In the lower pastures the lush grasses were already laid level with the ground; and the murmur of the mowing machine, like a great invisible bumble bee laden with summer spoils, made a constant background to the crooning of the doves in the massive-foliaged trees.
On the uplands the green rye was already up to the height of Nelly’s waist as she went afield to gather the first red poppies, while the green barley was up to her knees and the wheat well above her ankles.
The blackbird’s reedy cry was heard seldom now; its place in the feathered orchestra of the lanes and fields was taken by the thicker-throated ‘muggy’ and the hot sun-burnt ecstasies of finches and buntings.
There was a perceptible change in the mood of Robert Canyot as the time drew near for his departure to America.
He saw less of Nelly and hardly anything of Richard.
He went out, morning after morning, for the whole day taking his lunch with him and not returning till late in the evening.
It was always to Toat Farm that he went, for he kept his precious easel-picture, now near completion, of that sluggish pond and those sombre ancient walls in the cottage of Sally-Maria’s aunt. He had become a close friend of this woman, a person almost as silent as her dumb niece; and Charley Budge and Mr Priddle had grown so accustomed to his presence that they gave him their most familiar nods and ‘how-be-gettin’-on-then’ as if he were an established institution like old Miss Stone or the grocer’s cart from Selshurst. When it was a Sunday that he was there, there used sometimes to be quite a group of farm hands round his picture, Charley having brought Tom Rattle and Jimmy Roebuck to see ‘how ’twaren’t like a common school-marm job — more like what ‘un sees in shop windies and them show places’.
And on these occasions the men in their tightly fitting, uncomfortable cloth suits, with a flower stuck in both buttonhole and cap, would poke at the picture tentatively with their sticks as though it had been Farmer Patchem’s dangerous sow.
Canyot had put the very ‘body and pressure’ of his soul into this picture and the rustic wonder it excited gave him more pleasure than any virtuoso’s praise. He held, like Molière, that the first test of good art was that it should arrest the attention of the simplest. He had concentrated all his powers upon the reflection in the water of that rank herbage and those mossy walls, indicating as well as he could the shadowed presence there of a spirit of the spot, carrying the mind down a long dim vista of obscure memories, gathering itself, out of the colours and shapes of the moment, into a kind of eternal vision — a platonic archetype, that was more than a crumbling wall and a bank of hemlocks.
It was on Canyot’s last Sunday in England that he presented himself soon after breakfast at Hill Cottage and bluntly asked Nelly to accompany him that day to his favourite haunt. He wanted to put the very final touches to his picture and he wanted also, so he told her, to make her acquainted with Sally-Maria, so that he should feel that the child was not left quite friendless at his departure.
His abrupt request fell like a sharply flung pebble into the smooth waters of the little ménage.
Richard had been enlarging upon the fact that they had not yet revisited their Happy Valley and he had secured a promise from Nelly that they should walk over there that afternoon.
He looked at her therefore very emphatically, when in their small garden, among the phloxes and sweet-williams, Canyot sprung his intrusive request. Nelly looked silently and nervously from one to another. Her mind recalled Mrs Shotover’s upbraidings. Was she really, as the old woman had said, behaving as no decent girl ought to behave in ‘hanging on to two men’?
‘I’m afraid I can’t, Robert,’ she said; ‘you see we’ve arranged to go out this afternoon and take our tea out so as to give Grace a free day. I shouldn’t like to disappoint Grace, you see. And if we left Richard alone she’d never let him get tea for himself. She looks after him better than I do. No, Robert, I’m afraid it’s impossible.’ The little invention about Grace and her ‘day out’ had brought the colour to her cheeks; and the young painter did not hesitate to fix his eyes sternly and passionately upon her.
She looked tantalizingly soft and sweet, hovering there in her embarrassed hesitation.
She looked the very incarnation of English girlhood, some idyllic blending of earthiness and innocence such as might well make a jilted lover ‘grow pale and spectre-thin’ with unsatisfied longing. Canyot was neither thin nor pale at that moment, however. His muscular form was very erect and straight. His tanned, corrugated face scowling gloomily at her showed no inclination to be the only sufferer that day. His empty sleeve too had its own voice in the matter. He was one of those who had left ‘something’ behind in France; as he stood before her, subjecting her to the concentrated reproach of his gaze, there was that about him that made it very difficult for Nelly to hold to her decision. She felt a sudden immense pity for him and her heart nearly yielded. The freemasonry of youth was between them, adding a curious poignancy to her maternal instinct, and the very tenderness and softness of her mood just then, though due to her abandonment to Richard, made it all the more difficult for her to be hard and austere in dealing with her former lover.
‘My wife will be delighted to see your picture some other day, before you leave us,’ remarked Richard, conscious for the first time since his marriage that he and Nelly were at cross-purposes.
Nelly had looked up with a quick flush when he began to speak but her eyes dropped and she bent down over the flowers when she realized the import of his words. Why couldn’t he have been generous just then? She would have rewarded him for it. She would have loved him with an added love. Why couldn’t men understand these things? Why must they always be so legal and exacting, when what was wanted was the impulse of self-effacement?
She kept her head bent down for a perceptible moment of embarrassing suspense, inhaling the heavy scent of the phloxes until it became a thing that was no longer a perfume at all, but a thought — a wild reckless thought in her brain.
The beauty of the yellow day-lilies against the curves of her bending figure made Canyot sigh bitterly and worked like a sort of angry fever in his blood.
‘Well,’ he said, almost roughly, ‘I’ve got to go back anyway to Wind Shuttle to get my things. I’ve got to pass by here again. It’s on my way. So if you change your mind look out for me. Do you understand? I’ll be back in half an hour but I won’t worry you if you don’t want to come. I’ve only a week more, you know. Then I shan’t trouble you any more.’
He took no notice at all of Richard’s movement to open the gate for him but strode surlily off down the slope of the hill.
At that moment the little gate swung open again and the ex-priest entered.
‘What’s that, Father?’ cried the girl, noticing a letter in the old man’s hand.
‘It’s for your husband, my sweet,’ remarked the naturalist. ‘I met the boy bringing it up. It came by some extra post. It’s a foreign one.’
Nelly snatched the letter from him. ‘Oh! it’s from Paris. I do love the French stamps. They’re so much more exciting than ours. Here you are!’ She handed it over to her husband who, seeing the hand it was written by, placed it unopened in his pocket.
Nelly put on her spoilt-child air at once, the air so natural to youthful twenty-two married to middle-aged forty-five.
‘Don’t hide it away!’ she cried. ‘Nelly wants to see it. Nelly likes foreign letters!’
Richard turned just a little bit pale. This was a most unlucky trick of the imps of chance! ‘It really wouldn’t interest you, sweetheart,’ he said; ‘it’s not an exciting letter. A friend of mine — not anything thrilling.’