Calthorpe came often to see the Denes after the inquest; no one could have been kinder, more considerate, or more attentive than Calthorpe.

No doubt the Denes would have preferred to keep out Calthorpe, as they had kept out every one else, but he was the overseer, and they tolerated him.

He came on Saturday afternoons, on Sundays, and sometimes on ordinary week-days, during the evening.

He would spend a little time talking to Silas, and then he would knock at Nancy’s door and ask her for confidential information.

“Nobody can tell me so well how Silas is getting on as you can, Mrs. Dene,” he would say; “may I come in for a minute?” or else “would you stroll down the road?”

Nan never strolled down the road, but she always let him into her kitchen and gave him a chair beside the fire. Sometimes her husband was there, sometimes he was not, but in either case he could not affect the conversation. Nan told Calthorpe one day how it had taken her a little while to become accustomed to the disabilities of the brothers, and to remember that whereas Silas could hear and speak but could not see, Gregory could see but could neither hear nor speak.

“I used to stop and think; now of course I know without thinking. And really you wouldn’t believe how one can get on with Gregory: I talk to him with my fingers like I talk to you with my tongue, it’s no bother. He’s very quick, too, at understanding.”

Calthorpe had already noticed that she never lost an opportunity of praising her husband and advertising her own contentment. She was more reticent about her brother-in-law, and when once Calthorpe asked her why, she replied after a slight hesitation.

“Silas can speak for himself; he doesn’t need any one to speak for him.”

“He can certainly speak!” said Calthorpe. “Do you remember how he startled us all at the inquest? why, by the time he’d finished, half the folk were wondering whether they shouldn’t throw themselves into the floods, and the other half whether they shouldn’t go home and strangle their families!”

It was the first time he had directly mentioned the inquest to Nan, and he did so now in full recollection of the effect Silas’s speech had had upon her. He had hesitated long over the problem whether he should ever allude to it or no, but recognising the subject as the shadow always in the background of their talks, he had decided to attack it openly, his intent, as usual, kindly.

“It’s worried you a good deal, I know,” he added.

“Oh,” she began,—he knew that little “Oh,” by which she prefaced her remarks and which always betrayed her nervousness,—“Oh, I don’t think we ought to talk about it, do you?”

“You mean, you don’t want to talk about it?”

She got up in a restless way, and busied herself with a vase of wild flowers upon the dresser, turning herself so that her face was hidden from him.

“Mrs. Dene, you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Oh, don’t drive me, please,” she murmured, in a voice full of distress.

Calthorpe was very remorseful to feel that he had been the cause of this distress, and he came over to the dresser where she stood arranging the flowers.

“Very well; of course we will never speak of it again,” he said, trying to soothe her, but knowing that if his repentance took too affectionate a form she would immediately shy away from him. “What are you doing with those flowers? look, you have upset some of the water! here’s my handkerchief to mop it up with.”

As she took the handkerchief he saw that there were tears on her cheek, as clear as the drops of water she had spilt from the flowers; but with his large, rough tact he pretended not to notice.

“Where did you find so many flowers, this time of year? Primroses in February! Catkins, of course, and grasses, and a sprig of plum blossom....”

“And some wild violets,” she said, showing him. “Smell them, how sweet!”

“Well, I wish I had somebody like you to put flowers about my place,” he said in a rush of sentiment.

“Will you take these? Yes, please!” crushing them, all wet as they were, into his hands. “I got them in a copse over by Thorpe’s Howland last Sunday, I walked over there....”

“What, by yourself?”

“No, with Silas and Mr. Morgan; it was Gregory’s Sunday on at the factory. We started after dinner, Silas was in a good temper, and I was happy to get away from the floods for a bit. You know, there’s a belt of higher ground away there to the south, which never gets flooded. It was nice to see the green again, and to go through woods where the trees didn’t stand with their roots soaking and rotting in water. I hate the floods, they’re so cruel; cruel in a dull, flat sort of way.... Gregory likes them; they make him grin. Of course, Silas can’t see them, but if he could I’m certain he’d like them too; he’s always asking me to tell him just what they’re like. But that Sunday he’d forgotten about them. He was as cheerful as could be, repeating poetry all the time as we went along the lanes; he kept stopping and saying “Now listen to this!” and waving time with his stick as he recited, and Mr. Morgan kept capping what he said, and they laughed a lot, trying to outdo each other.” She smiled at the recollection, leaning with her back against the dresser; then Calthorpe saw the smile disappear from her lips as though at another darker remembrance, and the scared look came into her eyes.

“Well?” he prompted.

“Oh. Well, then we went on till we got to Thorpe’s Howland, and we made Silas sit under a beech-tree while we looked for primroses....”

“You and Linnet Morgan?”

“Yes, I and Mr. Morgan. Silas sat under the tree for a bit, pulling up the moss all round him; then he got up and leant against the tree-trunk, saying more poetry; Shakespeare, I think it was. Mr. Morgan beckoned to me to come and listen, so we crept up on tiptoe, and Silas went on like that for about half an hour; I don’t know how he manages to keep it all in his head. I don’t like it so much when he starts his poetry in the kitchen, but in the wood it seemed all right; it might have been part of the wood,” she said, lowering her voice and hanging her head with her pretty, sudden shyness, and scrutinising her finger nails.

“How do you mean: part of the wood?”

“Well,—there was a lot of patchy sunlight on the ground, coming through the trees, and the moss that Silas had torn up smelt bitter,—like earth,—and the primroses smelt soft and sweet. There was the sort of big sand-pit in the bank, where we had picked them. There were the trees, so gray and naked. There was Silas,—Mr. Morgan whispered to me that Silas looked like a tree himself, a tree that had been blasted by lightning, and when he said that, I saw he was right; even Silas’s arms, waving about, were like the branches.”

“Well, well!” said Calthorpe, scratching his chin.

“Mr. Morgan’s like a son to Silas already,” she went on; “he’s gay with him, and he’s as gentle as a woman. He’s never put out by Silas’s ways—never seems to notice them, in fact. And Silas likes him because he can talk to him by the hour about all the things he thinks about and reads about.”

“But Silas always talks to everybody.”

“Yes, he’s so greedy for an audience that he’ll put up with never getting a sensible answer, sooner than not talk at all. But Mr. Morgan’s got education; he’ll argue with Silas; he’s like a whetstone to a knife. He’ll get Silas into a proper excited rage, and then laugh, and Silas takes it in good part. It was a grand day when he came to live in the cottage.”

“Yes,—well, I must be going,” said Calthorpe, moving away, and he went after a rather sulky good-bye, very unlike his usual friendliness and promises to come again.

Nan stood still, with a finger to her lip, after he had gone, then she opened the door and ran quickly after him. He heard her steps, and her voice calling his name and, turning, he saw her, a bright flushed spot on each small cheek-bone, with strands of dark hair blowing across her face.

“Oh, Mr. Calthorpe, I haven’t offended you, have I?”

(“How tiny she is, and how concerned she looks!” he thought, and nearly laughed with tenderness.)

“Bless me, no, my dear!” he said, patting her arm as one might pat a child’s.

“I’m so glad; I was afraid ... you went away so suddenly.... You forgot the flowers; here, I’ve brought them.” She held them out, and continued to look anxiously up into his face. “Sure I didn’t say anything to offend you—sure?”

“Sure! you’re very sweet,” he said, taking the flowers.

“You’ve been so kind; I think you’re my best friend,” she said impulsively, and she put her hand on his cuff. “I must go back now—but you’re not cross, are you?”

“Not a bit; not in the very least.”

He walked away shaking his head rather ruefully.

“She won’t come for an ordinary stroll with me of an evening, yet she tears after me without a hat or a coat, all upset, for anybody to see! She’s got a good heart.... She’s never herself when those Denes are about. But when she’s herself she’s just as sweet as she can be. Poor little thing! Am I a fool to go there?” and thinking these thoughts he hurried on, carrying the flowers she had given him.

He continued, however, to go there, but he made his visits more rare, reflecting, with a shade of surprise at his own considerateness, that it would be doing her a bad turn to cause gossip in the village. He was, after all, the overseer, while she was only the wife of a factory-hand and a factory-hand herself, so that he could not visit the Denes as another man might, on a footing of equality. The death of Silas’s wife had given him an excuse at first for frequenting the double cottage, but that affair was now a month old, and was already beginning to be forgotten in the rude world of the factory-village, where accidents were more or less common. Silas himself never alluded to it. He seemed, as Nan had said, to live in comparative content with Linnet Morgan. Linnet Morgan was young, educated, and extremely clever; and so merry that Silas’s dark moods usually ended by being dispelled before his laughter. Linnet Morgan seemed, in fact, to have taken charge of Silas’s life.

So much, Calthorpe thought, for Linnet Morgan.

But Nan,—ah! Nan was winning and tantalising, demure sometimes and sometimes impetuous; Nan was shy but confiding; little and sweet and windblown; and Calthorpe tried to feel large and fatherly towards Nan. She evidently welcomed him, gave him his chair by the fire; then went about her occupations, stopping to chatter when she felt inclined, asking him his opinion with her pretty head held on one side and her hands on her hips, singing over her work,—adopting him very much, in fact, as an inmate of her household. This method might put him at his ease, but it also mortified him. She accepted his visits with a lack of self-consciousness, he sometimes thought, that would have been mortifying to any man. He supposed that Gregory was fond of her, but the difficulty of communicating with Gregory rendered too tedious the effort of discovering his thoughts. Calthorpe usually nodded pleasantly to Gregory, and left their acquaintance at that. He thought Gregory a sneering, sour kind of fellow, jealously wrapped up in his machinery; he would not let Calthorpe look at his designs, but covered them over with both hands outspread, when once the overseer bent with a friendly interest over his shoulder.

But Nan,—no, never had Calthorpe blundered across so delectable a being as Nan. He cursed himself for having hitherto overlooked the grace and delicacy which set her so apart from the other working women; he cursed himself anew each time he watched her as she hung muslin curtains across her windows, or arranged and re-arranged her wild flowers upon the dresser. He had to make his observations for himself, for she told him nothing; she did not tell him how she wilted daily as she passed through the factory on her way to her own work, which lay among the heaps of white powder and the myriads of little scent-bottles, and was congenial to her,—soft powder, coloured boxes, gilt labels, pretty cut-glass, and a constant rainbow of ribbons. She snipped them with her scissors, sitting on a high stool before the table, in company with rows of other girls, all in blue overalls; and the ends of ribbon fell in a scatter of confetti around her. She noticed everything that the other girls did not notice. They only lifted their heads to gape at the visitors who were being taken over the factory, but Nan, gentle, uncommenting, and inwardly blandished, dwelt with pleasure upon the bright lightness of the big room, upon the pale sunlight that fell on the bent heads of the girls,—some of them had fair, sleek hair that looked like spun silk in the sun,—upon the powdery cleanliness of the floor, and the scrubbed expanse of the tables between the armies of shining little bottles. She hated the rest of the factory, that smelt and smoked and clanked; but this one room approached her secret vision of diaphaneity and seemliness.

For who amongst men and women lives without the secret vision of some spot, either known or merely conjectural, whether of red moors or sheltered meadows, mirrored coasts or battlemented mountains? Hers was a pitifully simple dream. Sun and water, and always light: light everywhere, streaming and pouring in, because light to her meant happiness. The house must be small, the rooms low; size alarmed her. She would be too timid to dwell beneath vaulted roofs. In her mind she knew its geography intimately, and the disposal of its garden; it stood in the heart of undulating cornlands, not very far from the sea. She had never seen it. And with whom she shared it she did not know. Certainly not with Gregory. Gregory’s exclusion was not deliberate; it was unthinking, and, had it been put to her in words, might have perplexed and dismayed her; nevertheless, it was a fact that Gregory’s step never sounded upon the tiles of her dream-passage, nor did his belongings lie in the litter of joint-proprietorship about the rooms.

Instead of this she was given flooded, low-lying country, a dark and ancient abbey, and the clanging factory served by fire and iron. She shuddered at the cranes which discharged the coal from the slow canal-barges of the factory’s private canal. She compared the barges to beetles, and the cranes that poised above them, to the pincer-armed antennÆ of some gigantic spider, descending to devour. When they pivoted slowly with their dangling burdens, she shrank, thinking that the cable must break, either from accident or mischief, and drop the weight upon the men below. She thought the factory would relish that. She never went near the canal wharves or the railway line if she could possibly avoid it, but sometimes she had to take Silas to the “shops”—the packing sheds where he worked, and which were near the railway. He seemed often to ask her to take him there since Hannah had died, and on the way there he would talk about the accident. Nan was unable to answer. She led him conscientiously, holding her black shawl about her head with her free hand, and turning her profile away from him; but though she was careful of his steps she could never force an answer between her lips. No, not if she had known that he would guess his secret had been surprised; nothing could have loosened her response,—yet her terror of him was extreme. She had often to constrain herself from crying out. He walked boldly, really knowing the way without her guidance, and talking in a loud voice, swinging his arms, so that sometimes people stopped to stare at him. He rehearsed and repeated every detail of that day, making a grievance that he had not known of his wife’s death until three hours after its occurrence, and Nan shuddered, wondering how he could infuse so much vehemence into a lie. Had he perhaps persuaded himself of its truth? But she little knew the rotations moving in his brain, that dwelt upon the murder as a vindication of his own cunning and courage. That was a deed planned and executed by no bungler and no coward! He delighted fearfully in its elaboration. With every phrase he was risking a slip, as a man walking in a dangerous place risks his limbs with every step. True, he held Nan in contempt, but she did well enough for him to practice on; any suspicion that might raise its head in her mind could easily be laid again by his inventive brain. And after she had left him, he felt flattered and gratified by his own daring.

A coward! was he a coward? Surely a blind man had very little choice; deeds of danger were debarred from him, but Silas dwelt amorously upon such deeds—courage pre-eminent amongst the high attributes that fascinated, baffled, and angered him.

By a twist of his brain, through his blindness, courage meant light. Courage shone. It allured him, so that he turned constantly round the image. There was nothing moral about this allurement, it was as pagan as any cult of beauty. Courage moreover—physical courage—carried with it the thought of death, which to his egoism was so supremely and morbidly entrancing. That he should cease to be?... he could never adopt this idea. He went up to it, and fingered it, but its clammy touch revolted him, and he violently rejected it always. But he returned to it again and again, working back his way in a roundabout fashion, disguising the phantom under a rich cloak of phrases.

He was scarcely more wary in his dealings with Lady Malleson than with Nan, not that he underestimated her intelligence, but because she awoke all his boastfulness, pandered to it, stimulated him as nobody had in the whole of his highly experimental life. The comparative frequency of his interviews with her was kept strictly secret. It was now no longer Nan who led him to Malleson Place, as on the first occasion, but Hambley, whom Silas had terrorised into discretion. Nor did those meetings invariably take place in the house, but sometimes in a summer-house, away from the gossip of the servants, while Hambley was sent to skulk about the park, with orders not to return before an hour, or two hours; and even once, when Sir Robert was in London, Hambley was dismissed until midnight. He offered no objection; the employment was after his own heart, and Lady Malleson, unknown to Silas, made it well worth his while. He knew that he was safe enough over this. When the lady brought Silas to the garden gate, and gave him over to Hambley, Silas could not see what passed between her hand and Hambley’s. He could not see Hambley’s grin of thanks, or his lifted cap, or Lady Malleson’s nod of smiling complicity that enjoined silence. He could only stand by, waiting to be led away, during the little farce that was never neglected:

“Well, good-night, Dene; so glad you’re getting on well.”

“Good-night, my lady; thank you.”

“Good-night, Hambley. Take care of Dene going through the park.”

“Yes, my lady; good-night, my lady.”

Then they would turn and go, Hambley leading Silas with care, while Christine Malleson re-locked the garden gate and watched them, always reluctantly, out of sight.

That first occasion!

She had long resisted the impulse to send for him. How long? She did not know; every day had been a week, since the wish first consciously awoke in her. What had deterred her? she did not know that either; perhaps a superstitious shrinking, an instinct that the amusement might turn to a wild beast of danger as soon as she exchanged the tractable wraith of her own evoking for a human creature of independent intentions, of will and muscle. So she had prolonged the period of evasion, knowing perfectly well that at the end of the road she was descending with such restrained, deliberate footsteps, stood the figure of Silas, with folded arms, waiting for her. Sometimes she had wondered whether the whole thing were not the creation of her fancy. The matter had grown in her mind, since she had first heard from her husband the story of the inquest, until the blind man now accompanied every moment of her day; and so strong was this fateful companionship, that she believed Silas, down in the village, must be living in equivalent consciousness of her nearness and the rapid convergence of their lives. Still she attempted to persuade herself that her own idle mind was alone responsible; sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a shrug, she had tried to dismiss the too persistent figure.

She had not believed her own lips when she heard them giving the order to fetch Silas Dene.

When they came to tell her that he had arrived she had glanced at herself in the mirror, then remembering that he was blind, she thought, “Absurd!”

“Who is with him?” she asked the servant.

“A young woman, my lady.”

“Very well; give her some tea in the housekeeper’s room. Bring Dene up here.”

She lay on her sofa, waiting for him to be brought up. She hoped his blindness was not disfiguring, and suddenly the matter lost its almost mystical value, and she saw it in a prosaic light: why had she been so foolish as to obey her whim and send for this man? she knew that she was very unskilled at talking to what she called “common people,” even when she came across them accidentally, such as gardeners; they were always taciturn and hostile, and she thought vaguely that they would be more so within four walls even than in the open air. The prospect of being closeted in her sitting-room alone with a factory-hand,—he was nothing else,—appalled her. Perhaps he would spit. Perhaps he would smell.... In any case, what should she find to say to him?

He was there, standing by the door where the servant had left him, with the special stillness of the blind in a strange place. Contrary to her expectation, he did not wear a beard. She saw at once that he had an extraordinary proud, fine-featured face, and that his blindness was not in the least disfiguring. Indeed, his eyes were so dark and so full of fire that it was hard to believe them sightless. He had nothing of the smartened-up appearance that she was accustomed to associate with the poor when visiting the rich. He had so clearly taken no trouble either to brush his hair or change his coat, that she remembered with a twinge of annoyance her own glance into the mirror when his arrival was announced. Her embarrassment diminished as she realised that he was himself neither intimidated nor impressed.

“Oh, Dene,” she said, “I am glad to see you. Sir Robert has been telling me a little about your circumstances, and I wondered whether I could help you in any way? So I asked you to come up here to speak to me.” She was satisfied with her opening, but felt the last phrase to be weak, a falling away; his quietness, and the knowledge that he could not see her, disconcerted her.

“In what way did you mean exactly, my lady?” he asked.

How could she answer that question? Mention of money was impossible; she knew that already, although she had only heard him pronounce nine words. She was driven up against the truth that she had wanted to see him for no other purpose than her own distraction, that any other reason would be a mere pretext, and she had a swift impulse to tell him this, confident that he would not misunderstand. So much already did she feel him to be not only her social, but also her intellectual equal. (Social was a wrong word, an absurd word; it could never be used, with all the artifice and fallacy that it implied, in connection with Silas Dene. Her discoveries went rapidly. But she must give some sort of answer.)

“I meant nothing exactly. I thought that if there was anything I could do, you would tell me.”

“This is the first time, my lady, that I remember your sending for any one from the factory up to Malleson Place.”

She was astonished at that; his tone amounted to an accusation. He was so grave, and she used in her mind the word “chained,” as most nearly expressing his obvious reserve of force.

“The truth is,” she said, ceasing to lie at full length upon the sofa, and sitting upright, “that I was very much interested in what Sir Robert told me, and thought I would like to see you for myself.”

“As your ladyship has seen me now,” he suggested, “and there is nothing I want, I can go?”

As soon as he wanted to go, she wanted him to stay. She got up and came to help him, saying, “But I should like to talk to you for a little, Dene; give me your hand and I will take you to a chair.”

He shook his head, and said that he preferred to stand. She had to go back to her sofa thwarted, though in so small a thing, while he remained by the door. He made her sitting-room appear tawdry, with its little gilt chairs and lacy cushions and pink carpet, so much did he rob people and objects of all but their true significance. She was almost ashamed of her surroundings, and was thankful that he could not see them, but she thought that it would take more than mere blindness to stay his more perilous vision down through the embellishments into anybody’s soul. She was conscious of saying to herself, “This won’t do,” and of taking herself sharply in hand. “This is to be my game,” she insisted, “not his.”

She had failed entirely to make him sit down, for he continued to refuse her invitation with the same haughty gravity, and responded not at all to the one or two phrases with which she tried him.

“I have heard reports of your fame as a public speaker, Dene,” she said with a propitiatory smile, forgetting for the moment that her smiles were wasted on him.

“A lot of the chaps speak, my lady.”

“But without your advantages. Sir Robert tells me you are a very highly-educated man.”

“No such luck, my lady.”

“Oh, come, Dene? Sir Robert says you are a great reader.”

“Somebody must ha’ been kiddin’ Sir Robert, my lady.”

She delighted in him. He was perfectly grave, and affected a Lincolnshire accent, which he certainly had not possessed when he first came into the room; a subtle insolence, but one which she did not resent, for it demonstrated him as unwilling to prance out his tricks, cheaply, at the bidding of a sophisticated curiosity, and she was a woman who knew how to esteem superficial, although perhaps not fundamental dignity. (Malleson had fundamental dignity, which, poor man, had not served him to very much purpose with his wife.) Also, she was emphatically a woman who maintained that the first duty of sex in the game was to be a danger to the opposite sex. Dene—certainly Dene fulfilled both these conditions! Acquaintance such as hers with him was like a sojourn at the foot of a volcano which might at any moment erupt. She relished the peril of the game. How she stirred him to extravagance after extravagance! how she poked and probed and decoyed his mind! encouraging, insinuating, blowing upon the ready spark; “baiting Silas Dene,” she called it, as a baron might have said, “baiting the bear”; all the better sport because she knew it to be so quick with danger. She sent for him as often as she dared, and when he was absent she thought about him, but always as an experiment, an intellectual exercise. She was too cold-blooded a schemer to allow herself to think of him now as anything else....