I  
She hoped that the subject would be forgotten. It was not forgotten. That was clear to her, although Silas made no direct allusion; but by his manner he established the existence of a secret between them, and because she dared not say to him, “There is no secret,” the secret remained, growing insidiously. She was nervous and uneasy in his presence. Silas was kinder than ever she had known him, kinder and gentler, also he appeared to be more contented, but she had a terrified suspicion that he was contented only because his mind was occupied, and it seemed horrible to her that she should be the centre of that occupation. She had suddenly become involved in an affair whose existence, she protested to herself, had its being solely as the outcome of Silas’s imagination. She tried to shake it off and to laugh it away, but he held her to it. She had the helpless sensation of being on the end of a rope that 159he was slowly hauling in, maintaining his purchase over every miserly inch as he gained it.
Hambley, soft-footed, insinuating, and urbane, added by his parasitic presence to the uneasiness of the house. The yellow faced, thin little man, with his black hair and his long front teeth like a rodent’s, never had an opinion of his own, but echoed Silas, or cackled with the laughter of approval. He alternately tried to provoke and to propitiate Nan and Morgan, gibed at them when they were civil to him, and fawned on them when they were curt. Nan shuddered when she wondered how many of Silas’s darker thoughts were shared out to his keeping.
Was there a conspiracy against her? To her mind, full of alarm, this seemed not impossible. Calthorpe even,—her prop, her kind, comfortable friend,—Calthorpe mentioned casually, “I may have to steal Gregory from you, my dear; I must have a man with me when I go to Birmingham to look over some new plants, and I fancy that your Gregory would relish the job, and be very useful to me.” She had clasped his arm. “Oh no, don’t take Gregory away, Mr. Calthorpe.” “What!” he said in surprise, “are you so fond of him?” She did not answer. She was not fond of Gregory; he was an owner and an institution, 160but the question of fondness played no part. Hitherto, she had not thought of disliking him; that was all. He and Silas (until she knew Silas was a murderer) had appeared very much the same in her mind, the only difference being that whereas Gregory had rights over her passive and uninquiring person Silas had none.
“Well, am I not to take him?” asked Calthorpe.
“Yes, take him,” she replied. Why had she hesitated? By all these doubts and hesitations she was playing Silas’s game; he had gained another inch of the rope. “When are you going?”
“It’s all quite uncertain; I may not be going at all. But if I go, it will be some time next month, and I shall ask for Gregory. I am discovering that he has the real knack for any kind of engine; he’s sulky about it and contemptuous, but I urge him, and he unfolds. He showed me some of his plans—but you’re in the clouds?”
II
 
Silas was with Lady Malleson, more than usually morose. She lay upon the sofa, while he prowled up and down the room.
“Dene, you scarcely speak to me to-day?”
161(“She cringes,” he thought with pride.)
“My sister-in-law’s in love,” he replied tersely.
“With whom has she fallen in love?” asked Lady Malleson, thinking how strange it was that she should be thus intimately conversant with a group of work-people down in the village.
“With Morgan,—the young zany.”
“Why, you always seemed so fond of him! your one human frailty,” she bantered. But he rounded on her with unwarrantable sharpness. “I think your ladyship is mistaken: I never remember saying I was fond of Morgan. They’re neither of them any more alive than a turtle-dove sunning itself in a wicker cage.”
“You strange creature—have you no natural affections?” she said, with indolent curiosity. “None for that young man, who really devotes himself to you? none for your little harmless sister-in-law?”
“I’m nothing to them—only a blind man to whom they’re kind out of their charity.”
“I don’t believe, Silas, that you are so bleak as you make out.”
“My own solitude, my lady, is my own choosing.”
“Why shouldn’t you accept what comfort those two young things could give you?”
162“It’s weak,” he burst out, “why not stand alone? why depend on another? Why shouldn’t the strength of one suffice? Why all this need to double it? Love’s wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more desperately you love. A prop.... Love’s the first tie for an independent man to rid himself of. It’s a weakness that grows too easily out of all proportion. I want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite. So well charted. So ... so recurrent.”
“Another theory, Silas? Be careful,” she lazily teased him; “what we most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear.”
“I shall break them,” he growled.
“What! your sister-in-law? that frail-looking little thing?”
“She, and ... her lover.”
“Silas, you scare me sometimes, you speak so savagely.”
“Scare you, my lady? even you?”
“Why ‘even me’?”
“You’ve explored me,” he said grudgingly; “you know me so well.”
“Do I? everything about you?”
“Not quite,” he said, in a tone of profound gloom.
163“Do you know yourself, I wonder?”
“To the depths,” he replied.
“Do you enjoy having such complete self-knowledge?”
“It’s lonely,” he said, his face drawn.
“Lonely, but you have me now to talk to.”
“Oh, your ladyship is very kind and gracious,” he said, with the deferential manner he sometimes abruptly assumed, and through which she always uncomfortably suspected the sarcasm; “I am very grateful to your ladyship. But your ladyship....” and thus far he preserved his deference, but abandoned it now to exclaim as though tormented, “You’re a whetstone to my disquiet; you taunt me, you keep all peace from me.”
“I never knew you wanted peace.”
He was tired and dispirited that day, and had been dwelling upon his blindness; he craved for peace, for some one to give him peace!—and she knew it. But she must whip and provoke him back to the strain of his old attitude. She did not know what urged her to say as she did, in her most sneering tone, “I never knew you wanted peace.”
“Nor I do,” he snarled; “I wouldn’t have it as a gift.”
164
III
 
So they wrangled always; indispensable she might be to him, but peace was certainly not what she brought him. And although they maintained the disguise afforded by her tone of slight condescension, and by his of conventional respect, underneath this disguise fomented the perpetual and manifold contest, of class against class, of the rough against the fastidious, of the man against the woman. She had very little real fear that its full strength would ever break over her,—little real fear, only enough to provide the spice she exacted. She trusted to her appraisement of him: too proud to risk a rebuff; too fiercely recalcitrant under the thongs of affection. Under their menace he snorted and reared, while she laughed indolently, and incited him to further indignations. Yet she held him, she held him! and though she knew full well that she fretted and exasperated him, she held him still; seeing his struggles, but toying with him, pretending to let him go, pulling him back, distracting and confusing his spirit that was always beating round in the search for escape; and all the while she heard from various quarters the pleasant flattery of her guilt extolled under the name of charity.
165
IV
 
“You’ll be happy soon: you’ll have the spring,” Silas said to Nan. He did not speak with the customary note of derision in his voice,—this was the newer Silas,—but she thought she detected it very painstakingly concealed.
She went away from him, and her going was after the manner of a flight. Had she followed her impulse, she would have gone running, with her head bent down between her protecting hands. It seemed that she could keep nothing from Silas; he laid his grasp without mercy upon her shyest secrets. She had tried to keep her joy in the coming spring a secret; although reserve was hard of accomplishment to her, she had achieved it, hiding her delight away in her heart, or so she believed, not knowing that her laughter had rung more clearly, or that she had been singing so constantly over her work in the two cottages. She was conscious of no impatience and no desires. She would not, by a wish, have made herself a month older. She was happy now, she told herself, because the country would presently become a refuge from the factory, instead of its dismal and consonant setting, wide and level as the sea itself, in its centre the sinister hump of the 166abbey and the factory. By walking a little way in the opposite direction, and turning her back upon the village, she would dismiss the factory and look across the liberated country, as it was impossible to do in these days when the floods accompanied the factory for miles around as a reflection of its spirit. She told herself that she wanted nothing more. She knew that she could be happy,—perhaps not indefinitely, but she did not look far ahead, the present was too buoyant and suspended,—happy for the moment if Silas would but leave her alone.
V
 
For a few days he kept up his new smooth-spoken tone; it was “little Nan” this, and “little Nan” that, and whenever he could get hold of her hand he stroked and patted it, and joined his fingers round her wrist, saying that it was fragile. “You’re very slight, Nan,” he said, feeling her arm and shoulder, and once he laid one hand against her chest and the other against her back, and said that there was no thickness in her body. She withdrew herself, shuddering, from his touch. “I’m blind, you know,” he whined, and then laughed, “Bless you, blind or not blind, I know any of you in the room before you’ve 167spoken; there’s very little Silas doesn’t know. I know all about you, Nan, and I’m a good friend to you, too.” “But Silas ...” she began desperately. “Hush!” he said, putting his fingers to her lips and looking mysterious, “no need to say anything; we understand one another.” Just then Linnet Morgan came in, throwing aside his cap, and Nan clasped her hands in terror lest Silas should continue. “Linnet?” said Silas instantly, “you’re back early to-day.”
Linnet had work which could as easily be done at home. He began at once getting books and papers out of his cupboard, and disposing them on the table. He and Nan observed one another stealthily and quickly; he saw that she wore her dark red shirt and black skirt, and that on his entrance she had become silent as though confused, but meanwhile he talked to Silas and made him laugh, and ran his fingers backwards through his hair. Nan noticed that his crisp hair was quite golden at the roots, and that a fine white line followed the beginning of its growth. He was very fair-skinned, and the back of his neck where it disappeared into his collar was covered with a fine golden down. He was always busy; when he was not working he was 168talking and laughing; Nan supposed that he had never in his life had time to think about himself.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” began Silas, resting his arms upon the table as though he were watching Nan and Linnet, “what were you two doing here the night Martin came? while I was at the Abbey?”
“The night the donkey was maimed?” asked Morgan.
“Why, fancy you remembering that!” said Silas negligently.
“I was clearing up, and we talked for a bit,” Nan put in.
“There was nothing to clear up; it was Sunday evening and you’d been singing and playing your zither. You talked mostly,—now, didn’t you?”
“Why not?” asked Morgan. He was very rarely sharp in speech, but he saw Nan’s discomfort.
“Why not, indeed? you and Nan are much of an age,” Silas replied. They considered him wonderingly; was he well-intentioned or infinitely malign? As they considered him he got up and went towards the stairs. “Back in a moment,” he said. They heard his tread upon the steps, then moving overhead. They looked at one another.
169“Why did you say that about the donkey?” Nan asked.
“You think, like me, that Silas did it,” he answered, as a statement. “Don’t look so frightened,” he went on, his eyes softening into his ready smile; “I assure you, you need never be frightened of Silas. There’s no muscle in his violence. Nothing will ever come of it—beyond maiming donkeys. Oh yes, it’s horrible, I know, because it’s so futile. No, don’t shake your head—your pretty head,” he added inaudibly. An impulse came over him to cry “You tiny thing! you slip of fragility!” but he repressed it.
She uttered the most treacherous remark she had ever breathed about Silas, something which fringed the frightful truth, “I know better,” then terrified of her indiscretion, added, “Oh no, I mean nothing.”
“You are afraid of him, aren’t you?” he said, coming round the table closer to her, his attitude very sympathetic and protective, and differing by a shade from Calthorpe’s attitude. “You must not be that. One can only be sorry for Silas, who has grown warped and crooked, and who talks because there is nothing else he can do. Whenever I think of Silas, I feel so lucky in mind and body.”
170She glanced at him gratefully. He had had the tact not to urge an explanation of her injudicious remark, and she knew that she could always depend upon this gentle tact; moreover, he had rescued her soul from the terror she so dreaded, and had by his words set Silas in a sane and pitiful light. It suited her temperament to have Silas drawn down from the uncomfortable heights where he seemed to dwell in perpetual strife with elements. It was no longer Silas who brooded over them, but they who endured and even loved Silas with widened charity. She was very grateful to Linnet for this. What he had done once he could do again; he could soothe her terrors. She had not yet thought of him in so human, companionable a way.
He continued the line that he had taken up, giving her time to command herself fully, making no demands upon her and pretending that nothing had been amiss. He swung himself on to the table, and talked easily,—
“I feel so lucky and thankful for having whole limbs and a sane mind. I don’t covet genius, but I do covet sanity; in fact, I’m not sure that the broadest genius isn’t the supreme sanity. Balance and justice! I think those two things are magnificent 171and grand,” (but he himself, she knew, would in practice always be merciful rather than just).
“I wish I had your book-learning,” she said; “you ought to stick to books.”
“Oh no,” he replied, “I like chemistry better, and those things. Science.... If I hadn’t to earn my living I shouldn’t be working on scents in this factory. No! I’d be in a country cottage with a laboratory.”
“You do your best as it is,” she said, touching his stack of scientific books.
“I had a bit of training at Edinburgh University,” he said, in wistful reminiscence, “but one ought to dedicate years....”
“Who was your father?” she asked after much deliberation whether she might venture the question. She knew Morgan only as an isolated person, who had arrived one day into the world of the factory, and had never mentioned home or relations. She knew only that he was Scotch; he had a very slight Scotch accent.
“He was an Inverness crofter,” he replied vaguely, “I used to keep the sheep on the hills in mists and snows, and properly I hated it. The days 172were short, and I thought it was always winter. I used to sit shivering on the brae-side, huddled in a plaid for shelter under a boulder, trying to read while I kept one eye on the sheep. The pages of my book used to get damp and limp, and the print got blurred when I tried to dry the page with the corner of my jacket. Then somebody found out that I wasn’t getting any education, and reported it, so I was sent back to school, and was happy again. And you—you haven’t lived here always, have you?”
“Since I was ten,” she replied, sighing, “we used to live in the south before that ... I liked that,” she said, “it was a pretty place, Midhurst, near Arundel—perhaps you know it?” She thought innocently, and rather in the fashion of a child, that every one must know what she knew.
“I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Oh, it’s under the Downs. Do you remember the day we walked with Silas to Thorpe’s Howland? that put me in mind of Midhurst; there were woods round about Midhurst.”
“You enjoyed yourself that day, didn’t you?”
He expected a little burst of rhapsody from her, but she only said quietly, “Yes, I did,” and he was aware of disappointment, and at the same time of 173the little stinging charm of her occasional unexpectedness.
“We both come from sheep country, then,” he said, but the images evoked in their minds were different: his of rough hills with their summits lost in mist, and lochs lying amongst the windings at their base; of dirty huddled flocks swept by wind and sleet; while hers were of cropped downland under a blue and white open sky, with the shadows of the clouds bowling across the downs and over the clumps of trees and little church-steeples in the valleys. He realised the disparity, saying “When I say that, we see different pictures,” and he smiled, but in his heart he longed for their childhood to have run side by side either in the Sussex or the Highland village. “Have you ever been back there?” he asked.
“Oh no; it’s a long way from Lincolnshire. I was always at the factory after I left school, and then when I was eighteen Mother died and I married.”
“Only eighteen?”
“A week after my birthday.”
“How young!” he said, with such rich and wondering compassion that she looked suddenly as it were into the depths of a cool inexhaustible well, always at hand for the quenching of her thirst. He 174was sitting on the table near her, while their conversation flowed on in its effortless interest, so that time and his books were forgotten. He seemed quite absorbed in what they were saying, looking down at her with intent consideration. They had attained an intimacy in which they could talk untroubled; she found it very precious.
“Now, Linnet!” said Silas’s bantering voice, “making love to my sister-in-law?”
VI
 
Silas became unwontedly withdrawn into himself, neither Nan nor Morgan knew what to make of him. At times he avoided them, at other times silently sought their company. Gregory, to whom Nan turned, after one glance at his brother, replied, “Let him alone,” and she followed the brief formula as being the best advice, finding that Silas only snarled at her whenever she spoke to him. She was relieved rather than dismayed; Silas surly was preferable to Silas honeyed.
He roamed alone, spending hours in the abbey after dusk; or ordered up Hambley, and under the little man’s guidance made his way to the secluded summer-house at Malleson Place. Lady Malleson 175was also at a loss to understand his altered manner; towards her he relaxed his taciturnity, and his speech was more than ever wild and varied, but although he ranged erratically she had the impression that his mind rarely departed from one central subject, and she had also the shrewd idea that that subject was his little sister-in-law, whom she had once seen, and whom she vaguely thought a pretty, delicate, rather appealing girl, unimportant until she had become the preoccupation of Silas’s thoughts.
So long as she had Silas with her, however, she cared very little what he talked about. The utmost that she deplored, sometimes, was his restlessness. It made her wonder whether she really held him. She wondered, indeed, sometimes whether her hold on him was too light to satisfy her vanity, or too secure—all too secure!—for the preservation of her safety and her convenience. She liked danger well enough, but there was a point where danger might become too dangerous.
“Wild man,—Ishmael,” she said to him.
But he went on regardless with what he had been saying.
“There’s but one use for the body,” he exclaimed, “health. Not mortification—that’s morbid. But 176health, lean and hard. Sinews like whips.” He bared a magnificent forearm. “The only instance where I practise what I preach,” he added bitterly, causing the muscle............