Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely different world, but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure of it directly. They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of walking home across the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they explained, but Mary thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with her, being conscious, indeed, that he got comfort from her presence. What could be the cause of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously, as the pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam between their eyes and the tall form of Edward, standing up to drive, with the reins in one hand and the whip in the other. People from the village, who had been to the market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off home down the road together in little parties. Many salutations were addressed to Mary, who shouted back, with the addition of the speaker’s name. But soon she led the way over a stile,bu and along a path worn slightly darker than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct branches stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction by a hump of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the field; circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing and returning again and again.
Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such associations for her.
‘Well, Ralph,’ she said, ‘this is better than Lincoln’s Inn Fields, isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses, have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot? I shouldn’t think so—’
‘Look here, you must explain,’ said Ralph. ‘Who are these young men? Where am I staying?’
‘You are staying with us, of course,’ she said boldly. ‘Of course, you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?’
‘If I had, I shouldn’t have come,’ he said sturdily. They walked on in silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her comfort.
‘This is the sort of country I thought you’d live in, Mary,’ he said, pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. ‘Real country. No gentlemen’s seats.’
He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks the pleasure of owning a body.
‘Now we have to find our way through a hedge,’ said Mary. In the gap of the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a rabbit.
‘It’s quite right that they should poach,’ said Mary, watching him tugging at the wire. ‘I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,’ she repeated, coming out on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. ‘I could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.’
‘Could you?’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t believe you could,’ he added.
‘Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,’ said Mary, with a soberness which impressed Ralph very much.
‘But you’d get tired of it,’ he urged.
‘I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,’ she replied.
The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of rest and satisfaction.
‘But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry across your garden?’
‘The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.’
‘And what about the Suffrage?’ he asked, attempting sarcasm.
‘Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,’ she replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.
Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her further. His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage. Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the country.
‘D’you know the points of the compass?’ he asked.
‘Well, of course,’ said Mary. ‘What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like you?’ She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the south.
‘It’s my native land, this,’ she said. ‘I could smell my way about it blindfold.’
As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because she was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be attached firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk had fallen to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and even lean his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very narrow lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout through her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a neighbouring field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.
‘That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,’ she said.
She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon whom the light fell in wavering discs calling out now a bright spot of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand in the bucket he carried, and was at once the centre of a circle also; and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his black overcoat.
He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them, now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candle-light; and yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself. Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces, bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink, unmoulded flesh.