When he let her go he was pale and trembling and hardly dared to look into her eyes. But the effect of his violence upon Nelly was not to make her in the least angry with him. She saw his remorse. She bent forward and gave him a quick affectionate little kiss upon his cheek. Then she smiled sadly and tenderly. ‘You’ll only make yourself unhappy by that, Robert dear, and it doesn’t do any good. I do love you; but I could never like your doing that. So what’s the use?’
He stood staring at her, like an animal that has been punished for some unknown fault. The colour, coming slowly back into his face, covered it with funny red blotches.
‘I’m a fool,’ he muttered, ‘a damned fool! Let’s go on now.’ And they resumed their rapid stride, side by side.
They reached Toat Farm without any further personal conversation. The weight of the basket of provisions he carried wearied him and reduced his speed; so that when they arrived at the place the girl was quite cool and collected and able to be nice to Sally-Maria and Sally-Maria’s aunt.
They ate their lunch in the woman’s cottage and she made them tea. The dumb child seemed hostile to Nelly, for she refused to accept a morsel of food while they remained there and a queer inarticulate anger against them both was obviously smouldering in her sullen eyes. ‘She is jealous, poor little thing!’ whispered Nelly as they went out, and the whole complicated misery of human emotions swept over her in one drowning wave. Was there no such thing in the world as disinterested love?
But Canyot’s picture impressed her much more than she had anticipated. The artist had managed to communicate to those shadows in the water a strange passionate beauty full of wistful hints and intimations; the wind that stirred the rank-growing melancholy hemlocks seemed, as the girl gazed at them, to be the very wind of fate itself carrying the burden of old sorrows, of old baffled longings, out of some deep unknown into some still obscurer future.
She understood, as she looked, fascinated and silent, at what he had done, something of what he really did mean by his queer phrase about the ‘paint box’.
It was not till quite late in the afternoon that they prepared to leave Toat Farm. At the last minute Robert discovered to his dismay that Sally-Maria was missing. Her aunt called loudly for her and they all searched for her in the places where the child generally was accustomed to play. But in the end they had to leave without saying goodbye to her.
If her aunt’s final conjecture was correct, she had run off; as she usually did when she was unhappy, to the cottage over the hill where lived Old Miss Stone’. With this explanation Robert had to be contented.
The incident of Sally-Maria’s disappearance threw a gloom over them both as they walked back slowly across the Downs; and nothing that Nelly could find to say to her companion seemed able to lift it.
She herself was occupied with the very difficult question as to how the broken and ruffled stream of her love for her husband could be restored to its former level course.
She surprised herself by the bitterness she felt about it, by the anger she felt towards him.
Her present desire, which she herself did not dare to bring into the light of complete consciousness, was to excite his jealousy to the breaking point.
She wished to make him suffer exactly the same pain that she herself was suffering. She wished to have him not only begging for her forgiveness, but in a blind helpless manner — the clearness of all human issues tarnished and stained — doubtful as to her love.
Meanwhile as she walked by Canyot’s side there slowly settled down upon her the consciousness that things could never be quite the same. If she had actually caught him in the act of making love to this Paris woman, she could hardly have felt more deceived, more betrayed, more disillusioned. And yet in one part of her brain she had known that it was almost certain that he had entanglements. Woman-like, she had suppressed that knowledge, thought it down, thought it away, thought it into faint unreality.
Everything about her present feeling towards Richard puzzled and bewildered her. She was surprised at herself for not being more hurt than she was. She recalled how as a young girl she had often imagined herself in just this very position — the position of a betrayed wife — and how she had always, in imagination, felt a kind of passionate passivity in suffering, a sweet tenacious clinging devotion to the erring one that nothing could shake. In place of this she found herself sickened with the whole business of life, dulled and stupefied, as if with a species of nausea. What especially surprised her was that the strong, clean, pure flow of her own love for her husband seemed to have received some disastrous alloy, some influx of poisonous bitterness.
Was she, after all, she asked herself, something different from the devoted, passionate, tenacious Nelly, in whom she had believed?
Was she, as Mrs Shotover had so bluntly told her, no better than an intriguing flirt whose infatuation for a man turned to gall and wormwood at the first catastrophe?
Or had Richard, by his miserable business, really poisoned with a fatal poison the well-spring of her love?
It is strange, she thought, these terrible little accidents of betrayal — what they can destroy! Like some evil acid thrown upon sensitive flesh, they seem able to bite to the very bone! Nelly sighed, as she walked, from a heart most ‘sorely charged’. It seemed so ridiculously small, the whole matter of this clandestine correspondence, of this burnt letter, revealing a sequence — so she told herself — of letters that had not been burnt! A ridiculously small matter! and yet it seemed to have given to the very essence of her being a strange organic shock.
She felt as if since he had thrown the thing into the fire two or three long bitter years had passed over her head instead of a few hours.
When they reached the top of the hill above Hill Cottage they were surprised to see a small motorcar standing by the gate.
‘Who’s that?’ said Canyot brusquely. ‘If it’s a visitor I shall clear off. In fact,’ he added, ‘I think I shall be off anyway. I don’t feel in a mood for meeting people.’
He gave her his hand and looked into her eyes, hoping for some final glance of tenderness; but her gaze was fixed upon the unusual object at the gate. ‘Goodnight, Robert,’ she repeated, almost mechanically, as with a wave of his hand he strode away.
She was met at the door by her husband. Directly she saw him she knew that something was wrong. ‘Is it Father?’ she asked. Richard nodded without speaking and stood aside for her to go in.
Her father’s bedroom was upon the ground floor. Its door stood wide open.
Directly the girl stepped across the threshold she knew that the old naturalist was dying. By his side stood the doctor, a quiet self-contained young man with an expressionless face; at the foot of the bed sobbed Grace, her big tears streaming down her rosy cheeks and falling upon her apron.
‘What is it?’ whispered Nelly to the doctor. ‘Is it his heart?’
It was Richard who answered her question. He stepped up close to her side and put his arm round her waist. ‘It was a sun stroke it seems,’ he said. ‘He was brought back from West Horthing in Mrs Shotover’s carriage. He must have become unconscious on the way. Grace was alone. Mrs Shotover’s man carried him in and then went for the doctor. I have been several times to the top of the hill to look out for you. I found him like this when I came in and he has not changed since.’
The old man was lying on his back with his eyes closed. His breath was loud and unnatural, resembling the sound of water in an iron pipe. His mouth was wide open and every now and then a convulsive spasm crossed his face.