"You may know about cows and horses," said Mrs. Bolitho; "you're wrong about humans." The way that she put it was that Martin cared for Maggie but "couldn't get it out." "He doesn't want her to know it," she said.
"Why shouldn't he?" asked James.
"Now you're asking," said Mrs. Bolitho.
"Nice kind of courtin' that be," said James; "good thing you was a bit different, missus. Lovin' a lass and not speaking--shouldn't like!"
Mrs. Bolitho's heart grew very tender towards Maggie. Married or not, the child was in a "fiery passion of love." Nor was it a selfish passion, neither--wanted very little for herself, but only for him to get well. There was true romance here. Maggie, however, gave away no secrets. She had many talks with Mr. Bolitho: about the village, about the new parson, about Mrs. Bolitho's son, Jacob, now in London engineering, and the apple of her eye,--about many things but never about herself, the past history nor her feeling for Martin.
The girl never "let on" that she was suffering, and yet "suffering she must be." You could see that she was just holding herself "tight" like a wire. The strange intensity of her determination was beautiful but also dangerous. "If anything was to happen--" said Mrs. Bolitho. She saw Martin, too, many times, looking at Maggie in the strangest way, as though he were travelling towards some decision. He certainly was a good young man in his behaviour, doing now exactly what he was told, never angry, never complaining, and that, Mrs. Bolitho thought, was strange, because you could see in his eye that he had a will and a temper of his own, did he like to exercise them. After all, he himself was the merest boy, scarcely older than Jacob. She could, herself, see that he must have been a fine enough lad when he had his health--the breadth of his shoulders, the thick sturdiness of his shape, the strength of his thighs and arms. Her husband had seen the boy stripped, and had told her that he must have been a "lovely man." Drink and evil women--ay, they'd brought him down as they'd brought many another--and she thought of her Jacob in London with a catch at her heart. She stopped in her cooking and prayed there and then, upon her kitchen floor, that he might be kept safe from all harm.
Nearly every one in the village, of course, remembered Maggie, and they could not see that she was "any changed." "Cut 'er 'air short-- London fashion" they supposed. They had liked her as a child and they liked her now. She was more cheerful and friendly, they thought, then she used to be.
Nevertheless all the village awaited, with deep interest, for what they felt would be a very moving climax. The young man was "fey." God had set His mark upon him, and nothing that any human being could do would save him. In old days they would have tried to come near him and touch him to snatch some virtue from the contact. They did not do that, but they felt when they had spoken to him that they had received some merit or advantage. The new parson came to call upon Martin and Maggie, but he got very little from his visit.
"Poor fellow," he said to his wife on his return. "His days are numbered, I fear."
To every one it was as though Martin and Maggie were enclosed in some world of their own. No one could come near them, no one could tell of what they were really thinking, of their hopes or fears, past or future.
"Only," as Mrs. Bolitho said to her husband, "one thing's certain, she do love 'im with all her heart and soul--poor lamb."
When Martin and Maggie had been at the farm about a fort-night, there came to St. Dreot's a travelling circus. This was a very small affair, but it came every year, and provided considerable excitement for the village population. There were also gipsies who came on the moor, and telling the fortunes of any who had a spare sixpence with which to cross their palms. The foreign and exotic colour that the circus and the gipsies brought into the village was exactly suited to the St. Dreot blood. Many centuries ago strange galleys had forced their way into bays and creeks of the southern coast, and soon dark strangers had penetrated across the moors and fields and had mingled with the natives of the plain. Scarcely an inhabitant of St. Dreot but had some dark colour in his blood, a gift from those Phoenician adventurers; scarcely an inhabitant but was conscious from time to time of other strains, more tumultuous passions, than the Saxon race could show.
This coming of the circus had in it, whether they knew it or no, something of the welcoming of their own people back to them again. They liked to see the elephant and the camel tread solemnly the uneven stones of the village street, they liked to hear the roar of the wild beasts at night when they were safe and warm in their own comfortable beds, they liked to have solemn consultations with the gipsy girls as to their mysterious destinies. The animals, indeed, were not many nor, poor things, were they, after many years' chains and discipline, very fierce--nevertheless they roared because they knew it was their duty so to do, and when the lion's turn came a notice was hung up outside his cage saying: "This is the Lion that last year, at Clinton, bit Miss Harper." There were also performing dogs, a bear, and two seals.
The circus was quite close to the farm.
"I do hope," said Mrs. Bolitho to Martin, "that the roaring of the animals won't disturb you."
It did not disturb him. He seemed to like it, and went out and stood there watching all the labours of the gipsies and the tent men, and even went into "The Green Boar" and drank a glass of beer with Mr. Marquis, the proprietor of the circus.
On the third day after their arrival there was a proper Glebeshire mist. It was a day, also, of freezing, biting cold, such a day as sometimes comes in of a Glebeshire May--cold that seems, in its damp penetration, more piercing than any frost.
The mist came rolling up over the moor in wreaths and spirals of shadowy grey, sometimes shot with a queer dull light as though the sun was fighting behind it to beat a way through, sometimes so dense and thick that standing at the door of the farm you could not see your hand in front of your face. It was cold with the chill of the sea foam, mysterious in its ever-changing intricacies of shape and form, lifting for a sudden instant and showing green grass and the pale spring flowers in the border by the windows, then charging down again with fold on fold of vapour thicker and thicker, swaying and throbbing with a purpose and meaning of its own. Early in the afternoon Mrs. Bolitho took a peep at her lodgers. She did not intend to spy--she was an honest woman--but she shared most vividly the curiosity of all the village about "these two queer ignorant children," as she called them. Standing in the bow-window of her own little parlour she could see the bow-window and part of the room on the opposite side of the house-door. Maggie and Martin stood there looking out into the mist. The woman could see Maggie's face, dim though the light was, and a certain haunting desire in it tugged at Mrs. Bolitho's tender heart. "Poor worm," she thought to herself, "she's longing for him to say something to her and he won't." They were talking. Then there was a pause and Martin turned away. Maggie's eyes passionately besought him. What did she want him to do--to say? Mrs. Bolitho could see that the girl's hands were clenched, as though she had reached, at last, the very limits of her endurance. He did not see. His back was half turned to her. He did not speak, but stood there drumming with his hands on the glass.
"Oh, I could shake him," thought Mrs. Bolitho's impatience. For a time Maggie waited, never stirring, her eyes fixed, her body taut.
Then she seemed suddenly to break, as though the moment of endurance was past. She turned sharply round, looking directly out of her window into Mrs. Bolitho's room--but she didn't see Mrs. Bolitho.
That good woman saw her smile, a strange little smile of defiance, pathos, loneliness, cheeriness defeated. She vanished from her window although he stood there. A moment later, in a coat and hat, she came out of the front door, stood for a moment on the outskirts of the mist looking about her, then vanished on to the moor.
"She oughtn't to be out in this," thought the farmer's wife. "It's dangerous."
She waited a little, then came and knocked on the door of the other sitting-room. She met Martin in the doorway.
"Oh, Mrs. Bolitho," he said, "I thought I'd go to the circus for half an hour."
"Very well, sir," she said.
He too disappeared. She sat in her kitchen all the afternoon busily mending the undergarments of her beloved James. But her thought were not with her husband. She could not get the picture of those two young things standing at the window facing the mist-drunk moor out of her head. The sense that had come to the farm with Martin's entry into it of something eerie and foreboding increased now with every tick of the heavy kitchen clock. She seemed to listen now for sounds and portents. The death-tick on the wall--was that foolish? Some men said so, but she knew better. Had she not heard it on the very night of her grandfather's death? She sat there and recounted to herself every ghost-story that, in the course of a long life, had come her way. The headless horseman, the coach with the dead travellers, the three pirates and their swaying gibbets, the ghost of St. Dreot's churchyard, the Wailing Woman of Clinton, and many, many others, all passed before her, making pale her cheek and sending her heart in violent beats up and down the scale.
The kitchen grew darker and darker. She let the underclothes lie upon her lap. Soon she must light the lamp, but meanwhile, before the oven she let her fancies overwhelm her, luxuriating in her terror.
Suddenly the kitchen-door was flung open. She started up with a cry. Martin stood there and in a voice, so new to her that she seemed never to have heard it before, he shouted, "Where's Maggie?"
She stood up in great agitation. He came towards her and she saw that his face was violent with agitation, with a kind of rage.
"Where's Maggie?" he repeated.
She saw that he was shaking all over and it was as though he did not know who she was.
"Maggie?" she repeated.
"My wife! My wife!" he cried, and he shouted it again as though he were proclaiming some fact to the whole world.
"She went out," said Mrs. Bolitho, "about three hours back I should think."
"Went out!" he stormed at her. "And in this?"
Then, before she could say another word, he was gone. It was in very truth like an apparition.
She sat there for some time staring in front of her, still shaken by the violence of his interruption. She went then to the kitchen-door and listened--not a sound in the house. She went farther, out through the passage to the hall-door. She opened it and looked out. A sea of driving mist, billowing and driving as though by some internal breeze, met her.
"Poor things," she said to herself. "They shouldn't be out in this." She shut the door and went back into the house. She called, "Jim! Jim! Where are you?" At last he came, stumping up from some mysterious labour in the lower part of the house.
"What is't?" he said, startled by her white face and troubled eyes.
"The two of them," she said, "have gone out on to the moor in this mist. It isn't safe."
"Whatever for?" he asked.
"How should I know? She went out first and now he's after her. 'Tisn't safe, Jim. You'd best follow them."
He didn't argue with her, being an obedient husband disciplined by many years of matrimony.
"Well, I'll go," he said slowly. "Best take William, though."
He went off in search of his man.
But Bolitho need not trouble. Half an hour later Maggie returned, stood in the sitting-room looking about her, took off her jacket and hat, then, pursuing her own thoughts, slowly put them on. She was then about to leave the room when the door burst open and Martin tumbled in. He stood at the doorway staring at her, his mouth open. "Why!" he stammered. "I thought . . . I thought . . . you were out-- " She looked at him crossly.
"You shouldn't have gone out--an afternoon like this. If I'd been here--"
"Well, you weren't. You shouldn't have gone out either for the matter of that. And I was at the circus--a damned poor one too. Your things are soaking," he added, suddenly looking up at her. "You talk about me. You'd better go and change."
"I'm going out again," she said.
"Out again?"
"Yes . . . There's a train at Clinton at seven. I'm catching that."
"A train?" He stared at her, completely bewildered.
"Yes. That's what I went out to get my head clear about. Martin, you've beaten me. After all these years you have. After all my fine speeches, too."
He began to drum on the window. He tried to speak casually.
"I haven't beaten you, Maggie."
"Yes, you have. I said you wouldn't be able to send me away. Well, you've managed to and in the only way you could--by your silence. You haven't opened your mouth for a fortnight. You're better now, too, and Mrs. Bolitho will look after you. I was determined to hang on to you, but I find I can't. I'm going back to London to get some work."
His hand dropped from the window. Then, with his head turned from her and his voice so low that she could scarcely hear the--
"No, Maggie, don't go."
She smiled across at him. "There's no need to be polite, Martin. We're both of us beyond that by this time. I'll come back if you really want me. You know that I always will, but at last, after all these years, I've found a scrap of self-respect. Here am I always bundling about--first the aunts, then you, then Paul, then you again, and nobody wanting me. I don't suppose," she said laughing, "that there can be anybody less wanted in the world. So I'm just going to look after myself now. It's quite time I did."
"But I want you," he said, his voice still very low. She looked up, her eyes lit as though with some sudden recognition.
