On the morrow we again took our pipes to the clump of pines, and Malory began, in his drowsy, meditative voice, to tell his story from where he had left off.

“I hope you are by now as curious as I was to discover the secret of the Pennistan quality. The family were evidently unconscious that there was any secret to discover. They thought no more of themselves than they did of their blue surrounding hills, though in relation to the weather they considered their blue hills a good deal, and Amos taught me one evening that too great a clearness was not to be desired; the row of poplars over towards Penshurst should be slightly obscured, misty; and if it was so, and if the haze hung over Crowborough Beacon, I might safely leave the yearling calves out in the field all night. I should look also for a heavy dew upon the ground, which would predict a fine day besides bringing out the mushrooms.

“We were standing in the cross-roads, where the white finger-post said, ‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ and Amos had corrected my pronunciation from Lee to Lye, and from Cowden to Cowden. I know no greater joy than returning to the heart of a beloved country by road, and seeing the names on the finger-posts change from the unfamiliar to the familiar, passing through stages of acquaintance to friendship, and from friendship into intimacy. Half the secret of love lies in intimacy, whereby love gains in tenderness what it loses in mystery, and is not the poorer by the bargain.

“Mrs. Pennistan came out to join us, and I took the opportunity of asking her whether I might use a certain cupboard for my clothes, as I was pressed for room. She replied,—

“‘Granny had that cupboard, but she’s surely past using it now, so anything of hers you find in it, hang out over the bannister, and I’ll pack it away in a box.’

“Out of this little material circumstance I obtained my explanation; I went in, leaving husband and wife strolling in the road, for it was Sunday evening, and on their Sunday evening they clung to their hour of leisure. I went in, past the chestnuts, up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs I opened the cupboard door, and explored with my hand to discover whether the recess was empty. It was not, so I fetched my candle in its blue tin candlestick, and lifted out the garments one by one; they were three in number.

“I carried them carefully into my room, with no intention of examining them, but as I laid them on the bed their texture and fashion arrested me. A smell came from them, faded and far away. I held them up one by one: a heavily fringed shawl of Spanish make, a black skirt with many flounces, a tiny satin bodice that would barely, I thought, fit a child. As I unrolled this last, something fell from it: a pair of old, pink shoes, tiny shoes, heelless shoes,—the shoes of a ballet dancer.

“As I turned over these relics I heard some one moving in the passage below, and going to the top of the stairs I called to Ruth. She came up, then seeing the shoes in my hands she gave an exclamation of surprise.

“‘Are these yours?’ I asked.

“‘Mine! no; why, look here,’ and she held a shoe against her foot, which, although small, outstripped the shoe in width and length. ‘They’re granny’s, I reckon,’ she added.

“Then she took up the bodice and examined it critically.

“‘It’s a bit rotten, of course,’ she remarked, pulling cautiously at the stuff, ‘but where’d you buy satin now to last as well as that? and bought abroad, too.’

“The subtlest inflection of resentment was in her tone.

“‘Here, give them to me,’ she said. ‘Granny can’t want these old rags, messing up the house. There’s little enough cupboard room anyhow. I’ll put the shawl away up in the attic, for there’s wear in it yet, but the rest can go on the midden.’

“I detained her.

“‘Tell me first, how comes your grandmother to have these things?’

“She was surprised at my ignorance.

“‘To start with, she’s father’s grandmother, not mine. She’s so old, I forget her mostly.... She’s ninety-six, ninety-seven come Christmas. We’re wondering if she’ll last to a hundred.’

“How callous she was! Triply callous, I thought, because of her own youth, because of her great-grandmother’s extreme age, and because of the natural philosophic indifference of her class towards life and death.

“‘She was a dancer, once, you know,’ she went on. ‘Used to dance on the stage, and my great-grandfather found her there, and married her. What a tiny little thing she must have been, just look at this,’ and she held the little bodice across her own breast with a gay laugh, like a child trying to put on the clothes of its biggest doll.

“Then she held the skirt against her slender hips to show me how short it was, and pointed her foot in an instinctive dance position.

“She was holding up the bodice by tucking it under her chin. I looked at her, and she blushed, and convinced me that no woman ever stands altogether innocent of coquetry before any man.

“‘Tell me more about your grandmother,’ I said.

“‘It’s so long ago,’ she replied. ‘She had two children, and one was my father’s father, and the other was Rawdon Westmacott’s mother. You know my cousin Rawdon?’

“‘I know him,’ I said. ‘So you and he are of different generations, though there’s not more than twelve years between you in age.’

“‘Yes, that’s so. Now I come to think of it, there’s the old book in the parlour you might like to read, a diary or something, kept by my great-grandfather. It’s only an old thing; I’ve never looked on it myself, but I’ve heard father talk of it. Shall I get it for you?’

“I begged that she would do so, and she ran downstairs, and returned with a little tartan-covered volume in her hand.

“‘Father sets great store by it,’ she said hesitatingly, as she gave it up to me.

“‘He won’t object to my reading it?’

“‘Oh, no, if you’ve a mind.’

“She evidently looked down on me a good deal for my interest in the old-fashioned volume.

“Left alone, I drew my chair near to the chest of drawers, whereon I had set the blue candlestick; I had two hours before me, and I felt as an explorer might feel on the verge of a new country. Here was a document written by a dead hand, an intimate document, private property, not edited and re-edited, but quietly owned by dignified and unassuming descendants, who would neither cheapen nor profane by giving the dead man’s confidence to the world. It was probable that no intelligently interested eyes but mine would ever read it. I hesitated for an appreciable time before I opened the diary, and in that pause my eyes wandered from the little book to the little garments on the bed, and I fancied that these inanimate objects, made animate by the spirit of their respective owners, called to one another yearningly across the silence of my room.

“When I at last opened the diary I found myself carried straight away into an unanticipated world. The man, whose name and rank, ‘Oliver Pennistan, captain, Dragoons,’ I read on the fly-leaf, was writing in Spain. His first entry was dated Madrid, 1830. He wrote without conscious art, and indeed his daily jottings seemed to me solely the occupation of a lonely evening; at one moment he was annoyed because he had been given pan de municion, which was hard, black, and uneatable, instead of pan de candeal; at another, he had been overcharged by his landlord, and feared he must exchange into a different posada.

“He was innocent of literary artifice, this Pepys of nineteenth century Spain, yet the natural, matter of fact, unstudied candour of his daily biography brought the preposterous age before me, crimped and grotesque, the Spain of Goya. Eighteen-thirty, an incredible period in any country, attained in Spain an incredibility which turned it into a caricature of itself. Oliver Pennistan, I knew, wore whiskers and an eyeglass; tight, straight, high military trousers; drawled; guffawed; said ‘Egad.’ As for the women of his acquaintance, I knew them to be frizzed and fuzzed, with faces mauve beneath their powder, and hearts sick with sentiment beneath their tight bodices. I did not know what had taken Oliver Pennistan to Spain, but I supposed that he was a younger son, as I had heard Amos boast of the dozen boys of his grandfather’s generation.

“Still I did not connect his Spanish experiences with the Pennistans I knew. I read the Madrid portion of his diary without impatience, because I was greatly entertained by the subtle flavour of the age which I found therein, but when he came to packing his valise preparatory for a trip to Cadiz, I fluttered the pages over, looking for his return to England. I wanted to get to the dancer who now sat in the room below mine roasting chestnuts over the fire. I was disappointed to see that the diary never accompanied him to England, and I began to fear that his courtship and marriage would not be revealed to me.

“‘Leaving Madrid with regret,’ ran the diary, ‘but have the benefit of agreeable society on the road. Hope to cover thirty miles to the day. I have a broad sash to keep off the colic, and an amulet from a fair friend to keep off the evil eye.’

“Thus equipped, the dragoon rode to Cadiz, and I must do him the justice to say that he looked on the country he rode through with an appreciative eye, noting the scent of the orange-blossom which assailed him as he entered Andalusia, and the grandeur of the rocky passes which connect northern and southern Spain. At the same time, he kept that nice sense of proportion by which tolerable food and lodging remains more important to the traveller than beauty of scenery. He noted also the superior attractions of the Andalusian women, ‘little, and dark, and for the most part fat, but with twinkling eyes and a smile more friendly, if also more covert, than their sisters of Madrid.’

“I turned over the pages again at this point, and chanced at last upon a phrase which convinced me that he had met his love. Then the book fell from my hand, and I lost myself in a reverie, working my way laboriously through a maze of preconception to the fact that this dancer of whom I had heard from Ruth was not an English dancer, but a Spanish dancer, and as this fact broke like daylight upon me I realised that I had bored into the heart of my mystery. Moments of revelation are intrinsically dramatic things, when a new knowledge, irrevocable, undisputable, comes to dwell in the mind. All previous habitants have to readjust themselves to make room for the stranger. A great shuffling and stampeding took place now in my brain, but I found that, far from experiencing discomfort or difficulty in accommodating themselves to their new conditions, my prejudices jumped briskly round and presented themselves in their true shape beneath the searching glare of the revelation.

“I read on eagerly, the shadow of disappointment lifting from me. Oliver Pennistan lodged at an inn which provided him with excellent ValdepeÑas; his business in Cadiz was somehow connected with wine, and many technical jottings followed, put in as a guide to his memory; I did not understand all his abbreviations, but was nevertheless impressed by his knowledge of sherry. His business took him most of the day. In the evenings he was a free man, and spent his time in the theatre; probably it was here that he first saw his dancer, for at about this time her name began to appear in the diary: ‘To the fight with Concha,’ or ‘With Concha to the merry-go-round.’ There were also references to the ‘Egyptians,’ who were Concha’s people, and the Goya world of Madrid was replaced by a society of Bohemians—bull fighters, mountebanks, acrobats, hunchbacks, thieves, fortune tellers, all the riff-raff of the gipsy quarter.

“I took this as a miniature allegory, for in the Prado at Madrid the Goya portraits of ladies and the Royal family hang upstairs, while in a basement, typical of the underworld into which Oliver Pennistan had now plunged, hang his series of extraordinary cartoons, caricatures, nightmares, peopled with obscene dwarfs and monstrous parasites.

“How remote the England of his boyhood must have seemed to him, his eleven brothers, the hills, the hawthorn, the farm-buildings; if he saw them at all, it must have been as at the end of a long avenue. I looked up, out of my window across the sleeping fields, and returned again to the pages yet hot and quivering with life, written in an ill-lighted posada at Cadiz.

“In the same way that, without a descriptive word, he had contrived to give me an unmistakable impression of the Spain of his day, he now gave me a portrait of the dancer, passionate but strangely chaste, scornful of men, but yielding her heart to him while she withheld her body. He gave me a picture also of his own love, flaming suddenly out of a night of indifference, overwhelming him and sweeping aside his reason, determining him to make a wife of the gipsy he would more naturally have desired as a passing love. I was intimate with his intention, yet he never departed from his catalogue of facts and doings; stay, once he departed from it to say, ‘Her head sleek as a berry, her little teeth white as nuts.’ His one description.... I looked across at the little silent heap of garments on my bed, that had clasped the fragile being he revered with so much tenderness.

“‘To the bull-ring with Concha,’ he noted on one occasion. ‘Not to the spectacle, but to the driving in from the corral. Miura bulls, black and small, but agile more than most. They are driven in through the streets in the small hours of morning, together with the tame cattle, by men on horses. These men wear the bolero and high, peaked hat, and carry a long pole armed with an iron point. I would have ridden, but she dissuaded me. We waited on a balcony above a yard. A long wait, but not dreary in such company. There is much shouting when the bulls come, and the yard beneath is filled with fury and bellowing; I would not willingly chance my skin among such angry monsters, but their drivers with skill manoeuvre each bull by himself into a separate cell where he is to remain without food or drink until morning. A diverting spectacle, had it not been for the press and the stench of ordures.’

“I have seen that dim yard myself,” said Malory, “chaotic with lashings and tramplings, and pawings and snortings, and the vast animals butt against the woodwork, and their huge forms move confusedly in the limited space. Like Pennistan, I would not care to chance my skin. Concha, who being a Spaniard was bred up to violence, was even a little frightened, ‘clung to me,’ said the diary, ‘and besought me not to leave her. We saw the bulls in their cells from above, by the light of torches. These brands may be thrust down to burn and singe and further enrage the beast,’ but Oliver Pennistan, who had been nurtured on this mild farm among pampered and kindly kine, did not like the sport, so turned away with Concha on his arm and passed through a door into the upper gallery of the arena.

“The vast circle seemed yet vaster by reason of its emptiness. Its ten thousand seats curved round in tiers and tiers and tiers, a gigantic funnel, open to the sky in which sailed a full and placid moon. The arena, ready raked and scattered with whitish sand, gleamed palely below, as if it had been the reflection of the heavenly moon in a pool of water. The great place lay in haunted silence.

“It was here, sitting in a box, that they came to their final agreement. The diary naturally giving me no hint of the words that passed between them, I had to be content with a laconic entry some few days later: ‘Married this morning at the church of S. Pedro.’ I sat on in my room wondering what Oliver Pennistan had made of that surrendered, inviolate soul, the no doubt rather stupid and affected soldier, the scion of English yeomen; I wonder what he made of his wildling, sprung as she was from God knows what parentage; the Moorish Empire and the Holy Land had both surely gone to her making. They roamed Spain together for their honeymoon, and I accompanied them in spirit, seeing her dance, not in public places only, but in their room, for his eyes alone, his hungry love her sweetest applause; dancing in her little shift, and teaching his clumsy hands to clap and his lips to cry ‘OlÉ!’ I wonder too what the mountebanks of the trade thought of Concha’s husband, who sat through her performance in the hot, boarded theatres of Spanish provincial towns, and would allow no other man near his wife, and who, when one evening she for pure mischief eluded him, only grieved in silence and thought her love was going from him. I wonder most of all what Concha thought of him, his staid insularity, his perpetual talk of home, and his unassailable prejudices?

“As I came to the last pages of the diary, which ended abruptly on the last day of the year in Valladolid, Ruth knocked on my door and said she had come for the clothes. I was so full of the illuminating romance that I pressed her with questions. She was not so much reserved as merely indifferent, but looking at her warm young face in the uncertain candlelight I knew that therein, rather than in her speech, lay the answer to all my queries. I had seen the portraits of Amos Pennistan’s father, and of Rawdon Westmacott’s mother, daguerreotypes which hung, enlarged, on either side of the kitchen dresser, and I knew that in that generation no sign of the Spanish strain had appeared. I looked again at Ruth, at her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise; looked, and was enlightened. I urged her memory. Could she recall no anecdote, dear to her father when in a mood of comfortable expansion, a family legend of her grandfather’s youth? Yes, she remembered hearing that the children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of sudden and uncertain temper. But she remembered, though it was not worth the telling, that Mrs. Oliver Pennistan, in her sunniest mood, would set her children on hassocks to watch her, their backs against the wall, would take down her hair, which was long and a source of pride to her as to all Spanish women, would take her shawl from the cupboard, and, stripping off her shoes and stockings, would dance for her children, up and down, the sinuous intricacies of an Andalusian dance. I wondered what Oliver Pennistan thought, when, coming in of an evening with the mud from the turnip fields heavy on his boots, he found his wife with hair and fingers flying, dancing to the music of her own voice on the tiled floor of his ancestral kitchen?”

“Now,” said Malory, “I scarcely know how to continue my story. I have told you how I went to live with the Pennistans, and I have told you Oliver Pennistan’s Spanish adventure, and the rest lies largely in hours so full of work that no day could drag, but which in words would take five minutes’ reproducing. I have told you already how I loved that simple monotone of life. I had arrived in autumn, an unwise choice for a novice less enthusiastic than myself, for soon the trees were bare of the fruit which had so rejoiced me, bare, too, of the summer leaf, and the working day, which at first had drawn itself out in long, warm, melting evening, now rushed into darkness before work was done, and not into darkness alone, but into chill and wet, so that you might often have seen me going about my work in the cow-sheds with a sack over my shoulders and a hurricane lantern in my hand. I do not pretend that I enjoyed these squally winter nights. They had the effect of dulling my perception, and presently I found myself like the country people whose life I shared, considering the weather merely in its relation to myself; was it wet? then I should be wet; was it a bright, fine day? then I should be dry. My standpoint veered slowly round, like the needle of a compass, from the subjective to the objective. I wish I could say as much for many of my contemporaries. Then in our age as in all great ages, we might find more men living, not merely thinking, their lives.”

In after years I remembered Malory’s words, and wondered whether he had found on the battlefield sufficient signs of the activity he desired.

“I remember how entranced I was,” he went on, altering his tone, “by the sense of ritual in the labouring year. I thought of the country as a vast cathedral, teeming with worshippers, all passing in unison from ceremony to ceremony as the months revolved. When I had come to join the congregation, apse and column and nave were rich with fruit, the common fruit of the English countryside, plum and apple, damson and pear, curved and coloured and glowing with the quality of jewels; then busy hands came, and packed and stored the harvest into bins, and colour went from the place, and it grew dark. A long pause full of meditation fell. The trees slept, men worked quickly and silently, no more than was imperative, and from darkened corners spread the gleam of fires which they had lighted for their warmth and comfort. But then, oh! then the place was suddenly full of young living things, and of a light like pearls; children laughed, and over the ground swept a tide which left it starred with flowers, and a song arose, full of laughter and the ripple of brooks. The spring had come.”

He was strangely exalted. I knew that my presence was forgotten.

“The shepherd and his nymph were not long lacking in this Arcadian world. I met them crossing the fields, I spied them beneath the hedges, I learned to step loudly before entering the dairy with my pails of milk. I loved them, more perhaps as a part of the picture than for their own sakes. To me they were Daphnis and Chloe, not the game-keeper’s son and the farmer’s daughter.

“The match was favourably viewed by Amos Pennistan, though Nancy was but eighteen and her lover two years older. I was honoured by an invitation to the wedding. I had already woven a little tale for myself around those country nuptials, a celebration which, although slightly irregular, would have become my lovers better than the parochial gentility which did actually attend their union. I had pictured them by a brook, Daphnis in, to our minds, becomingly inadequate clothing, Chloe’s muslin supplemented by chains of meadow flowers such as the children weave, accompanied by their flocks and the many young creatures, lambs, kids, and calves, as are characteristic of that least virginal of seasons. No wooing; no; or if there must be wooing, let it be sudden and primitive, and of the nature of a revelation, and let the oak trees be their roof that night, and the stars the witnesses of their natural and candid passion. But passion, poor soul! was put into stays and stockings, had his mad gallop checked into a walk, while fingers poked, eyes peeped, and tongues clacked round the prisoner. Alas for the secret of Daphnis and Chloe; shorn of the dignity of secrecy, it glared in the printed column, was brayed out from the pulpit, was totted up in pounds and shillings. Food entered to play his hospitable and clumsy part. For days Mrs. Pennistan baked, roasted, and kneaded cakes and pastries, and daily as she did it her temper disimproved. Such beauty as was Chloe’s, the beauty of health and artlessness, was devastated by the atrocious trappings of respectability....

“What a commonplace tale! you will say, and a vulgar one into the bargain! and indeed you will be right, if a miracle can become a commonplace through frequent working, and if you look upon the marriage of two young creatures as a social convenience, ordained, as we are told, for the procreation of lawful children. I have told you nothing but the love of rustic clowns. But as the great words of language, life and death, love and hate, sin, birth, war, bread and wine, are short and simple, and as the great classical emotions are direct and without complexity, so my rustic clowns are classical and enduring, because Adam and Eve, Daphnis and Chloe, Dick and Nancy, are no more than interchangeable names throughout the ages.

“My Arcady missed its lovers. I realised after they had gone that they had been real lovers, imperative to one another, and that they had not simply drifted into marriage as a result of upbringing and propinquity. Had their parents’ consent been for some reason refused, they would, I am convinced, have gone away together. Amos Pennistan, in one of his rare moments of expansion, told me as much himself. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘it never did to cross Nancy. She was strong-willed from three months upward. Ruth, now, she’s a steady, tractable girl for all her dark looks. Of the two, give me Ruth as a daughter.’

“You may imagine my profound interest in the study of this strain sprung from the stock of Concha and Oliver Pennistan. Here I had Nancy, with her slight English prettiness, and the fiery will which might never be crossed; and Ruth, who looked like a gipsy and was in fact steady and tractable. I could not help feeling that fate had her hand on these people, and mocked and pushed them hither and thither in the thin disguise of heredity. You remember Francis Galton and the waltzing mice, how he took the common mouse and the waltzing mouse, and mated them, and how among their progeny there were a common mouse, a black and white mouse, and a mouse that waltzed; and how in the subsequent generations the common brown house mouse predominated, but every now and then there came a mouse that waltzed and waltzed, restless and tormented, until in the endless pursuit of its tail it died, dazed, blinded, perplexed, by the relentless fate that had it in grip. Well, I had my mice in a cage, and Concha, the dancer, the waltzing mouse, sat mumbling by the fire.”

I shuddered. I did not understand Malory. He had spoken of the violence of his feeling when he first caught sight of Ruth; I could not reconcile that mood with his present chill analysis.

“You held a microscope over their emotions,” I said.

“I was afraid there would not be many emotions left now that Nancy was gone,” he replied regretfully. “I missed her as a study, and I missed her as an intrinsic part of my Arcady. I turned naturally for compensation to Ruth and to Rawdon Westmacott, but here I realised at once that I must dissociate the figures from the landscape. They would not fit. No; contrive and compress them as I might, they would not fit. I am very sensitive to the relation of the picture to the frame, and I was troubled by their southern exuberance in the midst of English hay and cornfields. Now could I but have had them here ...” and again the cropping goats, the mountains, and the torrent rushed across the magic lantern screen in my mind.

“I told you that I knew young Westmacott was there crazy for her; he had no reserve about his desire, but hung round the farm with a straw between his teeth, his whip smacking viciously at his riding-boots, and his eyes perpetually following the girl at her work. He would look at her with a hunger that was indecent. Me he considered with a dislike that amused while it annoyed me. I often left my work when I saw him looming up morosely in the distance, but old Amos dropped me a hint, very gently, in his magnificently grand manner, after which I no longer felt at liberty to leave the two alone. If they wanted private interviews they must arrange them when they knew my work would take me elsewhere.

“I was not sorry, for I had no affection for Westmacott, and it amused me to watch Ruth’s manner towards him. I had heard of a woman treating a man like a dog, but I had never seen an expression put into practice as I now saw Ruth put this expression into practice towards her cousin. She seemed to have absolute confidence in her power over him. When it did not suit her to notice his presence, she utterly ignored him, busied her tongue with singing and her hands with the affair of the moment, never casting so much as a glance in his direction, never asking so much as his help with her work; and he would wait, lounging against the doorway or against a tree, silent, devouring her with that hungry look in his eyes. Often I have seen him wait in vain, returning at last to his home without a word from her to carry with him. His farm suffered from his continual absence, but he did not seem to care. And she? did she get much satisfaction out of her ill-treatment of his devotion? I never knew, for she never alluded to him, but I can only suppose that, in the devilish, inexplicable way of women, she did. In his presence she was certainly an altered being; all her gentleness and her undoubted sweetness left her, and she became hard, contemptuous, almost impudent. I disliked her at such moments; self-confidence was unbecoming to her.

“Then, when she wanted him, she would whistle him up like a little puppy, and this also I disliked, because Westmacott, whatever his faults, wasn’t that sort of man, and it offended me to witness the slight put upon his dignity. He didn’t seem to resent it himself, but came always, obedient to her call. And he would do the most extraordinary things at her bidding. Mrs. Pennistan told me one day that when the pair were children, or, rather, when Ruth was a child of ten and he was a young man of twenty-two, she would order him to perform the wildest feats of danger and difficulty.

“‘And he’d do what she told him, what’s more,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, to whom these reminiscences were obviously a source of delight and pride, as though she, poor honest woman, shone a little with the reflected glory of her daughter’s ten-year-old ascendancy over the daring young man. ‘Lord, you would have laughed to see her standing there, stamping her little foot, and defying him to go down Bailey’s Hill on his bicycle without any brakes, and him doing it, with that twist in the road and all.... One day she wanted him to jump into the pond with all his clothes on, and when he wouldn’t do that she got into such a rage, and stalked away, and wouldn’t speak to him, enough to make a cat laugh,’ and Mrs. Pennistan with a great chuckle doubled herself up, rubbing her fat hands in enjoyment up and down her thighs, straightening herself again to say, ‘Oh, comical!’ and to wipe her eye with the corner of her apron!

“‘Well, now, I declare!’ she said suddenly, craning her neck to see over the hedge. ‘If she isn’t at her old tricks again!’

“I followed her with a thrill to a gap in the hedge whither she had darted—if any one so portly may be said to dart. There, across the field, by the gate, stood the pair we had been discussing, and I was actually surprised to find that the little ten-year-old girl whom I had half expected to see was a well-grown and extremely good-looking young woman. She was sitting on the gate, and Westmacott was lounging in his usual attitude beside her; even at that distance his singular grace was apparent.

“They seemed to be looking at the two cart-horses which were grazing, loose in the field.

“‘She’s up to something, you mark my words,’ said Mrs. Pennistan to me.

“I agreed with her. Ruth was pointing, and the imperious tones of her voice floated across to us in the still evening; Rawdon was following the direction of her finger, and now and then he turned in his languid, easy way that covered—with how thin a veneer!—the fierceness beneath, to say something to his companion. I saw his hand drop the switch he carried, and fall upon her knee. Her manner became more wilful, more imperative; had she been standing on the ground, she would have stamped. I heard Rawdon laugh at her, but that seemed to make her angry, and with a resigned shrug he pushed himself away from the gate and began to walk across the field.

“‘Lord sakes,’ said Mrs. Pennistan anxiously, ‘whatever is he going to do?’

“I begged her to keep quiet, because I wanted to see any fun that might be going.

“Mrs. Pennistan was not happy; she grunted.

“Ruth was perched on the gate, watching her cousin. I was delighted to have an opportunity of observing them when they thought themselves alone. Besides, I intensely wanted to see what Rawdon was going to do. He walked up to one of the horses, hand outstretched and fingers moving invitingly, but the horse snorted, threw up its head, and cantered lumberingly away to another part of the field. Rawdon followed it, pulling a wisp of grass by means of which he enticed the great clumsy beast until he was able, after some stroking and patting, to lay his hand upon its mane. Ruth, on the gate, clapped her hands and called out gaily,—

“‘Now up with you!’

“‘Lord sakes!’ said Mrs. Pennistan again.

“I saw Westmacott getting ready to spring; he was agile as a cat, and with a leap and a good hold on the mane he hoisted himself on to the horse’s back. The horse galloped madly round the field, but Westmacott sat him easily—not a very wonderful feat for a farm-trained boy to accomplish. As he passed Ruth he waved his hand to her.

“She wasn’t satisfied yet; she called out something, and, the horse having come to a standstill, I saw Rawdon cautiously turning himself round till he sat with his face to the tail. Then he drummed with his heels to put the horse once more into its lumbering gallop.

“I saw the scene as something barbaric, or, rather, as something that ought to have been barbaric and only succeeded in being grotesque. Ruth ought to have been, of course, an Arab girl daring her lover in the desert to feats of horsemanship upon a slim unbroken thoroughbred colt. Instead of that, Westmacott was just making himself look rather ridiculous upon a cart-horse. But the intention was there; yes, by Jove! it was; the intention, the instinct; he was wooing her in a way an English suitor wouldn’t have chosen, nor an English girl have approved. Mrs. Pennistan, however, saw the matter in a different light, as a foolish and unbecoming escapade on the part of her daughter; so, thrusting herself between the loose staves of the fence and waving her hands angrily, she called out to Westmacott to have done with his dangerous nonsense.

“He slipped off the horse’s back, and Ruth slipped down off the gate, the man looking annoyed, and, in a slight degree, sheepish, the girl perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Pennistan rated them both. Westmacott kicked sulkily at the toe of one boot with the heel of the other. I glanced at Ruth. She had her hands in the big pockets of her apron and was looking away into the sky, with her lips pursed for an inaudible whistle. Her mother stormed at her.

“‘You’re getting too old for such nonsense. It was all very well when you were a chit with pig-tails down your back. And you, Rawdon, I should ha’ thought you’d ha’ known better. What’d Pennistan say if he knew of your larking with his horses? I’ve a good mind to tell him.’

“‘I’ve done the brute no harm,’ he muttered.

“‘Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for, anyway?’

“‘A bit of fun ... ’ he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth.

“Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which I was to become so familiar.

“‘Ay, Ruth told you,’ stormed Ruth’s mother. ‘An old tale. You let Ruth alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.’

“Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s indifference.

“Ruth,” said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. “She is a problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her, lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be conscious of her.

“She on her part, was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced. Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work. I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her, however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me back into the regions of fact. ‘Ruth,’ I would say, ‘does a woman cling more to her children or to her husband?’ and she would stare at me and reply, ‘What things you do say, Mr. Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I have the dairy to wash down yet.’

“I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather, that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.

“Sunday afternoon was our holiday on the farm, and to the worker alone a holiday is passionately precious. It is all a matter of contrast. On Sunday afternoon I would take Ruth for a walk; the sheep-dog came with us, and we would go through shaw and spinney and young coppice, and along high-hedged lanes. One spot I loved, called Baker’s Rough, where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, and wild flowers had consequently gathered in their millions: anemones, wood-violets, bluebells, cuckooflowers, primroses, and later the wild strawberry, and later still the scarlet hips of the briar. I never saw a piece of ground so starred. Here we often passed, and we would climb the hill-ridge behind, and look down over the Weald, and fancy that we could see as far as Romney Marsh, where Rye and Winchelsea keep guard over the melancholy waste like little foreign towns. We stood over the Weald, seeing both fair weather and foul in the wide sweep of sky; there a storm, and there a patch of sun on the squares of meadow. On fine days great pillows of white cloud drifted across the blue, painted by a bold artist in generous sweeps on a broad canvas, and those great clouds were repeated below in the great rounded cushions of trees. We looked over perhaps fifty miles of country, yet scarcely one house could we distinguish, but when we looked for a long time we made out, here and there, a roof or an oast-house, and I used to think that, like certain animals, these dwellings had taken on the colour of the land. For the most part, a clump of trees would be our nearest landmark.

“I could evoke for you many of those hours when, with the girl beside me, I explored the recesses of that tender country. Without sharing my enthusiasm, she was yet singularly companionable, happy and contented wherever our footsteps led us, with the reposeful quality of content essential to a true comrade.”

He was silent, and I considered him covertly as he sat hugging his knees and staring into the distance with a far-away look on his face. He was, I thought, a queer chap; queer, lonely, alien; intensely, damnably analytical. As I watched him, his head moved slightly, in a distressed, unconscious manner, and his brow contracted into a frown that emphasized the slight negative movement of the head. Yet he did not share his difficulties with me. He dismissed them with a sigh, and a gesture of the hand, and resumed,—

“I mentioned just now the place called Baker’s Rough. Ruth came to me one morning with glowing eyes.

“‘There’s flowers such as you never saw on Baker’s Rough to-day,’ she said mysteriously.

“I tried to guess: mulleins? ragged robins? periwinkles? but it was none of those. She would not tell me. I must come and see for myself.

“We set out after tea for Baker’s Rough, walking quickly, for we had only an hour to spare. As we drew near, the sheep-dog, who had run on ahead, set up a tremendous barking at the gate. I cried,—

“‘Gipsies!’

“There was a real gipsy encampment, caravans hung with shining pots and pans, gaudy washing strung out on a line, a camp fire, lean dogs, curly-headed children. Ruth had guessed aright when she guessed that I would be pleased. Amos hated gipsies, but I loved them. I’ve never outgrown the love of gipsies that lurks in every boy. Have you?”

His eyes were actually sparkling as he asked the question, and I was overcome by a feeling of guilt. Often I had thought this man a prig. He was not one, but simply an odd compound of philosopher and vagrant, poet and child. I resolved not to be hard on him again. I was uncomfortably suspicious that it was I who had been the prig.

“As we stood looking,” he went on, “a woman came down the steps of a caravan, and, seeing us, invited us with a flashing smile to come into the camp. Ruth was delighted; she followed the woman, looking like a gipsy herself, I thought, and the children came round her, little impudent beggars, staring up into her face and even touching her clothes. She only laughed, curiously at home; I felt, despite my love of the roaming people, over-educated and sophisticated. I was loving the camp self-consciously, almost voluntarily, aware that I was loving it and rather pleased with myself for doing so.”

“Your mind twists,” I interrupted, “like the point of a corkscrew.”

He laughed, but he looked a little hurt, taken aback, checked on his course.

“I am sorry,” he said, “you are right to snub me for it. Well, Ruth at any rate was thoroughly at home, and I could see that the gipsy was sizing her up with her shrewd eyes, and wondering whether I should be good for half-a-crown or only a shilling.

“She let Ruth sit on a stool and stir the pot over the fire; it smelt very good, though it probably contained rabbits, which of all foods in the world is the one I most dislike. Then she offered, inevitably, to tell our fortunes, and Ruth, as inevitably, accepted with alacrity. She stretched out her little brown hand, strong and hard with work.

“Of course the gipsy told her a lot of nonsense, and I stood by, acutely apprehensive that I should be drawn in an embarrassing rÔle into the prognostications. I had come there with Ruth; therefore, in the gipsy’s eyes, I must be Ruth’s young man. I took off my cap to let the gipsy see that my hair was going gray on the temples. But it wasn’t any use; I found myself appearing as the middle-aged man whose heart was younger than his years, and who would finally carry off the young lady as his bride.

“I tried, of course, to laugh it off, but to my surprise I saw Ruth growing very red and her mouth quivering, so I told the gipsy we had heard enough and that we had no more time to spare. Ruth rose, the pleasure all died away from her face. Then, to add to the misfortunes of the evening, I heard a scream and an outburst of laughter from a neighbouring caravan, and, looking round, I saw Rawdon Westmacott jump to the ground in pursuit of a young gipsy woman, whom he caught in his arms and kissed.

“I looked hastily at Ruth; she had seen the thing happen. The distress which had troubled her face gave way to anger; the name ‘Rawdon!’ slipped in involuntary indignation from her lips. Then an instinct asserted itself to pretend that she had seen nothing, and to get out of the place before her cousin had discovered her. But she conquered the instinct, staring at Westmacott till he turned as though compelled in her direction.

“Not a word did they speak to one another then, but in the silence her anger and contempt flashed across at him like a heliograph, and his vexation flashed back at her. She stood there staring at him deliberately, staring him out of countenance. God! how vexed and furious he was! It makes me laugh now to remember it. I never knew what a fool a man could look when he was caught red-handed. The gipsy only giggled vulgarly, and tried to rearrange her tumbled dress. Ruth never even glanced at her, and presently she removed her gaze from Westmacott—it seemed quite a long time, though I suppose it was not really more than a few seconds—and turned to me.

“‘Shall we go?’ she said.

“‘We went, Ruth haughty, and I at a loss for words. Decidedly the expedition had not been a success. The sheep-dog ran on in front and tactfully barked, and in throwing little stones at him relations were re-established between us. I was prepared not to allude to the incident, but Ruth was bolder; she grappled directly with the difficulty.

“‘You saw Rawdon?’ she said with suppressed violence.

“‘I.... Well, yes, I saw him.’

“‘What was he doing there? He was up to no good with those gipsy women.’

“I had nothing to say; I knew she was right.

“‘He’s always after women,’ she added violently.

“‘I knew that she would not have said this to me had she not been completely startled out of her self-control.

“‘He cares for you though, in his heart,’ I said, rather inanely.

“‘Does he!’ she exclaimed. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘he rides the cart-horses bareback with his face to their tails to please you.’

“‘Oh, you may joke,’ she said; ‘he wants to please me now, but where’d I be if I belonged to him? He’d sing a very different song.’

“‘It rests with you, after all,’ I ventured.

“She was silent, swishing at the hedges with her stick as she passed.

“‘Doesn’t it?’ I urged.

“‘Oh—I suppose so.’

“‘How do you mean, you suppose so? Nobody wants you to marry him; your parents don’t; your brothers don’t. You need never see him again. Send him away!’

“‘I can’t do that,’ she said in a very low voice.

“‘Why not?’

“‘I can’t.... I sometimes feel I can’t escape Rawdon,’ she cried out. ‘He’s always been there since I can remember, I think he always will be there. There’s something between us; it may be fancy; but there’s something between us.’

“‘Hush!’ I said, startled as I was; ‘here he is.’

“He caught us up, walking rapidly, and I could see at a glance that he was determined to have it out with Ruth in spite of my presence. He came up with us, and he took her by the arm.

“‘Ruth!’ he said, in a vibrant voice. I want a word with you. You’ve misjudged me.’

“We had all come to a standstill.

“‘I can’t misjudge what I see,’ she answered very coldly.

“‘You saw, you saw! well, and what of it? That was only a bit of fun. Damn you, if you treated me a bit better yourself ...’

“‘Let me alone, Rawdon,’ she said, shaking him off. ‘You can do as you like, that’s your affair, only let me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.’

“‘Your way!’ he said, scowling at me. ‘Your way’s my way, as you’ll learn.’

“‘Now don’t you come bullying me, Rawdon,’ she said, but I think she was frightened.

“‘Well, you speak me fair and I won’t bully you. I was up to no harm, only larking around.... Come, Ruthie, haven’t you a smile for me? You treat me cruel bad most days, you know, and I don’t take offence. Ruthie!’

“‘We’re not alone, Rawdon,’ she said sharply.

“I thought he muttered, ‘No, damn it!’ between his teeth, and just then I felt a hand close over my wrist on the side farthest from Westmacott, a little imploring hand that checked in the nick of time my impulse to move away. She spoke bravely, as though the contact gave her courage.

“‘That’ll do, now, Rawdon, don’t come making a scene. There’s nothing to make a scene about.’

“‘But you’ll not sulk me?’ he said.

“‘I’ll not sulk you, why should I?’

“‘Then give me a kiss, for peace.’

“‘Let me be, Rawdon.’

“She was troubled, now that her anger had passed. I would have walked on, but for the dry, fevered fingers gripping my wrist.

“A new idea had taken possession of Rawdon’s mind; his eyes glowed in the noble, architectural carving of his face, that so belied the coarseness of his nature.

“‘I’m your cousin, Ruth!’ he cried satirically.

“He caught her by the shoulder and turned her towards him. I thought she would have struggled, and indeed I saw the preparatory tautening of her frame; then to my astonishment she yielded suddenly, flexible and abandoned, and he kissed her regardless of my presence; kissed her ferociously, and pushed her from him.

“‘I’ll see you to-morrow?’ he asked.

“‘To-morrow, likely,’ she answered indifferently, with a quick return to her old contemptuous manner.

“He nodded, put his hand on the top bar of the adjoining gate, and vaulted it, walking off rapidly across the fields in the direction of his own farm.

“‘And let me tell you,’ said Ruth, as though she were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, “he’ll be back around that gipsy place to-night as sure as geese at Michaelmas. He’s as false as can be, is Rawdon.”

“‘Then I think you were weak with him,’ I said. ‘Are you afraid of him?’

“‘It’s like this,’ said Ruth, with that great uneasy heave of the uneducated when confronted with the explanation of a problem beyond the scope of their vocabulary, ‘we never get straight. Rawdon and I. He cringes to me, and then I bully him; or else he bullies me, and then I cringe to him. But quarrel as we may, we always come together again. It’s no good,’ she said with a note of despair in her expressive voice like the melancholy of a violin, ‘we can’t get away from one another. We always come together again.’

“I was sad; I foresaw that those two would drift into marriage from pure physical need, though there might well be more hatred than love between them.

“In the meantime I tried, not always very successfully, to keep Ruth away from him; she liked being with me, I know, and I think she even welcomed a barrier between herself and her all-too compelling cousin, and so it came about that our Sunday afternoons were, as I have told you, usually spent together. There were times when she broke away from me, when the physical craving became, I suppose, too strong for her, and she would go back to Rawdon. But for the most part she would come after dinner on Sundays, silent and reserved, to see if I was disposed for a walk. She would come in her daily untidiness, with the colour blowing in her cheeks, as beautiful and as wild as a flower. I used to feel sorry for Westmacott and his hot blood.

“On these afternoons I tried my experiments on Ruth, and I sometimes wonder whether she ever caught me at the game, for she would give me a scared, distrustful glance, and turn her head away. She was curiously lazy for so hard a worker, and in sudden indolence she would refuse to move, but would lie on the ground idle and half asleep, and would do nothing but eat the sweets I gave her. I never saw a book in her hand. Once,” said Malory, throwing a bit of wood at the goats, “I thought I would convert her to Art. I brought out some treasured books, and showed her the pictures; she was neither bewildered, nor bored, nor impressed, nor puzzled; she simply thought the masterpieces unspeakably funny. She laughed.... I was absurdly offended at first, then I began to come round to her point of view, and now I am not at all sure that I don’t agree. She opened out for me a new attitude.

“After the failure of my pictures, I tried her with a more tangible object. I took her to Penshurst. In telling you of this I am making a very real sacrifice of my pride and self-respect, for, as sometimes happens, I have realised since, from my disinclination to dwell in my own mind upon the incident, that the little rapier of humiliation went deeper than I thought, down to that point in the heart where indifference ceases and essentials begin.”

As Malory said this, he looked at me with his quizzical, interrogative expression, as if to see how I was taking it. I noticed then that he had a crooked smile which gave to his face a quaint attraction. He was a clean-shaven man, with lean features and a dark skin; graying hair; I supposed him to be in the neighbourhood of forty.

“When I asked Ruth if she would come to Penshurst with me,” he continued, “she said she must change her dress. She was absent for about half an hour, while I waited in the garden and threw stones for the sheep-dog. When she joined me I saw that she had done her best to smarten herself up; she had frizzed her hair and put on a hat, and her blouse was decorated with some sort of lace—I can’t give you a closer description than that. I scarcely recognised her, and though I felt that I was expected to make some comment I knew at the same time that I was physically unable to do so. ‘How nice you look!’ were the words that my will hammered out in my brain, but the words that left my lips were, ‘Come along.’

“We started thus unpropitiously, and the strain between us was tautened at every step by the mood of excitement which possessed her. I had never known her like this before. Usually she was quiet, lazy about her speech, and not particularly apposite when she did make a remark, yet I had always found her a satisfactory companion. To-day she chattered volubly, and the painful conviction grew upon me that she was trying to be coy; she hinted that she had broken an appointment with Westmacott; I became more and more silent and miserable. I had anticipated with so much pleasure our going to Penshurst, and I knew now that the afternoon was to be a failure. When we reached the house, bad became worse; Ruth giggled in the rooms, and the housekeeper looked severely at her. She made terrible jokes about the pictures; giggled again; crammed her handkerchief against her mouth; pinched my arm. At last my endurance gave out, and I said, ‘We had better go home,’ and I thanked the housekeeper, and said we would find our own way out.

“Ruth was very crestfallen as we went silently across the park; she walked with hanging head beside me, and as I looked down on the top of her absurd hat I was almost sorry for her, but I was really annoyed, and childishly disappointed, so I said nothing, and stared gloomily in front of me. I thought that if I thus marked my disapproval of her sudden mood she would never repeat the experiment, and that next day she would return to her blue linen dress and her habitual reserve. I did not think she would make a scene, but rather that she would be glad to pass over the disaster in silence.

“I was surprised when she stopped abruptly.

“‘I suppose you’ll never take me out again?’ she said, as though the idea had been boiling wildly in her brain till it found a safety valve in her lips.

“‘My dear Ruth....’ I began.

“‘How cold you are!’ she cried violently, and she stamped her foot upon the ground. ‘Why don’t you get angry with me? shake me? abuse me? at any rate, say something. Only “my dear Ruth.” I suppose I’m not good enough for you to speak to. If that’s it, say so. I’ll go home a different way. What have I done? What’s wrong? What have I done?’

“I realised that she was in the grip of an emotion she could not control. Such emotions came over one but seldom in ordinary life, but when they come they are uncontrollable, for they spring from that point in the heart, which I was speaking of, where indifference ceases and essentials begin. Still, while realising this, I hardened myself against her.

“‘Nothing,’ I said, adding, ‘except failed to be yourself.’

“‘What do you want me to be?’ she asked, staring at me.

“‘My dear Ruth,’ I said, ‘I like you in blue linen.’

“I swear I only meant it symbolically; it was perhaps foolish of me to think she would understand. She went on staring at me for a moment, then a change came over her face, a wounded look, horrible to see, and I felt I had hurt a child, most grievously, but before I could rush into the breach I had made and build it up again with fair words, she had dropped her face into her hands and I saw that her shoulders were shaking. She uttered no word of reproach or self-justification, no plea; thereby increasing her pathos a hundredfold.

“I was distressed and embarrassed beyond measure; I hated myself, but I no longer hated her. I had begun to like her again in the brief period of her rage, and now in the period of her despair I liked her again completely. I implored her to stop crying, and I tried confusedly to explain my meaning.

“She would have none of my explanations, but turned on me cheeks flaming with a shame which forbade any allusion to her clothes. I could see that she was trembling from head to foot, and by the force of her authority over me I gauged the force of her emotion over herself. Genius and passion are alike compelling. Here was a Ruth I did not know, but it was a Ruth I had desired to see, and I triumphed secretly for having divined her under the Ruth of every day.

“Well,” said Malory, “I have made my confession now, for it partakes of the nature of confession. I never saw that piteous finery again, and I never saw the mood that matched it. She calmed down at length, and we made a compact of friendship, but if ever the name of Penshurst arose in conversation I saw the scarlet flags fluttering in her cheeks.

“Meanwhile the familiarity of the place grew on me, as I had foreseen, and there were many inmates of the farm, now old-established, whom I had known since their birth; plants and animals alike. We were haymaking, a common enough pursuit, but to me full of delight; I loved the ready fields, the unceasing whirr and rattle of the cutter, the browning grass as it lay where it had fallen, and the rough wooden rake in my hand. I loved the curve of the fields over the hill, and the ridges of hay stretching away like furrows. Above all I loved the great stack, which swallowed up the cart-loads one by one, and the green tarpaulins furled above it, which made it look like a galleon with sails and rigging.

“I told you I had dipped into many things; I worked once on a Greek trader which plied with figs and oranges from Smyrna to Corinth through the islands of the Ægean. It was a bulky, mediÆval-looking vessel, with vast red sails, very little changed, I should imagine, from the one in which Ulysses sailed on his immortal journey. I learnt a certain amount about the orange trade, but I learnt another thing from that Greek ship which I value more: I learnt about colour, hot, tawny colour, that ran the gamut from the bronze limbs of the crew, through the Venetian sails, to the fire of the fruit, and echoed again in the sunset behind Hymettus, and dropped in the cool aquamarine of the waves near the shore, and deepened into sapphire as I hung over the sides of the ship above the moving water. From this rich canvas I had come to the grays and greens and browns of England, the dove after the bird of Paradise, and do you know, I felt the relationship of the two, the relationship of labour between the Greek, the almost pirate, crew, and the English farmer with his classic and primitive tools, the brotherhood between the sweeping scythe and the dipping oar, between the unwieldy stack and the clumsy vessel.

“The scent of the hay is in my nostrils, and the stirring is in my arms to throw up my fork-load upon the cart. We worked sometimes till ten at night, a race with the weather; we worked by sunlight and moonlight, and I preferred the latter. You may think that I preferred it because it pleased me to see the round yellow moon come up from behind the trees, and light that wholesome scene with its unwholesome radiance, like a portrait of Hercules, naked, by Aubrey Beardsley? Well, you are wrong. I preferred it because I got less hot.

“Rawdon Westmacott used to come over to help us. A pair of extra hands was welcome, but I think old Pennistan would rather the hands had been tied on to any other body. It was quite clear that he neglected his own farm only to be near Ruth, and I had long since gathered that the Pennistans would never willingly consider him as a son-in-law. I sympathised with them. He was an unruly man, as wild as he was handsome, a byword among the young men of the countryside; prompt with his fist—that was perhaps the best thing that could be said of him—foul with his tongue, intolerable when in his cups. So quarrelsome was he that even when sober he would seek out cause for insult. I myself, who in my capacity of guest took every precaution to avoid any unpleasantness, had an ominous encounter with him. I had spent a day in London, and returned with various little gifts which I had thought would please the Pennistans; to Ruth I brought a pair of big, round, brass ear-rings and a coloured scarf, for I had a fancy to see her tricked out as a gipsy. It entertained me to see her, who as I have told you was habitually slow of mind, enthusiasm, and speech, respond with some latent instinct to the gaudy things. She ran to the glass in the kitchen and began to screw the rings on to her unpierced ears.

“‘You must learn to dance now, Ruth,’ I said.

“She looked round at me, and in the turn of her head and the flash of the rings I seemed to see Concha of the gipsy booth.

“‘Father doesn’t hold with dancing,’ she replied.

“‘He isn’t here to see,’ I said. ‘Won’t you try a step?’

“She blushed. It was a pretty sight to see her blush.

“‘I don’t know how,’ she said awkwardly, looking away from me into the glass as she wound the scarf round her neck.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘will you learn if I have you taught?’

“She burst into the shrill laugh of the common girl, and cried, ‘Get along with you, Mr. Malory! making fun of a poor girl like me.’

“Concha was gone, but I struggled to revive her, without conviction, and with a queer blankness in my heart. At least,” said Malory, correcting himself, “it wasn’t my heart, but my mind, my sense of rightness, that was disappointed.

“‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I’ll have you taught the dances of Spain.’

“‘Spain?’ she echoed, with a frown genuinely puzzled, so remote from her was all thought of the land of her wandering forefathers.

“I risked a bold remark.

“‘Your great-grandmother, I’ve no doubt, could give you a hint of the Spanish dances.’

“Then she remembered, but the recollection came to her, I could see, from afar off, with the unreality of a date in history, poignant enough at the time.

“At that moment a knock fell upon the door, and Rawdon Westmacott came in without waiting to be bidden. He saw Ruth standing there, and stopped. Then he caught sight of me by the wide fireplace. His eyes travelled swiftly between us, and I saw the rage and the prompt conclusion spring into them. In fact, I never saw a man so suddenly full of barely contained anger. He would have given a great deal, I am sure, to have insulted me openly.

“We stood for a moment in silence, the three of us, then Westmacott’s voice came out of space to break the moment’s eternity.

“‘That’s fine toggery, Ruth, you’ve got on,’ he said.

“She looked at him without answering, her breath beginning to come a little quicker. I watched them both; I was angry, but not too angry to be interested. I felt the man’s power; his brutality; and I remember thinking that something in her—was it primitive woman?—responded to something—was it primitive man?—in him. At the same time I knew that waves of hatred vibrated between them; that, if she was attracted, she was no less repelled. Did I touch then, in an unexpected moment of insight, the vital spot of that enigma? I believe that I was very near the truth. I knew that the situation was not by any means an important one, but it was nevertheless a battle, a clash of wills, and as such I thought it significant.

“I saw her hand travel upward, and slowly begin to unwind the scarf.

“‘It’s ill becoming you, my girl,’ he went on, with the threatening note rising in his voice. ‘I’d sooner see you simple, Ruth,’ and I thought of the lashing sea when the wind begins to swirl like a dragon’s tail along the beach.

“I tried to intervene.

“‘I brought....’ I began to say, but catching the glance which Ruth turned upon me I was silent.

“‘You’d best take them off,’ Westmacott said.

“Slowly she took the scarf, and laid it on the table, slowly she unfastened the rings and laid them beside the scarf. I could have wrung his neck, but for the sake of the girl I remained quiet; I knew that she would have to pay for my championship, and, besides, I was ignorant of what understanding existed between them. Underneath my anger, I was conscious of a vague irritation creeping over me, that she had taken his bullying so meekly and had not flown out at him, with her brass ear-rings clanking in her ears, as she had flown out at me on the day of Penshurst.

“Westmacott was clever enough to ignore the obvious fact that I had been the giver of the ornaments. He swept them off the table into his pocket, and, I presume, threw them into the horse-pond, and would have liked to throw me after; but that Ruth should not go without a present I ordered for her a pair of mice in a cage, a brown mouse and a Japanese waltzing mouse. She thought it extremely diverting to see the black and white mouse turning unceasingly after its tail, white the brown mouse watched it in perplexity mingled with disapproval from a corner of the cage.”

“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 onomatopoeia. 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.