as heber’s appearance at her door in search of catherine convinced susannah that the girl had fled alone, she longed to rush after his rival and tell him of her discovery. she had not doubted that catherine was with the shepherd. the moment she realised that there was still a chance of bringing saunders and the truant together, her spirits, which had been dashed to the earth on finding the bird flown, rose again, and she cast about for some means of communicating with charles. her only anxiety was lest the two men should meet in the town and the shepherd learn how she had deceived him. she could but trust to chance to [pg 122]prevent that; and, had she known it, chance had proved kind, for charles went straight to the hand of friendship, and, mounting his horse without a word to anybody, set his angry face homewards. in the course of the harassed evening which followed, susannah made up her mind to write to him.
most people thought it a curious thing that susannah’s destiny seemed to have nothing better in store than attendance upon a half-crippled old man. but most people scarcely realise as a truth that, to the accomplishment of any end, no matter how obvious or how commonplace, there is required a procession of acquiescent circumstances which would make the observer giddy, could he see it. any human being who meets a stranger in the road has only to think of the chain of chances—each of which has fulfilled itself—to be forged before that meeting can be brought about, and of the one link whose lack would be [pg 123]the undoing of the whole. we speak of ‘the hour and the man’ as though they were the only ingredients of fate, and as if their simultaneous appearance were all that was needed. but the hour may come and the man with it, and some untoward arrangement of detail may triumph over both.
everything had gone smoothly with susannah but the one detail of her own temperament. she had grasped life with both hands, caring no whit how much good others got out of it and thinking only of the passing day. she could not remember the time when masculine eyes had not followed her, and now, though her sun had passed its zenith, they followed her still. it was nearly three years since she had arrived to keep house for her uncle and so been thrown against her cousin heber. though few men had come to close quarters with her disturbing personality without feeling its influence, the shepherd, unlike others in [pg 124]this as in most of his ways, had treated her with the plain friendliness he might have shown to a man. perhaps it was this that made susannah feel for him what she had never felt for the many who had courted her and whom she had looked upon as mere pleasant accessories of life.
she was not a woman given to recognising failure under any circumstances; where a man was concerned, never. heber had touched her imagination—and she had more of it than is given to most women of her class—and her heart too. she would bring him to her yet, she promised herself. there was a power in her that hard work and a cramped life had not been able to destroy. the consciousness of femininity in a working woman, should it be alive when its necessary function of attracting a mate and securing a home is accomplished, seldom survives the birth of her first child. susannah moorhouse had neither mate nor child; but it is possible that, had she gone through the [pg 125]ordeal of acquiring both, that consciousness would have endured, damaged, perhaps, but living still. there were some large qualities in her and persistence was one of them, though its roots were in her settled belief in herself. she meant to employ every means to attain her desire. she sought no witch and brewed no potion, though superstition still lurked in the crevices of the country and one or two aged people professed themselves able to heal cattle and to deal with scalds, unrequited affection and other human difficulties, by the mild charms they practised.
but susannah’s trust was in none of these; she knew herself to stand, by virtue of some indefinable quality, in a different relationship to men from that of the women about her. she would draw the man of her choice to her by that unnamed force which she knew herself to possess and which she had put forth so often in idleness. it was no wonder that her neighbours, shrewish [pg 126]spinsters and toiling mothers of families, had not a good word for her; the gulf between them was so great.
though heber’s engagement to catherine was a staggering blow to her, its breaking came soon enough to give her courage again. nay, there was a fatalism in her that had, perhaps, preserved her from superstition by taking superstition’s place; and it suggested to her mind, preoccupied as it was with one idea, that larger powers than her own were playing into her hands. when she heard that charles saunders was to marry the girl she had never seen, and was more than ever curious to see, she resolved to possess her soul in patience. she smiled, standing before the cheap square of looking-glass that hung on her wall. there were lines in the face before her to which she would fain have been blind, but there were other things too. and all comes to him who waits. she meant to wait—not passively, but intelligently. then black [pg 127]heber had brought the girl he loved, and, with the miraculous blindness of manhood, had given her into the charge of the woman who loved him.
if susannah’s views of life were more enterprising than those of her neighbours her education had not differed from theirs, so it was a laborious business to her to write a letter. she went through a good deal of mental exercise before she lost sight of it in the maw of the local postman’s bag.
“mister saunders, sir,” she had begun:
“i take the liberty of writing these few lines. mister saunders you may spose catherine dennis is gone with heber, but not she. he nows no more nor you where shes gone. she run from here for fere of him sir, if you look you will find her yet.
“no more from your welwisher,
“susannah moorhouse.”
whether or no she expected an answer to this letter, she hoped for one; and when some days passed and brought no sign from charles, she began to grow restless. heber [pg 128]had not returned, though, hitherto, he had always contrived to pay a weekly visit to his father, if but for five minutes. he was the old man’s favourite son and the only one of four brothers who lived within reach.
the uncertainty as to what was going on began to prey upon susannah’s nerves. events which meant so much to her had run quickly enough of late to make inaction doubly unbearable; and, if she could not see saunders, she must at least see her cousin. pencoed chapel was the only place in which she was sure of meeting him, and she informed her uncle that she meant to go there on the following sunday.
the distance from talgwynne put walking out of the question; but she descended from the farm gig in which an acquaintance had driven her as near to pencoed as wheels could go, to make the rest of her way on foot. she had been obliged to start early to reach the chapel in time for the meeting, and as she neared it the sound [pg 129]of singing came to her on the wind. she paused outside the door; looking stealthily in, and seeing the tall figure of black heber, she slipped noiselessly into a seat.
the little, box-like building was half full of men and women; elderly people, for the most part, in dark-coloured clothes. the windows, which were small, with diamond leaded panes set low in the walls, let in an even light on their subdued homeliness.
apart from them, at a table covered with faded red cloth, was the same man who had baptized catherine in the pool at bethesda.
the hymn was a long one and the singers were well embarked on it; the predominance of men in the gathering gave it a fulness and strength of sound; and, as it was one immensely popular in the district, its solemn rhythm and swaying time were marred by no uncertainties. heber stood in a line with susannah, by the opposite wall, head and shoulders above the other [pg 130]worshippers, his eyes fixed on his book. she could hear his strong, melodious voice separately, fervent, and steady; and she listened to it as a person by a river’s side will listen to the tune of one particular eddy in the full underlying rush of water.
it was easy to see, here in the quietness of the chapel, how much more of youth there was in the man than in the impression he gave to others. he was little over thirty and the lines on his face were not lines of care, but the marks traced by exposure and hard exercise. his eyes were the narrowed eyes of men who look over long distances in rigorous weathers, and if his thin beard hid jaw and chin, the outline of his chest and shoulders was sharp and young. now and again he would look up, throwing back his head as he sent a note from his expanded lungs into the swell of the hymn. the words that floated out round her had neither interest nor meaning for susannah; for her there was only a [pg 131]single person, a single voice, under that roof. they had reached the last lines:
“ye men of god, lift up your souls,
nor halt with failing breath;
yet one more stream before us rolls,
the dark blue flood of death.
across its waves our pathway lies,
the hosts go on before;
and zion’s city meets our eyes
set on the other shore.”
as the singing ceased, heber shut his book and looked round like one awakened, straight at susannah. the act was so spontaneous that neither he nor the woman, whose gaze was fixed on him, had time to return from the widely separated regions in which their respective souls roamed.
in that instant there was revealed to the shepherd the thing that he had never suspected. perhaps the feelings roused by the strenuous, half-militant spirit of the hymn and the beat of its swinging music had lighted the whole range of his imagination; [pg 132]perhaps the shock of the contrast between that seen by his inner and his outer vision quickened it; in any case, the passion in susannah’s face shot its message across the chapel and he stood stock still while the rest of the congregation sat down. then he thought of his cousin and catherine as he had seen them that night in the kitchen at talgwynne, and the blood ran hot to his tanned face.
black heber was not vain; he had no time for vanity, had it been in him; nevertheless, susannah’s look pierced to his inactive, remote self-consciousness. he resumed his seat, feeling as if a rough hand had taken him by the collar. when a man without vanity loves a woman as much as he loved catherine dennis, the unasked favour of another is only a gyve to be shaken off. unreturned love must be worn either as a fetter or as a decoration; and though there are many men whose pride it is to go through life decked out in the [pg 133]cheap jewellery of the affections, the shepherd was not one of them. had he found time to think of such things they would have irritated him. he did not care for ornaments; he only cared for freedom and for getting what he wanted. though he believed himself to have lost catherine for good and all, his freedom remained; and he felt now as though susannah menaced it.
the religious emotion that had such a hold upon his character was gone for the time being and during the rest of the meeting he followed what was going on mechanically, his mind struggling with problems that took him far from the place in which he sat and the sermon to which his ears were deaf. he was nothing if not shrewd, and he was groping on the edge of a new suspicion. he was perplexed and disturbed, for the two facts of susannah’s love for him—almost incredible as he found that love—and catherine’s flight from her house struck [pg 134]him as pregnant ones when taken together. he remembered his cousin’s odd want of cordiality when she received the girl. he resolved to evade her, if he could, when his neighbours dispersed.
mrs. job, who was in chapel, was occupied with his affairs too. it was some time since she had seen the shepherd; and the last sign she had had of him was the sound of his horse’s tread on the night when he had ridden from pencoed with catherine. though she had no acquaintance with susannah, she knew her by sight and was one of the few who had observed her stealing into the place of worship. it did not take her long to make the discovery that the stranger had come neither to pray, nor to listen, nor to sing.
from where she sat, susannah’s face was perfectly plain to her, and when she saw how her eyes were set on her cousin, and how no movement of his, no turn of the head, no tone of the voice, escaped her, the [pg 135]devout mrs. job ignored her bible and let her thoughts dwell, unrebuked, upon the pair. what revealed itself to the shepherd revealed itself with a thousandfold more conviction to her. she was not accustomed to take much notice of love at any time; but her warm affection for heber made her acutely alive to everything that concerned him. while she was assured that catherine dennis was not good enough for him, susannah’s air brought revulsion to her puritan nature. she began to dislike her with all her strength.
almost at the final words of the final prayer heber rose from his place and made for the door, and susannah, who was on her knees with the rest of the assembly, had not courage to follow; for she was hemmed in by a woman and two men, who had entered later than herself, and who knelt immovably by her side. the shepherd gained the doorstep just as the minister’s voice ceased, and one or two people looked [pg 136]up, curious at his unusual haste. he was often the last to go.
he crossed the grass road hurriedly and went to the other side of mrs. job’s house. from an outsider’s point of view the deed was ignominious, but his plain intention was to avoid susannah, and, as usual, he took the most direct way of doing it. he had meant to spend a little time with his friend, but he left her dwelling behind him and hurried towards the nearest dingle. beside his distaste for the discovery he had made, the sight of his cousin brought back his trouble afresh.
susannah and mrs. job came out of the chapel at the same moment. the former looked round in search of heber. he was nowhere to be seen and she wondered if he had gone into her companion’s cottage; with that probability in her mind, she bid her good-day, introducing herself as a member of the shepherd’s family.
mrs. job replied shortly to her greeting [pg 137]and made no comment on the information. they went across the grass, side by side, and when they had reached the doorstep without any suggestion of hospitality passing between them, the younger woman spoke again.
“is heber here?” she asked, nodding towards the walls.
“i’ll see,” said the other; and with that she entered, leaving her companion outside.
susannah’s lips closed in an angry line; it was evident that she was to get no encouragement. she was ignorant of the reason for this plain hostility; but it only made her more certain that her suspicion was correct and that the shepherd was not far off.
mrs. job reappeared, holding the door open to show a portion of her face—no more.
“he be’ant here,” she called.
but susannah was not to be baffled so easily.
[pg 138]
“can ye give me a drink o’ water?” she inquired. “it’s dry work coming up the hill.”
the door was shut on her and she heard the pump working in the yard. apparently the latch was not to be lifted again, for when mrs. job returned she came round the side of the house and handed her the desired drink.
susannah swallowed the water, feeling as if it would choke her.
“thank ye,” she said.
and, as the elder woman put out her hand to take the empty cup, she dashed it on the ground at their feet. the china flew into shivers on the step.
she went off along the track, leaving the other speechless, and when she had gone a little way she sat down on the turf and looked back. mrs. job had gone in and the chapel-goers were dispersing; black figures scattered in retreating groups towards different quarters of the landscape. [pg 139]heber was with none of them and no one was going in her own direction. it seemed as if they, with mrs. job and the shepherd, were in the conspiracy against her. at last she rose and set out for the place at which she was to find the gig. her eyes were dry, because she was too furious for tears.
about an hour afterwards heber’s perturbed wanderings came to an end: he approached pencoed again. it was not only susannah’s demeanour and its suggestion that annoyed him, for, in his heart, he blamed her for having let slip his regained treasure. it was an illogical feeling, because he never doubted that catherine had gone with saunders, and gone willingly, repenting the rash step she had taken. he did not overlook the difference between himself and the richer man, though he despised charles. he had managed to convey news of what had happened to mrs. job, and his heart was so sore that he longed for the sympathy [pg 140]of the uncompromising and undemonstrative person whose partisanship never failed him.
there was a grim explosiveness in mrs. job’s manner as he entered the house, though she listened patiently while he gave her the history of talgwynne fair-day. her husband stole in, anxious for a pipe beside the fire, but she motioned him out; her relentless predominance in the household was a matter of course, and job departed as humbly as he had come.
“maybe it’s not saunders as is at the bottom o’ this,” said she, when the shepherd was silent. “mind you, heber, i’ve got eyes in my head, an’ ears too—not so long as some folks, but long enough to hear from here to talgwynne! ah! that cousin o’ yours be a bit o’ stuff to burn yer fingers wi’, an’ no mistake. i know that!”
moorhouse frowned and his companion took his frown for a sign of dissent. she raised her sharp nose higher.
[pg 141]
“what’s wrong wi’ her?” he asked.
“wrong wi’ her? she’ve got her eye on you! an’ i’ve got mine on her, an’ had in chapel, too. i can see a thing or two, b’lieve me!”
his brows drew still closer together.
“what made ye run out o’ chapel like that?” demanded mrs. job, coming closer. “it cost me a good chinay cup, that run o’ yours did. she just up wi’ her hand an’ down wi’ the cup on the stones an’ bruk it to pieces—if it had been my head my lady would ha’ been better pleased, her would—askin’ me for a drink. a drink indeed! her wanted to get into the house to see if ye was in it. but her didn’t know me!”
she gave him no time for comment.
“i saw her watchin’ ye i’ the chapel,” she went on, “an’ i heard o’ her walkin’ about talgwynne fair wi’ saunders! where was ye, heber, that day?”
“i wasn’t no more’n an hour i’ the town,” [pg 142]said he, “an’ i’d business to do afore i could get to father’s——”
“and catherine was gone, sure enough, by then,” broke in the other; “an’ if ye tell me that baggage didn’t get rid o’ her i won’t believe ye, that’s all! her may be wi’ saunders an’ her mayn’t.”
if these new lights were dazzling the shepherd, they showed him his vague suspicions in more definite shape. he stood staring at mrs. job as if he could see into her brain. mentally she travelled faster than he did, but he was following.
“the sooner i get after susannah the better,” he said, as he turned away.
“d’ye think she’ll tell ye the truth? go home, ye foondy feller, an’ don’t be wastin’ shoe-leather!” she exclaimed loudly.
he said nothing but the obstinate determination on his face spoke volumes.
after he passed the window a horrible fear shook her.
“you take up wi’ that baggage at [pg 143]talgwynne, an’ i’ve done wi’ you!” she cried after him.
black heber never swore; it was against his particular assortment of principles. but his lips moved as he passed out of earshot. he was on the nearest way to talgwynne, and he knew that he must overtake his cousin if she were on foot; he knew also, from mrs. job’s story of the broken cup, that she had not started homewards at once. it was not likely that she would tell him the truth, but he had a mad hope of wresting it from her; how, he did not know. at any rate, he might gather something from her bearing. he would be very cautious.
at last he saw her ahead of him. she did not hear his approach on the turf until he was close to her.
her heart beat tumultuously as they walked on together. she could not understand why he had avoided her only to pursue her afterwards. the silence by [pg 144]which each was seeking to compel the other’s speech was broken by the shepherd.
“you’ve had no chance to tell me anything, susannah,” he began.
“about catherine? there’s nothing to tell. i’m main sorry for ye, that’s all. they were gone when uncle and me got home from the fair.”
“how d’ye know she be gone with saunders? i went from the door like a fool in my haste, but maybe i’m wiser now.”
susannah had provided herself with answers for all emergencies.
“she left a bit o’ paper with writing on the kitchen table. ‘charles saunders is come,’ says she, ‘an’ i’m gone wi’ him.’ no more nor that. not a word of thanks to me, either.”
“what did ye do with it?” exclaimed he, stopping short.
“burnt it.”
heber made a smothered exclamation.
“but saunders was at the fair till afternoon,” [pg 145]said he, at the end of a long pause, during which neither had looked at the other.
“i heard that. i s’pose he came back.”
to the shepherd’s practical mind there were discrepancies of time in susannah’s account that he could not adjust. when he had reached talgwynne he had found the best part of the fair over; for noon saw business ebb in the little hillside place. his tardy appearance had been hailed with interest, and he was immediately secured to ride a horse for the inspection of a man who, he was told, had been all day in the town. the recollection of these facts sprang up to assort itself very ill with his companion’s words. he made up his mind to get to talgwynne on the first possible chance of absenting himself from his work and to see what he could elicit from his father. he could not tell how far the old man might be in susannah’s confidence. he did not speak of his intention to her, [pg 146]and it struck him, when he turned to take his way up the hill and they stood within sight of the waiting gig, that she made no suggestion of his coming. it was the first time in his recollection of her that she had seen him without pressing him to come soon.
they had reached a dip in the ground which hid the wayside cottage where the gig with susannah’s friends was drawn up. she had looked for the expression of greater resentment from him, but he had cursed neither fate nor saunders. he spoke of catherine’s desertion of him almost as if it had happened to some one else. there was no excitement in his manner, even little concern; and, for a man who had so few scruples about strong measures when they suited him, he seemed to accept his defeat with curious calmness. if he had flung away from his father’s door with every sign of uncalculating bitterness, he was different now. she told herself with triumph that [pg 147]he had taken catherine’s measure at last. perhaps susannah paid too little heed to those inconsistencies in him which surprised others.
as they parted she held out her hand and looked up at him with half-closed, half-mocking eyes.
“ah—you’ll forget her in time, heber,” she said, her fingers clinging to his as he touched them. she raised her face till it was close to his own.
he thrust her away with one short, frightfully definite word.
when she got into the gig a few minutes afterwards she was as white as a sheet.
