dirty huddled flocks swept by wind and sleet; while hers were of cropped
downland under a blue and white open sky, with the shadows of the clouds
bowling across the downs and over the clumps of trees and little
church-steeples in the valleys. He realised the disparity, saying “When
I say that, we see different pictures,” and he smiled, but in his heart
he longed for their childhood to have run side by side either in the
Sussex or the Highland village. “Have you ever been back there?” he
asked.
“Oh no; it’s a long way from Lincolnshire. I was always at the factory
after I left school, and then when I was eighteen Mother died and I
married.”
“Only eighteen?”
“A week after my birthday.”
“How young!” he said, with such rich and wondering compassion that she
looked suddenly as it were into the depths of a cool inexhaustible well,
always at hand for the quenching of her thirst. He was sitting on the
table near her, while their conversation flowed on in its effortless
interest, so that time and his books were forgotten. He seemed quite
absorbed in what they were saying, looking down at her with intent
consideration. They had attained an intimacy in which they could talk
untroubled; she found it very precious.
“Now, Linnet!” said Silas’s bantering voice, “making love to my
sister-in-law?”