Night and Day
thought how she would draw his attention to Edward’s passion for
Jorrocks, and the enthusiasm which led Christopher to collect moths and
butterflies though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s
sketching, if the fruits were invisible, might lend color to the
general effect which she wished to produce of a family, eccentric and
limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward, she perceived, was rolling the
lawn, for the sake of exercise; and the sight of him, with pink cheeks,
bright little brown eyes, and a general resemblance to a clumsy young
cart-horse in its winter coat of dusty brown hair, made Mary violently
ashamed of her ambitious scheming. She loved him precisely as he was;
she loved them all; and as she walked by his side, up and down, and
down and up, her strong moral sense administered a sound drubbing to
the vain and romantic element aroused in her by the mere thought of
Ralph. She felt quite certain that, for good or for bad, she was very
like the rest of her family.
Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the
afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a
commercial traveler in the opposite corner. They centered round a
village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln;
was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman
of the name of Otway?
The traveler knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue,
reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave
him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the
address.
“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.
“You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said the man; and
Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.
“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the heart of him
could not help marveling at the pleasure which he derived from making a
bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the
letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or
warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only fact it
disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr. Hilbery’s
address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her he
thought; she, too, had seen these gray fields, and, perhaps, she was
there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now,
and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in
the windows of an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his corner
and forgot the commercial traveler altogether. The process of
visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;
instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process
reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect the
figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from
Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing his
dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the late
afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a symbol
of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over the gray
fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful,
silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and
must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt jerks shook
him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet figure, with a
dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the platform. A
tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag, and
led the way without uttering one articulate word.
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk
almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a
note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s
voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the
winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself
at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely different world,
but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure of it directly.
They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of walking home
across the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they explained, but Mary
thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with her, being conscious,
indeed, that he got comfort from her presence. What could be the cause
of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously,
as the pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam between their
eyes and the tall form of Edward, standing up to drive, with the reins
in one hand and the whip in the other. People from the village, who had
been to the market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off
home down the road together in little parties. Many salutations were
addressed to Mary, who shouted back, with the addition of the speaker’s
name. But soon she led the way over a stile, and along a path worn
slightly darker than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the
sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some
semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black
trees with distinct branches stood against the light, which was
obscured in one direction by a hump of earth, in all other directions
the land lying flat to the very verge of the sky. One of the swift and
noiseless birds of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the
field, circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing and returning
again and again.
Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life,
generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would
flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the
sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the
pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were
strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and
the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such
associations for her.
“Well, Ralph,” she said, “this is better than Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses,
have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot?
I shouldn’t think so—”
“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men?
Where am I staying?”
“You are staying with us, of course,” she said boldly. “Of course,
you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”
“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in
silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to
feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and
air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her
comfort.
“This is the sort of country I thought you’d live in, Mary,” he said,
pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. “Real country.
No gentlemen’s seats.”
He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many
weeks the pleasure of owning a body.
“Now we have to find our way through a hedge,” said Mary. In the gap of
the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a
rabbit.
“It’s quite right that they should poach,” said Mary, watching him
tugging at the wire. “I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid
Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen
shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,” she repeated, coming out
on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her
hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. “I
could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.”
“Could you?” said Ralph. “I don’t believe you could,” he added.
“Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow
vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,” said Mary, with a soberness which
impressed Ralph very much.
“But you’d get tired of it,” he urged.
“I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,”
she replied.
The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on
fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of
rest and satisfaction.
“But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six
squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry
across your garden?”
“The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.”
“And what about the Suffrage?” he asked, attempting sarcasm.
“Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,” she
replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.
Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which
he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her further.
His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage.
Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a
tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his
stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the
country.
“D’you know the points of the compass?” he asked.
“Well, of course,” said Mary. “What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like
you?” She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the
south.
“It’s my native land, this,” she said. “I could smell my way about it
blindfold.”
As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph
found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt
drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because she
was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be attached
firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk had fallen
to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and even lean
his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very narrow
lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout through
her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a neighboring
field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.
“That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,”
she said.
She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in
gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon
whom the light fell in wavering discs, calling out now a bright spot of
yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand in
the bucket he carried, and was at once the center of a circle also; and
as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her
brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it sounded
to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his
black overcoat.
He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the
dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others.
A country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary
hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them,
now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and
yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector
himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear
pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of
eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or
the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to
her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead
were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which
part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself.
Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces,
bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink, unmolded
flesh.
“You came by the 3.10, Mr. Denham?” said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet,