IV
“Either Westmacott did not notice these new inhabitants of the kitchen window-sill, for there they lived, among the pots of red geranium, or he considered he had humiliated me sufficiently; at any rate he made no allusions to the cage. As for Ruth and I, we went for several uncomfortable days without reference to the scene, but there it was between us, an awkward bond, until she broke the silence.
“We were in the dairy; I had brought in the newly-filled milk pails, and she stood churning butter upon a marble slab. I liked the dairy, with its great earthenware pans of milk, its tiled floor, and its cleanliness like the cleanliness of a ship. To-day it was full of the smell of the buttermilk.
“‘Mr. Malory,’ said Ruth, suddenly turning to me, ‘I’ve never thanked you for understanding me the other night. I didn’t think any the worse of you, I’d like to say, for keeping back your words.’
“‘So long as you didn’t think I was afraid of your savage young friend....’ I said.
“‘No, no, I didn’t think that,’ she answered with her quick blush. ‘He says more than he means, Rawdon does, if he’s roused, and it’s best to give in.’
“‘You give in a good deal to people,’ I said with that same irritation at her meekness.
“‘It’s easier...’ she murmured.
“Ah? so that was it? not tameness of spirit, but mere indolence? I felt strangely comforted. At the same time I thought I would take advantage of our enforced confidences to make some remark about the young man of whom her parents had disapproved.
“‘Westmacott....’ I said. ‘He must be a difficult man to deal with? Even for you, whose word should be law to him?’
“But my attempt wasn’t a success, for she shut up like a box with a spring in the lid. I saw that I should never get her to discuss Rawdon Westmacott with me, and I came to the conclusion that she must be fond of the fellow, and I could understand it, regrettable as I thought it, for he was an attractive man in his dare-devil way.
“I soon had cause to regret my conclusion more, for I surprised the secret of a young handy-man who worked sometimes on the farm and for whom I had always had a great liking. He came to fell timber when old Pennistan wanted him, and he also did the thatching of the smaller, out-lying stacks. I went to help him at this work one day when his mate was laid up with a sprained ankle. He told me he had learnt his craft from his father, who had been a thatcher for fifty years; it gave me great satisfaction to think that a man could spend half a century on so monotonous a craft, constantly crawling on the sloping tops of ricks, with a bit of carpet tied round his knees, and his elementary tools—a mallet, a long wooden comb, a bundle of sticks, and a pocketful of pegs—always ready to his hand, while his mate on the ground pulled out the straw from the golden truss, made the ends even, and lifted the prepared bundle on a pitchfork up to the thatcher. My young friend told me the art of thatching was dying out. I tried my hand at it, but the straw blew about, and I found I could not lay two consecutive strands in place.
“He was a fine young man, whose knowledge of the country seemed as instinctive as it was extensive. I said I surprised his secret. I should not have used the word surprise. It shouted itself out from his candid eyes as he rested them on Ruth; she had brought out his dinner, and leaned against his ladder for a moment’s talk; he looked down at her from where he knelt on the rick, and if ever I saw adoration in a man’s face I saw it on his just then. I felt angry with Ruth in her serene unconsciousness. She had no right to disturb men with her more than beauty. I wondered whether she was or was not pledged to Rawdon Westmacott, and the more of a riddle she appeared to me the angrier I felt against her.
“I was dissatisfied with the whole situation; I could not manipulate my puppets as I would; I felt that I held a handful of scattered pearls, and could find no string on which to hang them. In my discontent I went into the kitchen to look at the mice, they were still and huddled in separate corners. Amos and his wife were sitting at the table drinking large cups of tea, Amos, full-bearded, and in his shirt sleeves and red braces as I had first seen him. As I turned to go they stopped me.
“‘Mr. Malory,’ Amos said, ‘we’d like to ask your advice. We’re right moidered about our girl. You’ve seen how it is between her and young Westmacott. Now we’ll not have young Westmacott in our family if we can help it, and we’re wondering whether it would be best to forbid him the place, and forbid Ruth to hold any further truck with him, or to trust her good sense to send him about his business in the end.’
“I reflected. Then I considered that Westmacott was probably more attractive present than absent, and spoke.
“‘I hardly like to interfere in what isn’t really my affair at all, but as you’ve asked me I’ll say that if Ruth were my daughter I should forbid him the farm.’
“‘That clinches it,’ said Amos, bringing his hand down on the table. ‘We’ll have the girl in and tell it her straight away. You’ve voiced my own feelings, sir, and I’m grateful to you.’
“Here Mrs. Pennistan began to cry.
“‘My poor Ruth! and what if she’s fond of the boy?’
“‘Better for her to shed a dozen tears for him now than a hundred thousand in years to come. I’ll call her in.’
“She came, wiping her hands on her blue apron.
“‘Father, the butter’ll spoil.’
“‘Never mind the butter. Now listen here, my girl, we’ve been talking about you, your mother and I, and we’ve decided that you and Rawdon have seen more of each other than is good for you. So I’m going to tell him that he’s to keep over at his own place in the future, and I expect you to keep over here; that is, I won’t have you slipping out and meeting that young good-for-nothing when the fancy takes you.’
“What a gentleman he is, I thought to myself, to have kept my name out of it.
“I looked at Ruth, wondering what she would do, and hoping, yes, hoping that she would rebel.
“‘Very well, dad,’ was all she said, and she looked perfectly composed, and was not even twisting her apron as she stood there before the court of justice.
“I think Amos was a little surprised, a little disappointed, at her compliance.
“‘You understand?’ he said, trying to emphasise the point which he had already
“‘I understand, dad,’ she said, still in that quiet and perfectly respectful voice.
“‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, and she got up and kissed her daughter, who submitted passively.
“‘Now perhaps Mr. Malory’ll lend me a hand with the butter, or it’ll spoil,’ said Ruth, looking at me, and I followed her out to the dairy, expecting, I must confess, that she would turn upon me and rend me. But she remained severely practical as she set me to my task.
“I could bear it no longer.
“‘Ruth,’ I said, ‘I must be honest with you, even though it makes you angry. Your father asked my advice in this business, and I gave it him.’
“‘You shouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘the butter’ll never set properly.’
“I returned to my churn.
“‘But, Ruth, do you understand what I say? I am partly responsible for Westmacott’s dismissal.’
“Her hand and arm continued their rotary movement, but she turned her large eyes upon me.
“‘Why?’ she inquired, with disconcerting simplicity.
“‘I don’t like him,’ I muttered. ‘How could I live here, knowing you married to a man I dislike and mistrust?’
“To my surprise she said no more, but bent to her work, and I saw a great blush like a wave creep slowly over her half hidden face and down where her unfastened dress revealed her throat.
“‘Ruth,’ I said humbly, ‘are you angry with me?’
“I heard a ‘No,’ that glided out with her breath.
“‘I hope you don’t care for him too much? He isn’t worthy of you.’
“‘Can you lift that pail for me?’ she said, pointing, and I lifted the heavy pail, and poured it as she directed into the separator, a smooth Niagara of milk.
“About three days later my thatcher unbosomed himself to me. Westmacott had disappeared from the farm, and of course every one for five miles round knew that Pennistan had turned him out. I don’t know how they knew it, but country people seem to know things like a swallow knows its way to Egypt.
“I recommended my thatcher to speak privately to Amos first, which he did, and received that good man’s sanction and approval.
“Then Ruth came to me, or, rather, I met her with the pig pail in her hand, and she stopped me. A distant reaper was singing on its way somewhere in the summer evening.
“‘I’ve seen Leslie Dymock,’ she said abruptly. ‘Is it true that you....’
“‘I didn’t discourage him,’ I said as she paused.
“Again she put to me that disconcerting question, ‘Why?’
“‘He’s a good fellow,’ I answered warmly. ‘He cares for you. He didn’t tell me. I guessed.’
“‘How?’ she asked.
“‘Heavens!’ I cried, taking the pig pail angrily from her, ‘you positively rout me with your direct questions. Why? How? As if one’s actions could hold in a single why or how. Don’t you know that the stars of the Milky Way are as nothing compared with the complexity of men’s motives?’
“She gazed at me, and as I looked into her eyes I felt that I had been a fool, and that with certain human beings a single motive could sail serenely like a rising planet in the evening sky. Then I remembered I was still holding the pail. I set it down.
“‘I am sorry,’ I said more gently, ‘I ought not to answer you like that. I like, I respect, and I trust Leslie Dymock, and for that reason I should at least be glad to see you consider his claim. As for my guessing, I had only to look at his face when you came.’
“‘I see,’ she said slowly. She bent to recover her pail. ‘I must be getting on to the pigs,’ and indeed those impatient animals were shrieking discordantly from the stye.
“Next day,” said Malory as though in parenthesis, and with a reminiscent smile on his face, “I remember that a butcher came to buy the pigs. He fastened a big hook on to the beams of the ceiling in a little, dark, disused cottage, and we drove the pigs, three of them, into the cottage for the purpose of weighing them alive, and Ruth looked on from outside, through the much cobwebbed window. It was a scene both farcical and Flemish. All the farm dogs gathered round barking; the pigs, who were terrified into panic, made an uproar such as you cannot imagine if you have never heard a pig screaming. The butcher and his mate drove them into sacks, head first, and as he got the snout neatly into one corner of the sack, and the feet into as many corners as were left to accommodate them, the sack took on the exact semblance of a pig dragging itself with restraint and difficulty along the ground. One after the other they were hoisted into the air and suspended yelling from the hook. I went out to see whether Ruth was scared by the noise. She was not. She was laughing as I had never seen her laugh before, her hands pressed to her hips, tears in her eyes, her white teeth gleaming in the shadows. I was interested, because I thought I understood the inevitable introduction of farcical interludes into mediæval drama. Now I think I understand better, that Ruth, who entirely lacked a sense of the humorous in life, was rich in the truly Latin sense of farce. I practised on her on several occasions after that, and never failed to draw the laugh I expected. The physical imposition of the automatic was unvarying in its results. And she had no feminine sentimentality about the sufferings of the pigs—not she. She rather liked to see animals baited.”
Yes, my friend, thought I as he paused, and I understand you even better than you profess to have understood the girl. You have no spark of real humour in you.
Just as Malory reached this point in his story, I was obliged to go away to Turin for a couple of days, but my mind ran more on the Weald of Kent than on my own affairs: I felt that the summer days were slipping by, that the corn would be cut and set up in stooks, if not already carted, by the time I got back, and that Leslie Dymock might have made such good use of his time as to be actually betrothed. As soon as I reached Sampiero and had changed from my travelling decency into my habitual flannels, I rushed out to find Malory, who was sitting with his pipe in his mouth beside the stream fishing.
He greeted me, “I’ve caught two trout.”
“No? We’ll have them for breakfast,” and I threw myself on the ground beside him, and watched his lazy line rocking on the water.
“What it is to be a fisherman!” Malory said. “To wade out into a great, broad river, and stand there isolated from men, with the water swirling round your knees, and crying ‘Come! come away from the staid and stupid land out to the sea, and exchange the shackles of life for the liberty of death.’ When the voice of the water has become too insistent, I have all but bent my knees and given myself up to the rhythm of the stream. Fishing, like nothing else, begets serenity of spirit. Serenity of spirit,” he repeated, “and turbulence of action—that should make up the sum of man’s life.”
He cast his fly and began to murmur some lines over to himself,—
“The Elizabethans counted life well lost in an adventurous cause. I believe in their sense of duty, but I believe still more in their sense of adventure. And they share with the French the love of panache. Prudence is a hateful virtue. I believe the hatefulness of prudence is the chief cause of the unpopularity of Jews.”
He looked apologetically at me to see what I made of his dogmatic excursion.
“I wonder whether you want me to go on with my story? You do! Well. Amos Pennistan said to me after a month had passed, ‘I’ve enough of Ruth’s nivvering-novvering.’
“I thought that,” said Malory, “an excellent expression—a moral onomatopœia. Amos continued, ‘I’m going to say to her, “One thing or the other; either you take Leslie Dymock, or you leave him.“’ ‘Grand!’ I said, ‘I like your directness, straight to the point, like a pin to a magnet. After all, over-much subtlety has weakened modern life and modern art alike. And what if she replies that she will leave him?’
“I thought his answer a fine simple one, patriarchal in its pride: ‘There’s many young men besides Leslie Dymock that would be glad to marry my daughter; ’tis not every girl has such a dower of looks as my girl, and a dower of this world’s goods thrown along.’ Flocks and herds, she-goats and he-goats, I suppose he would have said, had he lived in Israel two thousand years ago.
“So this ultimatum was presented to Ruth, who asked for a month in which to make up her mind. I saw her going about her work as usual, but I supposed that thoughts more sacred, more speculative, than her ordinary thoughts of daily labour, were coming and going in her brain, hopping, and occasionally twittering, like little birds in a coppice. I did not speak to her much at this time. I pictured her as a nun during her novitiate, or as a young man in vigil beside his unused armour, or as the condemned criminal in his cell, because all three figures share alike a quantity of aloofness from the world. I only wished that Heaven might grant me a second Daphnis and Chloe for my depopulated Arcady, and I asked no greater happiness than to see Ruth and Leslie tangled together in the meshes of love.
“September was merging into October, and again the orchards on the slope of the hill were loaded with fruit, the bushel baskets stood on the ground, and the tall ladders reared themselves into the branches. We were all fruit-pickers for the time being. Of the apples, only the very early kinds were ripe for market, and of this I was glad, for I enjoyed the jewelled orchard, red, green, and russet, and yellow, too, where the quince-trees stood with their roots under the little brook, but the plums were ready, and the village boys swarmed into the trees to pick such fruit as their hands could reach, and to shake the remainder to the ground. We, below, stood clear while a shower of plums bounced and tumbled into the grass, then we filled our baskets with gold and purple, returning homewards in the evening laden like the spies from the Promised Land. Amos stood, nobly apostolic, his great beard spread like a breastplate over his chest, among the glowing plunder. I was reminded of my Greek trader, and of the Tuscan vineyards; and the English country and the southern plenty were again strangely mingled.
“Towards the end of the month, considering that if her mind had not yet sailed into the sea of placidity I so desired it to attain, it would never do so, I decided to sound Ruth upon her decision. You see, she interested me, disappointed as I was in her, and I had nothing else to think about at the time save these, to you no doubt tame, love affairs of my country friends. I had a good deal of difficulty in coaxing her into a sufficiently emotional frame of mind; as fast as I threw the ballast out of our conversational balloon, she threw in the sand-bags from the other side. My speech was all of the lover’s Heaven, hers of the farm-labourer’s earth. She was curiously on the defensive; I could not understand her. I was certain that her matter-of-factness was, that evening, deliberate. She was full of restraint, and yet, a feverishness, an expectancy clung about her, which I could not then explain, but which I think was fully explained by later events.
“We got off at last, we went soaring up into the sky; it was my doing, for I had uttered the wildest words to get her to follow me. I had talked of marriage; Heaven knows what I said. I told her that love was passion and friendship—passion in the secret night, but comradeship in the open places under the sun, and that whereas passion was the drunkenness of love, friendship was its food and clear water and warmth, and bodily health and vigour. I told her that children were to their begetters what flowers are to the gardener: little expanding things with dancing butterflies, sensitive, responsive, satisfying; the crown of life, the assurance of the future, the rhyme of the poem. I told her that in love alone can the poignancy of joy equal the poignancy of sorrow. I told her of that minority that finds its interest in continual change, and of that majority which rests on a deep content, and a great many other things which I do not believe, but which I should wish to believe, and which I should wish all women to believe. I told her all that I had never told a human being before, all that I had, perhaps, checked my tongue from uttering once or twice in my life, because I knew myself to be an inconstant man. I made love by quadruple proxy, not as myself to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself in Leslie Dymock’s name to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself to any named or unnamed woman, but as any man to any woman, and I enjoyed it, because sincerity always carries with it a certain degree of pain, but pure rhetoric carries the pure enjoyment of the creative artist.”
I disliked Malory’s cynicism, and I should have disliked it still more had I not suspected that he was not entirely speaking the truth. I was also conscious of boiling rage against the man for being such a fool.
“When I had finished,” he went on, “she was trembling like a pool stirred by the wind.
“‘You think like that,’ she said, ‘I never heard any one talk like that before.’
“Then I told her a great deal more, about her Spanish heritage and that disturbing blood in her veins, and about Spain, of which she knew next to nothing: that southern Spain was soft and the air full of orange-blossom, but that the north was fierce and arid, and peopled by men who in their dignity and reserve had more in common with the English than with the Latin races to whom they belonged; that as their country had not the kindliness of the English country, so they themselves lacked the kindly English humour, which mocks and smiles and, above all, pities; and that their temper is not swift, but slow like the English temper, but, when roused, ruthless and as little to be checked as a fall of water. I think that for the first time she guessed at a world beyond England, a world inhabited by real men. Before that, Spain and all Europe had been as remote as the stars.”
Malory told her all this, and then, when they were fairly flying through the air—I imagined them as the North Wind and the little girl in the fairy-story: hair streaming, garments streaming, hand pulling hand—he judged the moment opportune to return to Leslie Dymock. I fancy that the crash to earth again must have knocked all consciousness from the girl for a considerable interval. During this interval Malory dilated on the admirableness of the young man, his estimable qualities, and his worldly prospects. I could understand his scheme. He had planned to fill her with electricity, then to switch her suddenly off, sparkling and thrilling, on to Leslie Dymock. He had, I suppose, assumed that a certain sympathy had already inclined her native tenderness towards Leslie Dymock. The scheme was an excellent one in all but one particular: that his initial premise was radically false.
After the interval of her unconsciousness, she returned with slowly opening eyes to what he was saying. God knows what she had expected the outcome of their wild journey to be. Malory only told me that with parted lips and eyes in which all the mysteries of awakened adolescence were stirring, she laid her hand, trembling, on his hand and said,—
“What do you mean? why do you speak to me like ... like this, and then talk to me again about Leslie Dymock?”
He asked her whether she could not find her happiness with Leslie Dymock and realise in her life with him all the pictures whose colours he, Malory, had painted for her. And she answered so bitterly and so scornfully that he charged her with having her heart still fixed on Rawdon Westmacott.
“Still fixed!” she cried, emphasising the first word, “and how could that be still fixed which never was fixed at all?”
He was baffled; he thought her an unnatural creature to be still heart-whole when her youth, her advantages, and that depth which, in spite of her tameness, her reserve, and his own protestations of her lack of passion—protestations which I suspect he continued to make for the strengthening of his own unsure belief—he instinctively divined, should have created a tumult in her soul. It was to him unthinkable that such hammer-strokes as Nature, Westmacott, and Dymock had conjointly delivered on the walls of her heart, should have failed to open a breach. Such breaches, once opened, are hard to close against a determined invader. He urged her to confide in him, he told her that his whole delight lay in the problems of humanity, that metaphysics and psychology were to his mind as sea-air to his nostrils. She only looked at him, and I think it was probably fortunate for his vanity that he could not read what a fool she thought him. I suppose that every man must appear to a woman half a genius and half a fool. Much as a grown person must appear to the infinitely simpler and infinitely more complex mind of a child.
He urged her confidence, therefore, seeing that she remained silent, although her lips were still parted, her hand still lying on his hand, and the expectation still living in her eyes, that had not as yet remembered to follow the lead of her mind. They were the mirrors of her instinct, and her instinct was at variance with her reason. He had come down to the practical business of his mission, while she lived still in the enchanted moments of their flight into a realm to her unknown. If her ears received his emphatic words, her brain remained insensible to them. He detached his hand from hers, to lay it on her shoulder and to shake her slightly.
“Ruth, do you hear what I am saying to you?”
Her widened eyes contracted for an instant, as with pain, and turning them on him she prepared an expression of intelligent comprehension to greet his next sentence.
“I am asking you to trust me as a friend. It’s lonely to be left alone with a decision. If you are angry with me for interfering, tell me to go away, and I will go. But so long as I may talk to you, I want to keep my finger on the pulse of your affairs, where it has been, let me remind you, ever since I set foot in your father’s house. I want to see you happy in your home, and to know that I accompanied you at any rate to the threshold.”
She broke from him, he told me, with a cry; ran from him, and never reappeared that evening. On the following day she accepted Leslie Dymock.
V
“There was a great deal of rejoicing,” Malory continued, “in the Pennistan household over the engagement. Nancy and her husband came for a three days’ visit. I was glad to see my Daphnis and Chloe again, and to discover that all the sweets of marriage which I had described to Ruth were living realities in these two. They seemed insatiable for each other’s presence. Their attitude towards Ruth and Leslie was parental; nay, grandfatherly; nay, ancestral! Experience and patronage transpired through the cracks of their benison. Ruth was annoyed, but I was greatly amused.
“It had been arranged that the wedding should take place almost immediately. Why delay? I am sure that Leslie Dymock was hungering to get his wife away to his own home. And Ruth? She accepted every happening with calm, avoided me—I supposed that she was shy, and left her to herself—was gentle and affectionate to Leslie, took a suitable interest in the preparations of her wedding. I was, on the whole, satisfied. I did not believe that she was much in love with Leslie Dymock, in fact I was inclined to think that she regretted her handsome blackguard, but I believed that her evident fondness for Dymock would develop with their intimacy, and that the bud would presently break out into the full-blown rose.
“As for him, he would not have exchanged his present position with an archangel.
“I asked Amos what had become of Westmacott.
“‘Over at his place, like a wild beast in a cave,’ he replied with a grin.
“‘Is he coming to the wedding?’
“‘Oh, ay, if he chooses.’
“I now became concerned for my own future. Life at the Pennistans’ without Ruth would, I foresaw, be less agreeable although not actually unbearable. She and I had worked together in a harmony I could scarcely hope to reproduce with the hired girl who was to take her place, for you must realise that although I have only reported to you our conversations on the more human subjects of life, our everyday existence had been made up of hours of happy work and mutual interest. I seriously thought of leaving, and said as much to Dymock.
“Some days afterwards that good young man came to me.
“‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘of your leaving and of your not liking, as you told me, to go away from the Weald till after next spring. Now I’ve a proposal to make to you,’ and he told me of a cottage near his own place, with five acres, enough to support hens, pigs, and a cow, whose tenant had recently died. He suggested to me that I should rent this small holding for a year. ‘And you can walk over o’ nights, and have a bit of supper with us,’ he added hospitably.
“The matter was adjusted, and I told Ruth with joy that I should be within half a mile of her in her new life. I was grieved to see that she first looked taken aback, then dismayed, then irritated. I say that I was grieved, but presently I found occasion to be glad, for I reflected that if she thus resented the disturbance of her solitude with her husband it could only be on account of her growing fondness for him, and as I could not now revoke my tenancy I resolved that I would at least be a discreet neighbour.
“How smugly satisfied we all were at that time! I feel ashamed for myself and for the others when I think of it.
“The first indication I had that anything was wrong came about a week before Ruth’s wedding, when, walking down a lane near Pennistans’ driving home the cattle, I passed Rawdon Westmacott. We were by then near November, so the evening was dark, and I was not sure of the man’s identity until we had actually crossed. Then I saw his sharp face, and recognised the subtly Oriental lilt of his walk. He looked angry when he saw that I was myself, and not one of the herdsmen he no doubt expected. I wondered what the fellow was doing on Pennistan’s land.
“The weather was bitterly cold, all the leaves were gone from the trees, and the fat, wealthy Weald was turned to a scarecrow presentment of itself. Instead of the blue sky and great white clouds like the Lord Mayor’s horses, a hard sulphur sky greeted me in the early mornings, with streaks of iron gray cloud on the horizon, and a lowering red disc of sun. Underfoot the ground was frosty, and the frozen mud stood up in little sharp ridges. As it thawed during the day the clay resumed its slimy dominion, and I had to exchange my shoes for boots, as the clay pulled my shoes off my heels.
“It was now two days before the wedding, and I sought out Ruth to make her my humble present. Never mind what it was. I had got her an extra present, which, I told her, was my real offering, and I gave her the case, and she opened it on a pair of big brass ear-rings. She got very white.
“‘You can wear them now,’ I said, ‘Leslie at least isn’t jealous of me, and here is the rest,’ and I gave her the coloured scarf.
“She took it from my hand, never thanking me or saying a word, but looking at me steadily, and put the scarf round her throat.
“I added my good wishes; Heaven knows they were sincere.
“‘Tell me you’re happy, Ruth, and I shall be filled with gladness.’
“‘I’m happy,’ she said dully.
“‘And you’re fond of Leslie?’
“‘Yes,’ she said with such sudden emphasis that I was startled, ‘all that you said about him is true; he is kind and valiant, a man with whom any woman should be happy. I am glad that I have learnt how good he is. I am fonder of him than of my brothers.’
“I thought that a strange comparison, but not wholly a bad one.
“I tried to be hearty.
“‘I am so pleased, Ruth, and my vanity is gratified, too, for I almost think you might have passed him by but for me.’
“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I would have passed him by.’
“‘By God, Ruth!’ I burst out, ‘he is a lucky fellow. Do you know that you are a very beautiful woman?’
“She swayed as though she were dizzy for a moment.
“‘I must go,’ she said then, ‘and I haven’t said thank you, but I do thank you.’
“She paused.
“‘You have taught me a great deal. I have learnt from you what men like Leslie Dymock have a right to expect from life.’
“‘And you will give it him?’ I asked.
“She bowed her head.
“‘I will try.’
“Now I thought that a very satisfactory conversation, and I went about my work, for beasts must be fed and housed, weddings or no weddings, with a singing heart that day. If, somewhere, a tiny worm of jealousy crawled about on the floor-mud of my being, I think I bottled it very successfully into a corner. I was not jealous of Dymock on account of Ruth; no, not exactly; but jealous only as one must be jealous of two young happy things when one remembers that, much as one values one’s independence, one is not the vital life-spark of any other human being on this earth. There must be moments when the most liberty-loving among us envy the yoke they fly from.
“I clapped a cow on her ungainly shallow flanks as I tossed up her bedding, and said to her, ‘You and I, old friend, must stick together, for if man can’t have his fellow-creatures to love he must return to the beasts.’ She turned her glaucous eye on me as she munched her supper. Then I heard voices in the shed.
“‘Rawdon! if dad sees you....’
“And Westmacott’s hoarse voice.
“‘I’ll chance that, but, by hell, Ruth, you shall listen to me. They think you’re going to marry that lout, but as I’m a living man you shan’t. I’ll murder him first. I swear before God that if you become that man’s wife I’ll make you his widow.’
“I stood petrified, wondering what I should do. It was night, and pitch dark inside the shed, but as I looked over the back of my cow down the line of stalls in which the slow cattle were lazily ruminating, I saw two indistinct figures and, beyond them, the open door, the night sky, and an angry moon, the yellow Hunter’s moon, rising behind the trees.
“Ruth spoke again.
“‘Rawdon, don’t talk too loud. I’ll stay, yes, I’ll stay with you; only dad’ll kill you if he finds you here.’
“‘I’ve been up every night to find you,’ Westmacott said in a lower voice. ‘I’ve hung about hoping you’d come out. Ruth, you don’t know. I’m mad for you.... You’re my woman. What business have you to go with bloodless men? You come with me, and I’ll give you all you lack. I’ll be good to you, too, I swear I will. I’ll not drink; no, on my word, it’s the thought of you that drives me to it. Ruth!’
“He put out his arms and tried to seize her, but she recoiled and stood holding on to the butt-end of a stall.
“‘Hands off me, Rawdon.’
“‘You’re very particular,’ he sneered; and then, changing his tone, ‘Come, child, you’re just ridiculous. I know you better than that. Have you forgotten the day we drove to Tonbridge market? you wasn’t so nice then.’
“‘I disremember,’ she said stolidly, but under her stolidity I think she was shaken.
“‘You don’t disremember at all. There’s fire in you, Ruth, there’s blood; that’s why I like you. You’re shamming ladylike. I’ve got that gent with his accursed notions to thank, I suppose.’
“This reminded me with a start of my own identity. I could not stay eavesdropping, so I made up my mind and stepped out into the passage between the stalls.
“Westmacott and Ruth cried simultaneously,—
“‘Who’s that?’
“‘Mr. Malory!’
“‘This is a bad hour for you, sir,’ said Westmacott to me.
“I knew that I must not quarrel with him.
“‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I had no intention of spying on you and was only doing my ordinary work in here. I will go if you, Ruth, wish me to go.’
“‘No,’ said Westmacott, ‘go, and tell them all I’m here? Not much. You’ve heard enough now to know I want Ruth. You’ve always known it. I’ve always wanted her, and I mean to have her. Who are you, you fine gentleman, that you should stand in my way? I could crush your windpipe with my finger and thumb.’”
I pictured that grotesque scene in that dark, smelly shed, among the ruminating cattle, and those two antagonistic men with the girl between them.
“I turned to Ruth,” said Malory, “and asked her frigidly what she wanted me to do? Should I attack the fellow? or give the alarm? or was it by her consent that he was there? Again she did not speak and he answered for her.
“‘I’m here by her consent, she’s had a note from me, and she answered it, and here she is. Isn’t it true?’ he demanded of her.
“‘It is quite true,’ she said, speaking to me.
“I was hurt and disappointed.
“‘Then I will go, as it appears to be an assignation.’
“‘No,’ said Ruth, ‘wait. You said you had had your finger on the pulse of my affairs ever since you came here, and now you must follow them out to the end. I am not a bit afraid of your turning me away from the path I’ve chosen.’
“Weak! I had thought her. As I stood there like a bereft and helpless puppet between those two dark figures, I felt myself a stranger and a foreigner to them, baffled by the remoteness of their race. They were of the same blood, and I and Leslie Dymock were of a different breed, tame, contented, orderly, incapable of abrupt resolution. Weak! I had thought her. Well, and so she had been, indolently weak, but now, like many weak natures, strong under the influence of a nature stronger than her own. So, at least, I read her new determination, for I did not believe in a well of strength sprung suddenly in the native soil of her being. I perceived, rather, a spring gushing up in the man, and pouring its torrent irresistibly over her pleasant valleys. I thought her the mouthpiece of his thunder. At the same time, something in her must have risen to merge and marry with the force of his resolve. Who knows what southern blood, what ancient blood, what tribal blood, had stirred in her from slumber? what cry of the unknown, unseen wild had drawn her towards a mate of her own calibre? An absurd joy rushed up in me at the thought. I flung a dart of sympathy to Leslie Dymock, but he, like those slow-chewing cattle, was of the patient, long-suffering sort whose fate is always to be cast aside and sacrificed to the egoism of others. I forgot my homily on marriage, and the pictures I had drawn of Ruth and Dymock in their happy home with their quiverful of robust and flaxen children. I forgot the sinful lusts of Rawdon Westmacott. Yes, I lost myself wholly in the joy of the mating of two Bohemian creatures, and in Ruth’s final justification of herself.
“‘I want you,’ continued Ruth, in the same even, relentless voice, ‘to stand by Leslie whatever may come to him, and to show him that he’s a happier man for losing me....’
“I heard Westmacott in the darkness give a snarl of triumph.
“‘You’re determined, then?’ I said to Ruth. ‘You’ve not had much time to make up your mind, or wasted many words over it, since I surprised you here.’
“‘Time?’ she said, ‘words? A kettle’s a long time on the fire before it boils over. I know I’m not for Leslie Dymock, I know it this evening, and I’ve known it a long while though I wouldn’t own it. I’m going, and I want to be forgotten by all at home.’
“I was moved—by her homely little simile, and by the anguish in her voice at her last sentence.
“‘I don’t dissuade you,’ I said. ‘Dymock must recover, and if you and your cousin love one another....’
“Westmacott broke in bitterly,—
“‘Say! You seem to have missed the point....’
“‘Rawdon!’ Ruth spoke with a passion I, even I, had not foreseen. ‘Rawdon, I forbid you to say another word.’
“He grumbled to himself, and was silent.
“I looked at her during the pause in which she waited threateningly for signs of rebellion on his part, and I found in her face, lit by the light of the Hunter’s moon, the strangest conflict that ever I saw on a woman’s face before. I read there distress, soul-shattering and terrible, but I also read a determination which I knew no argument could weaken. She was unaware of my scrutiny, for her eyes were bent on Westmacott. Her glance was imperious; she knew herself to be the coveted woman for whose possession he must fawn and cringe; she knew that to-night she could command, if for ever after she would have to obey. I read this knowledge, and I read her distress, but above all I read recklessness, a wild defiance, which alarmed me.
“‘I’ve said what I want to say,’ she added. ‘You’ve thought me a meek woman, Mr. Malory, you’ve told me so, and so I am, but I seem to have come to a fence across my meekness, and I know neither you nor any soul on earth could hold me back. It’s never come to me before like this. Maybe it’ll never come again. Maybe you’ve helped me to it. There’s much I don’t know, much I can’t say ...’ her ignorant spirit struggled vainly for speech. I was silent, for I knew that elemental forces were loose like monstrous bats in the shed which contained us.
“‘Am I to say good-bye?’ I asked.
“She swayed over towards me, as though the strength of her body were infinitely inferior to the strength of her will. She put her hands on my shoulders and turned me, so that the light of the yellow moon fell on my face.
“She said then,—
“‘Kiss me once before I go.’
“Rawdon started forward.
“‘No, damn him!’
“She laughed.
“‘Don’t be a fool, Rawdon, you’ll have me all your life.’
“I kissed her like a brother.
“‘Bless you, my dear, may you be happy. I don’t know if you’re wise, but I dare say this is inevitable, and things are not very real to-night.’
“There was indeed something absurdly theatrical about the shed full of uneasily shifting cattle, and that great saffron moon—shining, too, on the empty arena of Cadiz.
“I left them standing in the shed, and got into the house by the back door; with methodical precision I replaced the key under the mat where, country-like, it always lived.”
I felt in my own mind that much remained which had not been satisfactorily explained, but when Malory resumed after a moment’s pause, it was to say,—
“I don’t know that there is very much more to tell. I came down at my usual hour the next morning, and found no signs of commotion about the farm. As a matter of fact, I caught sight of nobody but a stray labourer or so as I went my rounds. I moved in a dull coma, such as overtakes us after a crisis of great excitement; a dull reaction, such as follows on some deep stirring of our emotions. Then as I went in to breakfast, I saw Mrs. Pennistan moving in the kitchen in her habitual placid fashion, and Amos came in, rubbing his hands on a coarse towel, strong and hearty in the crisp morning. The old grandmother was already in her place by the fire, her quavering hands busy with her toast and her cup of coffee. Everything wore the look I had seen on it a hundred times before, and I wondered whether my experience had not all been a dream of my sleep, and whether Ruth would not presently arrive with that flush I had learnt to look for on her cheeks.
“‘Where’s Ruth?’ said Mrs. Pennistan as we sat down.
“‘She’ll be in presently, likely,’ said Amos, who was an easy-going man.
“Her mother grumbled.
“‘She shouldn’t be late for breakfast.’
“‘Come, come, mother,’ said Amos, ‘don’t be hard on the girl on her wedding-eve,’ and as he winked at me I hid my face in my vast cup.
“Then Leslie Dymock burst in, with a letter in his hand, and at the sight of his face, and of that suddenly ominous little piece of white paper, the Pennistans started up and tragedy rushed like a hurricane into the pleasant room.
“He said,—
“‘She’s gone, read her letter,’ and thrust it into her father’s hand.
“I wish I could reproduce for you the effect of that letter which Amos read aloud; it was quite short, and said, ‘Leslie. I am going away because I can’t do you the injustice of becoming your wife. Tell father and mother that I am doing this because I think it is right. I am not trying to write more because it is all so difficult, and there is a great deal more than they will ever know, and I don’t think I understand everything myself. Try to forgive me. I am, your miserable Ruth.’
“I cannot tell you,” said Malory, who, as I could see, was profoundly shaken by the vividness of his recollection, “how moved I was by the confusion and distress of those strangely disquieting words. I could not reconcile them at all with the picture I had formed of two kindred natures rushing at last together in a pre-ordained and elemental union. I rose to get away from the family hubbub, for I wanted to be by myself, but on the way I stopped and looked at the mice in their cage among the red geraniums. They were waltzing frantically, as though impelled by a sinister influence from which there was no escape.”