“Thank you,” he replied. “Great compliment!”
“Oh, my brother!” she laughed.
“H'm! that's snatching back with the left hand what you gave with the right, and no mistake,” he said.
She laughed in amusement at him.
“But what was the matter with you?” he asked. “I know you were brooding something special. I can see the stamp of it on your face yet.”
“I think I will not tell you,” she said.
“All right, hug it,” he answered.
She flushed and bit her lip.
“No,” she said, “it was the girls.”
“What about 'em?” Paul asked.
“They have been plotting something for a week now, and to-day they seem particularly full of it. All alike; they insult me with their secrecy.”
“Do they?” he asked in concern.
“I should not mind,” she went on, in the metallic, angry tone, “if they did not thrust it into my face—the fact that they have a secret.”
“Just like women,” said he.
“It is hateful, their mean gloating,” she said intensely.
Paul was silent. He knew what the girls gloated over. He was sorry to be the cause of this new dissension.
“They can have all the secrets in the world,” she went on, brooding bitterly; “but they might refrain from glorying in them, and making me feel more out of it than ever. It is—it is almost unbearable.”
Paul thought for a few minutes. He was much perturbed.
“I will tell you what it's all about,” he said, pale and nervous. “It's my birthday, and they've bought me a fine lot of paints, all the girls. They're jealous of you”—he felt her stiffen coldly at the word 'jealous'—“merely because I sometimes bring you a book,” he added slowly. “But, you see, it's only a trifle. Don't bother about it, will you—because”—he laughed quickly—“well, what would they say if they saw us here now, in spite of their victory?”
She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their present intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was so quiet, she forgave him, although it cost her an effort.
Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall. He had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that his hands were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her large limbs, but white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. “She is wanting somebody to take her hands—for all she is so contemptuous of us,” he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two hands, so warm and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.
“Is that two o'clock striking?” Mrs. Dawes said in surprise.
Paul started, and everything sprang into form, regained its individuality, its forgetfulness, and its cheerfulness.
They hurried back to work.
When he was in the rush of preparing for the night's post, examining the work up from Fanny's room, which smelt of ironing, the evening postman came in.
“'Mr. Paul Morel,'” he said, smiling, handing Paul a package. “A lady's handwriting! Don't let the girls see it.”
The postman, himself a favourite, was pleased to make fun of the girls' affection for Paul.
It was a volume of verse with a brief note: “You will allow me to send you this, and so spare me my isolation. I also sympathise and wish you well.—C.D.” Paul flushed hot.
“Good Lord! Mrs. Dawes. She can't afford it. Good Lord, who ever'd have thought it!”
He was suddenly intensely moved. He was filled with the warmth of her. In the glow he could almost feel her as if she were present—her arms, her shoulders, her bosom, see them, feel them, almost contain them.
This move on the part of Clara brought them into closer intimacy. The other girls noticed that when Paul met Mrs. Dawes his eyes lifted and gave that peculiar bright greeting which they could interpret. Knowing he was unaware, Clara made no sign, save that occasionally she turned aside her face from him when he came upon her.
They walked out together very often at dinner-time; it was quite open, quite frank. Everybody seemed to feel that he was quite unaware of the state of his own feeling, and that nothing was wrong. He talked to her now with some of the old fervour with which he had talked to Miriam, but he cared less about the talk; he did not bother about his conclusions.
One day in October they went out to Lambley for tea. Suddenly they came to a halt on top of the hill. He climbed and sat on a gate, she sat on the stile. The afternoon was perfectly still, with a dim haze, and yellow sheaves glowing through. They were quiet.
“How old were you when you married?” he asked quietly.
“Twenty-two.”
Her voice was subdued, almost submissive. She would tell him now.
“It is eight years ago?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you leave him?”
“Three years ago.”
“Five years! Did you love him when you married him?”
She was silent for some time; then she said slowly:
“I thought I did—more or less. I didn't think much about it. And he wanted me. I was very prudish then.”
“And you sort of walked into it without thinking?”
“Yes. I seemed to have been asleep nearly all my life.”
“Somnambule? But—when did you wake up?”
“I don't know that I ever did, or ever have—since I was a child.”
“You went to sleep as you grew to be a woman? How queer! And he didn't wake you?”
“No; he never got there,” she replied, in a monotone.
The brown birds dashed over the hedges where the rose-hips stood naked and scarlet.
“Got where?” he asked.
“At me. He never really mattered to me.”
The afternoon was so gently warm and dim. Red roofs of the cottages burned among the blue haze. He loved the day. He could feel, but he could not understand, what Clara was saying.
“But why did you leave him? Was he horrid to you?”
She shuddered lightly.
“He—he sort of degraded me. He wanted to bully me because he hadn't got me. And then I felt as if I wanted to run, as if I was fastened and bound up. And he seemed dirty.”
“I see.”
He did not at all see.
“And was he always dirty?” he asked.
“A bit,” she replied slowly. “And then he seemed as if he couldn't get AT me, really. And then he got brutal—he WAS brutal!”
“And why did you leave him finally?”