I  
If the floods would but retreat! If the winter would but dissolve and allow spring to break over the land! Then the rich black loam of the fields would appear in the place of the water,—that flat and cruel, unprofitable water,—and the country under the blush of green would cease to be so mournful, rayless, and forbidding. The floods were so dead; dead brown, dead level; there was no life in them, except sometimes under the red sun, a fierce, angry sort of life, and sometimes when the wind beat them; but now gray rainy day succeeded gray rainy day, mild indeed, but not spring, not the spring of clear sunlit showers and rainbows! It would be a dark, fertile country that came to light, curiously un-English in its effect of unboundaried acreage, wide ditches marking off the fields in the place of hedges. Ditches and dykes would remain as the scar and testimony of the floods, the dykes that like some 126Roman aqueduct stretched away into the flat and misty distances.
Yearly Nan lived through the winter in the hope of such a spring, and almost yearly it failed her. She was drawn towards spring with an instinct of unsatisfied youth. It appeared to her like a vista cut in the darkness of the life she led between Silas and Gregory.
The population of her world was so restricted; in very early days she had been sharply taught that Gregory would neither welcome his wife’s friends at his fireside, nor allow her to go to theirs. She had never forgotten the written message he had left for her on the table in the first week of their marriage, having found her laughing in the kitchen with another girl: “No prying eyes here, missis.” The Denes, she learnt, were as sensitive as they were savage and solitary, and, so strong was the legend that they had created around themselves, that she had found herself quickly alienated from the rest of the village and definitely regarded as of the company inhabiting the lonely cottage. Silas, Gregory, Linnet Morgan, Donnithorne sometimes, Mr. Calthorpe. That was all. The two dominating figures were Silas and Gregory; she was more frightened 127of Silas than of Gregory, because of her secret knowledge, but Gregory was like a stranger to her; she was submissive to him but felt no nearness, no intimacy; he was more closely allied to Silas than to her. Of Linnet Morgan she thought with shy and oddly pleasurable evasion. Of Calthorpe, with confidence; she liked his well-brushed hair, precisely parted down one side, and the close pointed beard that gave him a certain robust dignity and rather the appearance of a sailor; thinking of Calthorpe was like leaning up against a solid and stable building. He looked at her with great kindliness now, when she talked to him; she had always wanted somebody to look at her like that. It awoke, too, in her a certain pride: she had trained this big man in the part she wanted him to play; she, so small, had taught him, so large, a trick, and whenever she brought him her confidences, and he responded with that look so full of kindliness, he was doing the trick she had trained him, against his will, to do. This gave her a proprietary sense in him. She found him very docile. He, on his part, loved her for her little domineering manner.
It was only when she returned to Silas and Gregory that she was made to realise her own 128futility. Against the weak pushing of her hands they remained immovable....
Then she fell sometimes into despair, and her courage crumpled. For days she would be silent, then with an effort she would bring out her zither and sing, until before their contempt her voice would trail away again miserably into silence.
She longed for the retreat of the floods and the end of the winter, because now the country and the year seemed to be conspiring with Silas and Gregory.
II
 
Once she tried to bring about a complete revolution in all their lives; only once. She was really half-crazy with despair when she made the attempt; nothing else could have given her the courage. As it was, she was intimidated by her own audacity, for by nature she accepted circumstances without questioning. Inaugurations terrified her; yet here was she, Nan, inaugurating.
She sat at the table, under the lamp, Silas and Gregory on either side of her, the remains of supper before them. She sat twisting her hands; swallowing hard.
129She began, “Shall we be here always?” then stopped, then plunged on again, “living always here, with the floods every winter, all the winter through? Why shouldn’t we go away, somewhere else, if we choose? Why shouldn’t we?” she cried suddenly, in a frightened voice, as nobody answered.
She looked at Silas and Gregory; Silas was smiling, and Gregory was smiling too, in a twisty, derisive way, as though he knew what she had been talking about. Yet he couldn’t know. Silas had a look of surprise and amusement; grateful surprise, as though she had provided him with an unexpected amusement in an hour of boredom.
“Go on!” he said to her.
At that she felt all her source of boldness, of inventiveness, dried up within her. What was the good of this struggle for escape when she was hemmed in, not only by the floods and the dykes, but by those two immovable men who owned her? But her terror urged against her hopelessness; and was the stronger.
“Can you like living here?” she appealed to Silas, trying to touch him upon his own inclinations.
“As well here as anywhere else,” he answered. “I work here.”
130She knew the bitterness that edged his voice whenever he mentioned his work.
“You tie up parcels in a packing-shed,” she said, “always the same,—work that a half-wit could do. Yes, a poor wanting creature could do your work. Why don’t you bestir yourself? Why don’t you come away?” She talked so, knowing that she strained to pull a weight that lay solid against her small strength.
If only Silas or Gregory would get up, she thought that with that insignificant display of mobility her hope would revive; but they sat on either side of her, cast in bronze. If they were doomed men, then they made no effort to escape their doom. Too proud, perhaps. They sat and waited. They seemed too indifferent to care.
“Nobody’s put you in prison into Abbot’s Etchery,” she murmured.
Yet they were so like prisoners, Silas in his darkness, Gregory in his silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles. When they stirred, it should have been to the accompaniment of a heavy clank. When Silas fought, when he cried aloud, it was the struggle of a chained man. But his struggles were so ineffective; Nan, who was 131not oppressed from within, but only from without, thought that he could help himself if he would. She had all the impatience of the naturally buoyant with the dogged tragedy of the fatalistic.
“Come away,” she urged. “What is it that keeps you here? There are warm, pretty places. Let’s make the best of things.”
“I might get away from Abbot’s Etchery, I shouldn’t be getting away from myself,” said Silas.
Nan cried out, “Can’t one get away? Who says so? Isn’t it in our own hands?”
“Is it?” replied Silas, letting drop the sorrowful query as though it were rather the echo of a perpetual self-communion revolving in his soul, than an idle response.
The old mournfulness, the old anguish, closed down upon them again. They were like haunted people, who would not help themselves. They seemed haunted by the past,—which contained indeed the death of Hannah, a death so rough and dingy,—by the present, and by the overcharged future. But their dread was not to be defined; it was of the nature of a mystic sentence, presaged from a long way off. Sometimes she thought that they were 132afraid of themselves; sometimes that they were too apathetic to be afraid. Only Silas made his dungeon clamorous sometimes with his wild revolt, that led to nothing, to no change, to no illumination.
III
 
Calthorpe found her sitting listless in a corner. She showed a hunted preference for corners, and for shelter behind furniture.
“Why, you’re pale,” he said. He came closer, “You’re wan.”
She did a rare thing: she put her hand into his and let him hold it, which he did as though it were a child’s. He was overcome by her smallness and frailty; she seemed to be almost transparent, and her features were tiny and delicate, but her eyes were large as she raised them. “Not ill?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “only tired and afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“No, not afraid really; only worn.”
“Yes, indeed; you’re like a little wraith. You’d blow away in a puff.”
He could not rouse her at all; she made no complaint, but sat very quiet and beaten, letting her hand lie in his. In reply to his questions, she kept 133on saying that she was tired. He knew that she meant spiritually, not physically, tired. She was very polite to him, saying “No, thank you, Mr. Calthorpe,” and he found her extremely pitiable, but his science failed him when he tried to think of a remedy. He could only sit alternately patting and pressing her hand. She gave him a grateful smile, at length.
“You do me good, just by being there.”
“Come, that’s better; won’t you tell me now what was the matter?”
“I only want to be happy,” she said suddenly, and her mouth quivered beyond her control, so she bit her under-lip and looked away.
“Oh, my dear! my dear!” said poor Calthorpe.
“I want to run by the sea, over the sands,” she cried, as though her heart had burst its compressing bonds; “I used to live by the sea once, in the south, and I think about it ... and the birds nesting. There were gulls upon all the rocks. There were white splashes down the rocks. It wasn’t home. But I’m homesick, I think.”
“You’re just a child,” said Calthorpe. “You want to play. Poor little soul!”
“Oh, how kind you are,” she said, and he felt her 134fingers flutter within his hand. “I get so tired of fighting, sometimes....”
“Won’t you tell me just exactly what you’re fighting against?” He was very patient and full of pity, but believing her to be slightly hysterical he had the reasonable man’s reliance on a calm statement of her difficulties to disperse much of their bogie-mist.
She only said, however, “I don’t know.”
(“Hysteria,” he thought. If she had said, “Forces of darkness,” he would have started mistrustfully, without allowing himself to be impressed. But she was too ignorant to use the phrase.)
“Come, then,” he said heartily, “it can’t be a very serious enemy if you can’t give it a name,—what?”
“It’s everything,” she said, “the floods,—I hate them,—the factory.... If the factory would stop, sometimes, but it never does: always that black smoke, and the men working in shifts to keep it going, and then the men always talking about wages, and sometimes the strikes. Even the abbey gets to be like the factory.”
“You’re fanciful,” said Calthorpe.
“Anybody would get fanciful, living with Silas and Gregory,” she replied mournfully.
135How she changed! he reflected. Sometimes she ordered him about, and sometimes she came to him like a child for consolation. Whatever her mood, he never ventured upon familiarity. He told himself sometimes with irritation that he had never been kept so at arm’s length by an otherwise friendly woman. He was a wholesome and masculine man, and he had a wholesome and masculine liking for the company of woman in his hours of relaxation, and in regard to Nan had certainly intended their friendship to run upon different lines, harmless enough, but perhaps a little more stimulating; he found, however, that quite quietly it was she who decided the direction, while he in aggrieved but unprotesting surprise fell meekly in with her wishes. He often told himself that he was wasting his time, and would go no more to the Denes’ cottage, but he always broke his resolution.
“Is Morgan no help to you? he’s something young about the house.”
“I don’t speak to him much, he’s always in his books. I wish you lived in the house, Mr. Calthorpe.”
“I wish I did, Nan.” But on the whole, he thought............