WHITE HEATHER.
"Kate," said Lomax, a few days after his adventure with the preacher,
"not a stroke of work shall I do this morning; the sun is hot, and the
breeze cool, and altogether it's a day in a hundred. Come out with me,
and we'll lie in the heather and look up at the sky. It will do you
good, little woman."
The sweetness of a wifely confession came between their glances
nowadays. There was a new wonder in meeting each other's eyes, and Kate
nestled close to his arm on the slightest pretext. She came to him now,
and ruffled the hair away from his forehead.
"What a forgetful boy you are. One day you make your mother promise to
come and see me, and the next you forget all about it. Only, I wish we
could have had our morning together," she added wistfully.
"Fie on you for a witch! I never used to forget anything to do with
mother before I knew you. Would you like to walk as far as Marshcotes,
and we can all come back together?"
"I don't think I ought, Griff. The doctor may know nothing about it--he
probably doesn't--but he was very anxious that I should not do much
walking."
"Then you shall wait here for us. Get the maid to pack up a hamper;
I'll bring mother, and we will find a picnic ground somewhere on
Gorsthwaite Moor. You need not walk more than a mile all told, and it
is a sin for you to miss a day like this."
But Griff did not reach Marshcotes. His stride slackened to a saunter,
and even the saunter was too much exertion by the time he had gone half
the distance. Knowing that Mrs. Lomax would pass him on her way to
Gorsthwaite, he tumbled into a warm bed of heather, lit his pipe, and
watched the shifting colours of the moor. The pulsing crimson-purple of
the heather, shot here and there with fainter splashes of heliotrope,
the hoarse chuckle of the grouse, and shriller wail of the plover, the
peaty reek creeping from a rush-girdled marsh on his right--all these
things were emphatic in their assertion that it was exceeding good to
be alive. His thoughts went out to the child that was to be born to
him: pride in his race, and zeal for its continuance, quickened the
paternal instinct in him; he travelled far into the future, and saw
another Lomax at the Manor, strong as himself, who would poach as his
fathers had poached before him, who would ride fearlessly and fight
like a man, and keep a big slice of his heart for the love that should
one day come to him.
The sunlight grew fainter. A fitful breeze ruffled the heather-tops.
A haze crept across the sky, from the horizon upwards. The sun failed
altogether, and flying squadrons of mist appeared, now making eager
forward rushes, now wheeling, gyrating, eddying to and fro in their
efforts to dodge the pursuing breeze. The mist-wreaths grew denser;
they turned but little now, and fled across the darkening purple like a
band of hunted witches.
Still Griff did not move. He was watching the elfin-revel, and thinking
of the old moor legend that a White Lady rides on the swirling mist,
tempting men to their doom in the bogs that take, but render never
again.
"It would need a marvellous White Lady to tempt me astray nowadays,"
murmured Griff, and laughed as he thought of Kate.
A voice came out of the mist.
"Bertie, is that you? How can you lie on your back there, while I am
dying of fright in the middle of this horrid moor?"
Griff knew the voice at once; it had thrilled him too often in times
past to admit of doubt. He rose slowly and lifted his cap to a figure
that loomed out of the fog-wall a few yards away.
"No, I'm not Dereham. Perhaps you have forgotten me, Mrs. Ogilvie?" he
said.
She came close up to him--a little hothouse woman, with a delicate,
rounded waist, and lips that were always either pouting or pleading.
The blush-rose tints deepened against the waxy white of her cheeks, as
she held out her hand. After a pause--
"Who would have thought of meeting you here, Griff?" broke out the
woman, impetuously. "And yet I--half expected it. Bertie told me you
had buried yourself in this wretched place, and I--yes, I did--I
_hoped_ I should run across you here. There! I should never, never have
confessed the half of that, if I had not been so awfully frightened."
She was devouring him with her eyes, in a strange, famine-stricken way
that startled this quondam slave of hers. Griff, remembering certain
remarks of Dereham's, realized vaguely that she would be in his arms
before the end of the scene, unless he took strong measures.
"Frightened by what? A touch of mist in the middle of a summer's
morning? You are a baby, Sybil."
She fell back a step. Her mouth trembled, her eyes filled with tears.
Over and over again she had reasoned out Griff's faithlessness
to her by woman's logic. His flight from London, his vulgar
after-dissipation--or what had seemed such to her--his failure to come
back to her side--they had all been twisted into proofs of his hopeless
captivity under her yoke. It had been so easy to believe this, while
away from him--and now, he showed hard and cold as an iceberg.
She tried to smile with her old winning artlessness.
"You are awfully rude, Griff, but perhaps I shall forgive you that; it
is not a new _rôle_, this of the barbarian. Still, you might at least
say you are glad to meet an old--friend. I haven't approved of you
lately, you know, and you were horribly brusque before you left town,
but----"
"I am always glad to meet an old friend. Do you mind if I smoke?" said
Griff, refilling his pipe.
Sybil Ogilvie saw that the battle was to be to the strong, and she kept
back her tears, though again they were very near the surface. Neither
spoke for awhile. Griff was stinging under the lash of remembered
follies. He saw, as if it had been written under his eyes, how this
woman had fooled him in the past; he writhed as he looked at her, and
understood what flimsy excuse he had had for raving about her. And now
that he was out of reach, her passion had ceased to be a plaything;
spoiled to the last, she only cared to have what was beyond her grasp.
Her voice, her eyes, her hair, all irritated him beyond measure;
chivalry was out of court, and he would not pity her.
"How did you get here?" he asked, in a hard, matter-of-fact voice.
"I walked up with Bertie Dereham to hunt for white heather. The mist
came on; he went ever such a little distance away to find the track,
and the fog swallowed him up. We shouted to each other, but 'here'
sounded to be just anywhere, and I rushed about the moor till I nearly
dropped with terror and weariness. Then I found you, and--I don't mind
the mist, Griff, any longer."
"Your compliments were always pretty, Sybil. I used to believe them."
"When you were half a bear only, it didn't matter; but now I am getting
awfully afraid lest you should eat me up." Yet her playfulness was
dulled by the pitiful tremor in her voice.
"You came in search of white heath? Our blood runs red up here, and
so does the heather. It was a wild-goose chase at best," said Griff,
deliberately, with a meaning she could not fail to catch.
Still she would not give in. It had become her life, this yearning for
the love she had trifled away.
"Griff, you don't, you can't mean to be so brutal! When are you coming
to live in town again? You are more yourself there."
"Never," said Griff, bluntly.
She laid one hand on his sleeve.
"Griff, dear, haven't you a little--just a little--consideration for
us poor wretches who happen to be--to be fond of you? It is a sin to
hide yourself among these barren moors."
Still he felt no twinge of pity--only the goad of past weakness.
"It is a sin to _seek_ at times, Sybil. You have told me as
much--often. You were so very good that you shamed me into virtue, and
sent me up here out of the reach of temptation; why do you not let well
alone?"
The irony in his voice made her wince. She turned and moved away from
him, into the whirling mist. The first suggestion of pity touched him.
"Don't go like this," he said, more gently. "Let us part friends, for
old times' sake."
She faltered and came back. Even those few steps away from him had
taught her what a final separation would mean, and she resolved to risk
all on a single throw. Without parley, with a suddenness that left
Griff resourceless, she was in his arms.
"Griff, will you never understand? Take me, take me, for I can't live
without you. Things are all changed, dear; I am free now, and--Griff, I
love you so." Her voice broke, her helplessness was pitiably real.
Once, Sybil Ogilvie would have said that it was only country hoydens
who indulged in these crude lapses of taste. Yet there were few
farm-wenches in all the Marshcotes moorside who could have brought
themselves to show so little restraint, so little of the pride of
shame; this dainty, well-bred child of the world had outfaced them all.
Griff held her away from him, looking straight into her eyes, with a
glance that was half of contempt, half of impatient pity.
"You never stopped to ask, Sybil, if we were both free."
In this supreme moment of his revenge, vengeance seemed a sorry thing.
Men cannot but deaden themselves to the faults of a woman who is wise
enough to love them; yet under all this Griff was chivalrously ashamed
that any woman should so have humbled herself before him.
Mrs. Ogilvie looked at him with startled eyes.
"What do you mean? Not that--oh, Griff, not that _you_ are
bound--married?"
He nodded silently. He was marvelling that he, or any man, had been
able to strike down to a bit of real feeling in this baby-temptress.
"Do you care for her, Griff?" she asked suddenly.
Again he nodded. Protestations seemed out of place.
Sybil turned her face from him, and looked for inspiration to the
white-armed maidens of the mist. The gambler's madness was on her now.
If Griff were to be won, she must stake, not pride only, but honour and
good fame; it was too late to draw back to half measures. Four walls
of fog shut in their little square of beaded heather, giving the woman
courage to believe that no hint from the outside world could reach them
there.
"Griff," she cried, stamping one little foot on the ground, "I won't
believe that you love her--I won't--I won't! You were mine two years
ago, you are mine now. How dare you mock me with this talk of another
woman!" The anger died; her voice grew low and soft; her baby lips
pleaded with him. "Such a warm little nest I have always kept for you,
dear, in my heart--warmer than ever you dreamed of in the old days. And
when my husband died, I thought you would come back to me, I thought
you would ask me to tell you what I was free to tell without staining
my honour. But you never came, and I feared I should lose every bit
of prettiness I had, Griff, in crying my eyes out for you." She was
watching his face, and the pity in it nerved her to the last effort. "I
have gone too far, too far. Oh, my dearest! what is honour if it goes
with a barren life?"
Griff moved impatiently up and down, gnawing at the stem of his pipe.
What an utter baby she was--spoiled and selfish, with never a thought
for any happiness but her own. His anger was rising quickly. What would
Kate say to all this, he wondered?
Before he could speak, another figure staggered out of the mist--a
short, thick-set man with a scrubby beard and a flushed face. He
tripped over a clump of cranberries, and fell prone at Mrs. Ogilvie's
feet. She clung to Griff's arm in terror.
"It's thee, is't?" said Joe Strangeways, scrambling to his feet again
and looking from one to the other, his hands in his pockets, his legs
moving backwards and forwards to maintain their perilous equilibrium.
"It's thee, Griff Lummax--robbing another chap of his wench, I'll go
bail. Tha'rt a bonny un, thou art, an' proper." He turned to Sybil.
"Clout his lugs for him, woman, an' send him trapesing home again.
He'll bring thee to shame, will Griff. It's all th' trade he's getten."
Mrs. Ogilvie began to laugh, in a false key. Griff had seen her in
hysterics once, and he knew the symptoms; without more ado he gave
her a good, hearty smack on the cheek, and, "Don't be a little fool,
Sybil!" he muttered harshly. Then he took Joe by the arm, and led him
into a sheep-track that crossed the Gorsthwaite path at right angles.
"That is your road, Strangeways," he said quietly. "The mist is
clearing already. You'll get home by night with luck."
Both his victims stood irresolute from surprise. Sybil had forgotten
hysterics altogether in the smart of the blow and her anger at such
unwarrantable treatment. Joe found it hard to meet his enemy's
matter-of-fact item of information. Finally, the quarryman, swearing
and grumbling, took himself off along the track indicated, and Griff
returned to Mrs. Ogilvie.
"I'm very sorry," he said, laughing at the absurdity of this last scene
in the drama; "I'm very sorry if I hurt you, Sybil, but I was not going
to have you on my hands in the middle of the moor. See, we shall have
the sun out again in a minute or two. I believe we went to sleep, you
and I, and dreamed we were in a fog, and you, or I, or both of us, said
a quantity of foolish things, which we can't remember now. Shall I put
you on your way to the Folly?"
She went with him passively. Nothing mattered very much now; it was
kind of him, she felt vaguely, to smooth over his denial, but what did
words signify? Her passion crept under shelter, whimpering.
The mist dispersed as quickly as it had gathered. The piled banks
melted to fleecy, lace-like bits of scudding vapour. The moor was
a twinkling sea of mist-beads, that shamed to fainter crimson the
heather-tips from which they hung. Gorsthwaite Hall showed clear at the
top of the rising ground ahead.
"Who was that brute? He seemed to have some quarrel with you," said
Mrs. Ogilvie, at last.
"I robbed him of the best woman God ever made. Let him be," Griff
answered, with a warm impulse to acknowledge the place which Kate held
in his regard.
Sybil flashed round on him, her eyes ablaze.
"Then I have loved a fool--just a fool?" She shrugged her pretty
shoulders, and laughed mirthlessly. "I have made a mess of my
self-respect," she went on, with bitter frankness; "I should have
minded less if the woman who claims you had been other than the
cast-off wife of a clown. Griff, you will make me hate you yet; love
cannot survive the jar of absurdity."
Griff answered nothing, for Kate herself was standing at the Hall
gate. He had thought of skirting the house at the rear, instead of
risking this meeting by following the proper track; but he disliked the
suggestion of cowardice in such a plan. As he glanced from the delicate
bundle of drapery and affectation at his side to the steady, splendid
grace of the wife he loved, he was glad of the meeting.
"Kate, here is an old friend of my London days, whom I have just
rescued from the mist. Mrs. Ogilvie, this is my wife." For a fleeting
moment Griff understood that revenge may be exceeding sweet; then he
crushed the feeling.
Kate inclined her head, and smiled with the ease of a woman who trusts
her husband. Sybil Ogilvie, too, tried to smile; but she did not mind
one whit the less now that she found her rival worthier than she had
thought her.
"You will come in and rest after your walk?" suggested Kate, in her
even, rounded voice.
"Thank you, no. I shall be late for luncheon as it is, I am afraid. If
your--your husband will be kind enough to show me my way----"
"I'll come with you; you will never find it alone."
"No, _please_ don't. I can manage quite well if you put me into the
road."
"Nonsense. You would drown in a bog, or something. Kate, if mother
walks over now the mist has cleared, will you tell her I shall be back
in the afternoon? Don't wait dinner."
At the end of ten minutes' walking--
"You were very careful to call me Mrs. Ogilvie before your wife. Is she
jealous in these cases, Griff?" cooed Sybil, feeling it wiser to taunt
than to cry, since she had only the two alternatives from which to
choose.
Griff muttered something softly to himself, and they walked on in
unbroken silence for another mile. The cold, impersonal bearing of her
companion roused something of Mrs. Ogilvie's pitiful prudence.
"You won't--how shall I put it?--I have made myself ridiculous--you
won't breathe a word of it to any one, will you--to Bertie Dereham, I
mean, or----"
He simply stared at her in unfeigned wonder. Ill-advised her late
confession might have been, but it had seemed passionate enough. Surely
she might have let this old hedging mood of hers wait until another day.
"Don't look so shocked, Griff!" she went on hurriedly. "Of course
I don't for a moment think you will--be unlike yourself in that
way--only----"
"Only you are not sure; thanks," put in Griff, curtly, looking straight
before him.
She put her hand on his sleeve.
"Don't be harsh, dear; we have not long together."
He shook off her touch, laughing bitterly. How could he feel compassion
for her, when she let her detestable little suspicions kill pity before
it was half awake?
"No, we have not long together, Sybil. Let us talk of the last new
play, or the old after-theatre suppers, or some topic we are sure to
agree upon."
"Be quiet!" she cried, the tears starting to her eyes.
But the tears were wasted, for Griff would not look at her. Mrs.
Ogilvie, now that she had disposed of her mean instinct towards
prudence, came swiftly back to the desire for a forbidden plaything
which she mistook for love; she shivered at thought of her coming
loneliness; she was ready to accept this half-tamed bear on his
own terms, though he had laughed at her pleading and slighted her
tenderness. She wanted him either to kiss or to thrash her--it scarcely
mattered which, so long as she broke through his indifference.
They reached the wind-driven fir-tree under which Roddick and Janet
Laverack had kept their Christmas tryst. The sun was warm on Frender's
Folly, but no sunshine could overlay the brooding sadness of the
place; rather, there seemed an added desolation, as when light shines
dumbly on a dead man's eyes. Sybil stopped, and pointed across the
smooth-shaven lawns that lay beneath them.
"Isn't it like a grave? Griff, you don't know how eerie it is down
there; I dread going back to it."
"Come, Sybil, don't talk about graves in the middle of a September day.
The Folly is well enough; eat a good lunch, and you'll find it twice as
desirable a place. Good-bye; I must turn back here."
She clutched at him with her little gloved hands.
"You shan't go in this way, you shan't! _Eat a good lunch_--is that
your farewell, Griff, after--after all that has been?"
"_And_ drink a half-bottle of Burgundy; I forgot that." Not at any cost
was he going to have a repetition of the scene on Marshcotes Moor. And
that unwarrantable pity was beginning to touch him again.
She looked from the castle keep to the sweeping purple of the moor.
Twice she was on the point of speaking, and twice she stopped herself.
Then she crept close to him, and held up her face, and pursed out her
baby-mouth.
"Sweetheart, have you no pity?" she murmured.
He took her two hands and touched them lightly with his lips.
"It would do us no good, child. Go back to the old life; you'll forget
me soon enough, if you only make up your mind to it. There, don't cry!
I'm a brute, and there is an end of it. Good-bye."
He turned sharp on his heel and left her. Sorry he was, but nothing
more; he knew that she would forget, and the present trouble seemed to
him scarcely more than a child's first taste of toothache. He forgot
that the agony of a fall into a two-foot pond is very real if the
victim imagines it to be as deep as the sea.
Once he looked back. Amid the glowing waste stood a little hothouse
figure of a woman, with yellow hair and a dimpled white-and-pink face.
He thought it a quaint picture, and waved his hand twice, and swung off
across the heather to the wife who would be impatiently awaiting his
home-coming.