"And that is forbidden?"

"Not forbidden. But fruitless."

She shook her head. "There are fruit. Though bitter."

But it was said without contradiction, with a deep sadness, almost to herself. Charles was overcome, as by a backwash from her wave of confession, by a sense of waste. He perceived that her directness of look was matched by a directness of thought and language-that what had on occasion struck him before as a presumption of intellectual equality (therefore a suspect resentment against man) was less an equality than a proximity, a proximity like a nakedness, an intimacy of thought and feeling hitherto unimaginable to him in the context of a relationship with a woman.

He did not think this subjectively, but objectively: here, if only some free man had the wit to see it, is a remarkable woman. The feeling was not of male envy: but very much of human loss. Abruptly he reached out his hand and touched her shoulder in a gesture of comfort; and as quickly turned away. There was a silence.

As if she sensed his frustration, she spoke. "You think then that I should leave?"

At once he felt released and turned eagerly back to her.

"I beg you to. New surroundings, new faces ... and have no worries as regards the practical considerations. We await only your decision to interest ourselves on your behalf."

"May I have a day or two to reflect?"

"If it so be you feel it necessary." He took his chance; and grasped the normality she made so elusive. "And I propose that we now put the matter under Mrs. Tranter's auspices. If you will permit, I will see to it that her purse is provided for any needs you may have."

Her head bowed; she seemed near tears again. She murmured, "I don't deserve such kindness. I..."

"Say no more. I cannot think of money better spent."

A delicate tinge of triumph was running through Charles. It had been as Grogan prophesied. Confession had brought cure-or at least a clear glimpse of it. He turned to pick up his ashplant by the block of flint.

"I must come to Mrs. Tranter's?"

"Excellent. There will of course be no necessity to speak of our meetings."

"I shall say nothing."

He saw the scene already; his polite but not too interested surprise, followed by his disinterested insistence that any pecuniary assistance desirable should be to his charge. Ernestina might very well tease him about it-but that would ease his conscience. He smiled at Sarah.

"You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight-and smile at your own past sorrows." He thought he detected a kind of light behind the doubt in her eyes; for a moment she was like a child, both reluctant and yet willing to be cozened-or homilized-out of tears. His smile deepened. He added lightly, "And now had we better not descend?"

She seemed as if she would like to say something, no doubt reaffirm her gratitude, but his stance of brisk waiting made her, after one last lingering look into his eyes, move past him.

She led the way down as neat-footedly as she had led it up. Looking down on her back, he felt tinges of regret. Not to see her thus again ... regret and relief. A remarkable young woman. He would not forget her; and it seemed some consolation that he would not be allowed to. Aunt Tranter would be his future spy.

They came to the base of the lower cliff, and went through the first tunnel of ivy, over the clearing, and into the second green corridor-and then!

There came from far below, from the main path through the Undercliff, the sound of a stifled peal of laughter. Its effect was strange-as if some wood spirit had been watching their clandestine meeting and could now no longer bottle up her-for the laugh was unmistakably female-mirth at their foolish confidence in being unseen.

Charles and Sarah stopped as of one accord. Charles's growing relief was instantaneously converted into a shocked alarm. But the screen of ivy was dense, the laugh had come from two or three hundred yards away; they could not have been seen. Unless as they came down the slope ... a moment, then she swiftly raised a finger to her lips, indicated that he should not move, and then herself stole along to the end of the tunnel. Charles watched her crane forward and stare cautiously down towards the path. Then her face turned sharply back to him. She beckoned-he was to go to her, but with the utmost quietness; and simultaneously that laugh came again. It was quieter this time, yet closer. Whoever had been on the path had left it and was climbing up through the ash trees toward them.

Charles trod cautiously towards Sarah, making sure of each place where he had to put his wretchedly unstealthy boots. He felt himself flushing, most hideously embarrassed. No explanation could hold water for a moment. However he was seen with Sarah, it must be in flagrante delicto.

He came to where she stood, and where the ivy was fortunately at its thickest. She had turned away from the interlopers and stood with her back against a tree trunk, her eyes cast down as if in mute guilt for having brought them both to this pass. Charles looked through the leaves and down the slope of the ash grove-and his blood froze. Coming up towards them, as if seeking their same cover, were Sam and Mary. Sam had his arm round the girl's shoulders. He carried his hat, and she her bonnet; she wore the green walking dress given her by Ernestina-indeed, the last time Charles had seen it it had been on Ernestina-and her head lay back a little against Sam's cheek. They were young lovers as plain as the ashes were old trees; as greenly erotic as the April plants they trod on.

Charles drew back a little but kept them in view. As he watched Sam drew the girl's face round and kissed her. Her arm came up and they embraced; and then holding hands, stood shyly apart a little. Sam led the girl to where a bank of grass had managed to establish itself between the trees. Mary sat and lay back, and Sam leaned beside her, looking down at her; then he touched her hair aside from her cheeks and bent and kissed her tenderly on the eyes.

Charles felt pierced with a new embarrassment: he glanced at Sarah, to see if she knew who the intruders were. But she stared at the hart's-tongue ferns at her feet, as if they were merely sheltering from some shower of rain. Two minutes, then three passed. Embarrassment gave way to a degree of relief-it was clear that the two servants were far more interested in exploring each other than their surroundings. He glanced again at Sarah. Now she too was watching, from round her tree trunk. She turned back, her eyes cast down. But then without warning she looked up at him.

A moment.

Then she did something as strange, as shocking, as if she had thrown off her clothes.

She smiled.

It was a smile so complex that Charles could at the first moment only stare at it incredulously. It was so strangely timed! He felt she had almost been waiting for such a moment to unleash it upon him-this revelation of her humor, that her sadness was not total. And in those wide eyes, so somber, sad and direct, was revealed an irony, a new dimension of herself-one little Paul and Virginia would have been quite familiar with in days gone by, but never till now bestowed on Lyme.

Where are your pretensions now, those eyes and gently curving lips seemed to say; where is your birth, your science, your etiquette, your social order? More than that, it was not a smile one could stiffen or frown at; it could only be met with a smile in return, for it excused Sam and Mary, it excused all; and in some way too subtle for analysis, undermined all that had passed between Charles and herself till then. It lay claim to a far profounder understanding, acknowledgment of that awkward equality melting into proximity than had been consciously admitted. Indeed, Charles did not consciously smile in return; he found himself smiling; only with his eyes, but smiling. And excited, in some way too obscure and general to be called sexual, to the very roots of his being; like a man who at last comes, at the end of a long high wall, to the sought-for door ... but only to find it locked.

For several moments they stood, the woman who was the door, the man without the key; and then she lowered her eyes again. The smile died. A long silence hung between them. Charles saw the truth: he really did stand with one foot over the precipice. For a moment he thought he would, he must plunge. He knew if he reached out his arm she would meet with no resistance . . . only a passionate reciprocity of feeling. The red in his cheeks deepened, and at last he whispered.

"We must never meet alone again."

She did not raise her head, but gave the smallest nod of assent; and then with an almost sullen movement she turned away from him, so that he could not see her face. He looked again through the leaves. Sam's head and shoulders were bent over the invisible Mary. Long moments passed, but Charles remained watching, his mind still whirling down that precipice, hardly aware that he was spying, yet infected, as each moment passed, with more of the very poison he was trying to repel.

Mary saved him. Suddenly she pushed Sam aside and laughing, ran down the slope back towards the path; poising a moment, her mischievous face flashed back at Sam, before she raised her skirts and skittered down, a thin line of red petticoat beneath the viridian, through the violets and the dog's mercury. Sam ran after her. Their figures dwindled between the gray stems; dipped, disappeared, a flash of green, a flash of blue; a laugh that ended in a little scream; then silence.

Five minutes passed, during which the hidden pair spoke not a word to each other. Charles remained staring fixedly down the hill, as if it were important that he should keep such intent watch. All he wanted, of course, was to avoid looking at Sarah. At last he broke the silence.

"You had better go." She bowed her head. "I will wait a half-hour." She bowed her head again, and then moved past him. Their eyes did not meet.

Only when she was out among the ash trees did she turn and look back for a moment at him. She could not have seen his face, but she must have known he was watching. And her face had its old lancing look again. Then she went lightly on down through the trees.

22.

I too have felt the load I bore In a too strong emotion's sway; I too have wished, no woman more, This starting, feverish heart, away.

I too have longed for trenchant force And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course, Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

But in the world I learnt, what there Thou too will surely one day prove, That will, that energy, though rare, And yet far, far less rare than love.

-Matthew Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)

Charles's thoughts on his own eventual way back to Lyme were all variations on that agelessly popular male theme: "You've been playing with fire, my boy." But it was precisely that theme, by which I mean that the tenor of his thoughts matched the verbal tenor of the statement. He had been very foolish, but his folly had not been visited on him. He had run an absurd risk; and escaped unscathed. And so now, as the great stone claw of the Cobb came into sight far below, he felt exhilarated.

And how should he have blamed himself very deeply? From the outset his motives had been the purest; he had cured her of her madness; and if something impure had for a moment threatened to infiltrate his defenses, it had been but mint sauce to the wholesome lamb. He would be to blame, of course, if he did not now remove himself, and for good, from the fire. That, he would take very good care to do. After all, he was not a moth infatuated by a candle; he was a highly intelligent being, one of the fittest, and endowed with total free will. If he had not been sure of that latter safeguard, would he ever have risked himself in such dangerous waters? I am mixing metaphors-but that was how Charles's mind worked.

And so, leaning on free will quite as much as on his ashplant, he descended the hill to the town. All sympathetic physical feelings towards the girl he would henceforth rigorously suppress, by free will. Any further solicitation of a private meeting he would adamantly discountenance, by free will. All administration of his interest should be passed to Aunt Tranter, by free will. And he was therefore permitted, obliged rather, to continue to keep Ernestina in the dark, by the same free will. By the time he came in sight of the White Lion, he had free-willed himself most convincingly into a state of self-congratulation ... and one in which he could look at Sarah as an object of his past.

A remarkable young woman, a remarkable young woman. And baffling. He decided that that was-had been, rather- her attraction: her unpredictability. He did not realize that she had two qualities as typical of the English as his own admixture of irony and convention. I speak of passion and imagination. The first quality Charles perhaps began dimly to perceive; the second he did not. He could not, for those two qualities of Sarah's were banned by the epoch, equated in the first case with sensuality and in the second with the merely fanciful. This dismissive double equation was Charles's greatest defect-and here he stands truly for his age.

There was still deception in the flesh, or Ernestina, to be faced. But Charles, when he arrived at his hotel, found that family had come to his aid.

A telegram awaited him. It was from his uncle at Winsyatt. His presence was urgently requested "for most important reasons." I am afraid Charles smiled as soon as he read it; he very nearly kissed the orange envelope. It removed him from any immediate further embarrassment; from the need for further lies of omission. It was most marvelously convenient. He made inquiries ... there was a train early the next morning from Exeter, then the nearest station to Lyme, which meant that he had a good pretext for leaving at once and staying there overnight. He gave orders for the fastest trap in Lyme to be procured. He would drive himself. He felt inclined to make such an urgent rush of it as to let a note to Aunt Tranter's suffice. But that would have been too cowardly. So telegram in hand, he walked up the street.

The good lady herself was full of concern, since telegrams for her meant bad news. Ernestina, less superstitious, was plainly vexed. She thought it "too bad" of Uncle Robert to act the grand vizir in this way. She was sure it was nothing; a whim, an old man's caprice, worse-an envy of young love.

She had, of course, earlier visited Winsyatt, accompanied by her parents; and she had not fallen for Sir Robert. Perhaps it was because she felt herself under inspection; or because the uncle had sufficient generations of squirearchy behind him to possess, by middle-class London standards, really rather bad manners-though a kinder critic might have said agreeably eccentric ones; perhaps because she considered the house such an old barn, so dreadfully old-fashioned in its furnishings and hangings and pictures; because the said uncle so doted on Charles and Charles was so provokingly nephewish in return that Ernestina began to feel positively jealous; but above all, because she was frightened.

Neighboring ladies had been summoned to meet her. It was all very well knowing her father could buy up all their respective fathers and husbands lock, stock and barrel; she felt herself looked down on (though she was simply envied) and snubbed in various subtle ways. Nor did she much relish the prospect of eventually living at Winsyatt, though it allowed her to dream of one way at least in which part of her vast marriage portion should be spent exactly as she insisted- in a comprehensive replacement of all those absurd scrolly wooden chairs (Carolean and almost priceless), gloomy cupboards (Tudor), moth-eaten tapestries (Gobelins), and dull paintings (including two Claudes and a Tintoretto) that did not meet her approval.

Her distaste for the uncle she had not dared to communicate to Charles; and her other objections she hinted at with more humor than sarcasm. I do not think she is to be blamed. Like so many daughters of rich parents, before and since, she had been given no talent except that of conventional good taste ... that is, she knew how to spend a great deal of money in dressmakers', milliners' and furniture shops. That was her province; and since it was her only real one, she did not like it encroached upon.

The urgent Charles put up with her muted disapproval and pretty poutings, and assured her that he would fly back with as much speed as he went. He had in fact a fairly good idea what his uncle wanted him so abruptly for; the matter had been tentatively broached when he was there with Tina and her parents ... most tentatively since his uncle was a shy man. It was the possibility that Charles and his bride might share Winsyatt with him-they could "fit up" the east whig. Charles knew his uncle did not mean merely that they should come and stay there on occasion, but that Charles should settle down and start learning the business of running the estate. Now this appealed to him no more than it would have, had he realized, to Ernestina. He knew it would be a poor arrangement, that his uncle would alternate between doting and disapproving ... and that Ernestina needed educating into Winsyatt by a less trammeled early marriage. But his uncle had hinted privately to him at something beyond this: that Winsyatt was too large for a lonely old man, that he didn't know if he wouldn't be happier in a smaller place. There was no shortage of suitable smaller places in the environs ... indeed, some figured on the Winsyatt rent roll. There was one such, an Elizabethan manor house in the village of Winsyatt, almost in view of the great house.

Charles guessed now that the old man was feeling selfish; and that he was called to Winsyatt to be offered either the manor house or the great house. Either would be agreeable. It did not much matter to him which it should be, provided his uncle was out of the way. He felt certain that the old bachelor could now be maneuvered into either house, that he was like a nervous rider who had come to a jump and wanted to be led over it.

Accordingly, at the end of the brief trio in Broad Street, Charles asked for a few words alone with Ernestina; and as soon as Aunt Tranter had retired, he told her what he suspected.

"But why should he have not discussed it sooner?"

"Dearest, I'm afraid that is Uncle Bob to the life. But tell me what I am to say."

"Which should you prefer?"

"Whichever you choose. Neither, if needs be. Though he would be hurt..."

Ernestina uttered a discreet curse against rich uncles. But a vision of herself, Lady Smithson in a Winsyatt appointed to her taste, did cross her mind, perhaps because she was in Aunt Tranter's not very spacious back parlor. After all, a title needs a setting. And if the horrid old man were safely from under the same roof . . . and he was old. And dear Charles. And her parents, to whom she owed ...

"This house in the village-is it not the one we passed in the carriage?"

"Yes, you remember, it had all those picturesque old gables-"

"Picturesque to look at from the outside."

"Of course it would have to be done up."

"What did you call it?"

"The villagers call it the Little House. But only by comparison. It's many years since I was in it, but I fancy it is a good deal larger than it looks."

"I know those old houses. Dozens of wretched little rooms. I think the Elizabethans were all dwarfs."

He smiled (though he might have done better to correct her curious notion of Tudor architecture), and put his arm round her shoulders. "Then Winsyatt itself?"

She gave him a straight little look under her arched eyebrows.

"Do you wish it?"

"You know what it is to me."

"I may have my way with new decorations?"

"You may raze it to the ground and erect a second Crystal Palace, for all I care."

"Charles! Be serious!"

She pulled away. But he soon received a kiss of forgiveness, and went on his way with a light heart. For her part, Ernestina went upstairs and drew out her copious armory of catalogues.

23.

Portion of this yew Is a man my grandsire knew ...

-Hardy, "Transformations"

The chaise, its calash down to allow Charles to enjoy the spring sunshine, passed the gatehouse. Young Hawkins stood by the opened gates, old Mrs. Hawkins beamed coyly at the door of the cottage. And Charles called to the under-coachman who had been waiting at Chippenham and now drove with Sam beside him on the box, to stop a moment. A special relationship existed between Charles and the old woman. Without a mother since the age of one, he had had to put up with a series of substitutes as a little boy; in his stays at Winsyatt he had attached himself to this same Mrs. Hawkins, technically in those days the head laundrymaid, but by right of service and popularity second only below stairs to the august housekeeper herself. Perhaps Charles's affection for Aunt Tranter was an echo of his earlier memories of the simple woman-a perfect casting for Baucis-who now hobbled down the path to the garden gate to greet him.

He had to answer all her eager inquiries about the forthcoming marriage; and to ask in his turn after her children. She seemed more than ordinarily solicitous for him, and he detected in her eye that pitying shadow the kind-hearted poor sometimes reserve for the favored rich. It was a shadow he knew of old, bestowed by the innocent-shrewd country woman on the poor motherless boy with the wicked father-for gross rumors of Charles's surviving parent's enjoyment of the pleasures of London life percolated down to Winsyatt. It seemed singularly out of place now, that mute sympathy, but Charles permitted it with an amused tolerance. It came from love of him, as the neat gatehouse garden, and the parkland, beyond, and the clumps of old trees-each with a well-loved name, Carson's Stand, Ten-pine Mound, Ramillies (planted in celebration of that battle), the Oak-and-Elm, the Muses' Grove and a dozen others, all as familiar to Charles as the names of the parts of his body-and the great avenue of limes, the iron railings, as all in his view of the domain came that day also, or so he felt, from love of him. At last he smiled down at the old laundrymaid. "I must get on. My uncle expects me." Mrs. Hawkins looked for a moment as if she would not let herself be so easily dismissed; but the servant overcame the substitute mother. She contented herself with touching his hand as it lay on the chaise door. "Aye, Mr. Charles. He expects you."

The coachman flicked the rump of the leading horse with his whip and the chaise pulled off up the gentle incline and into the fenestrated shadow of the still-leafless limes. After a while the drive became flat, again the whip licked lazily onto the bay haunch, and the two horses, remembering the manger was now near, broke into a brisk trot. The swift gay crunch of the ironbound wheels, the slight screech of an insufficiently greased axle, the old affection revived by Mrs. Hawkins, his now certainty of being soon in real possession of this landscape, all this evoked in Charles that ineffable feeling of fortunate destiny and right order which his stay in Lyme had vaguely troubled. This piece of England belonged to him, and he belonged to it; its responsibilities were his, and its prestige, and its centuries-old organization.

They passed a group of his uncle's workers: Ebenezer the smith, beside a portable brazier, hammering straight one of the iron rails that had been bent. Behind him, two woodmen, passing the time of day; and a fourth very old man, who still wore the smock of his youth and an ancient billycock ... old Ben, the smith's father, now one of the dozen or more aged pensioners of the estate allowed to live there, as free in all his outdoor comings and goings as the master himself; a kind of living file, and still often consulted, of the last eighty years or more of Winsyatt history.

These four turned as the chaise went past, and raised arms, and the billycock. Charles waved seigneurially back. He knew all their lives, as they knew his. He even knew how the rail had been bent. . . the great Jonas, his uncle's favorite bull, had charged Mrs. Tomkins's landau. "Her own d-d fault"-his uncle's letter had said-"for painting her mouth scarlet." Charles smiled, remembering the dry inquiry in his answer as to why such an attractive widow should be calling at Winsyatt unchaperoned ...

But it was the great immutable rural peace that was so delicious to reenter. The miles of spring sward, the background of Wiltshire downland, the distant house now coming into view, cream and gray, with its huge cedars, the famous copper beech (all copper beeches are famous) by the west wing, the almost hidden stable row behind, with its little wooden tower and clock like a white exclamation mark between the intervening branches. It was symbolic, that stable clock; though nothing-despite the telegram-was ever really urgent at Winsyatt, green todays flowed into green tomorrows, the only real hours were the solar hours, and though, except at haymaking and harvest, there were always too many hands for too little work, the sense of order was almost mechanical in its profundity, in one's feeling that it could not be disturbed, that it would always remain thus: benevolent and divine. Heaven-and Millie-knows there were rural injustices and poverties as vile as those taking place in Sheffield and Manchester; but they shunned the neighborhood of the great houses of England, perhaps for no better reason than that the owners liked well-tended peasants as much as well-tended fields and livestock. Their comparative kindness to their huge staffs may have been no more than a side-product of their pursuit of the pleasant prospect; but the underlings gained thereby. And the motives of "intelligent" modern management are probably no more altruistic. One set of kind exploiters went for the Pleasant Prospect; the others go for Higher Productivity.

As the chaise emerged from the end of the avenue of limes, where the railed pasture gave way to smoother lawns and shrubberies, and the drive entered its long curve up to the front of the house-a Palladian structure not too ruthlessly improved and added to by the younger Wyatt-Charles felt himself truly entering upon his inheritance. It seemed to him to explain all his previous idling through life, his dallying with religion, with science, with travel; he had been waiting for this moment ... his call to the throne, so to speak. The absurd adventure in the Undercliff was forgotten. Immense duties, the preservation of this peace and order, lay ahead, as they had lain ahead of so many young men of his family in the past. Duty-that was his real wife, his Ernestina and his Sarah, and he sprang out of the chaise to welcome her as joyously as a boy not half his real age.

He was greeted in return, however, by an empty hall. He broke into the dayroom, or drawing room, expecting to see his uncle smilingly on his feet to meet him. But that room was empty, too. And something was strange in it, puzzling Charles a moment. Then he smiled. There were new curtains -and the carpets, yes, they were new as well. Ernestina would not be pleased, to have had the choice taken out of her hands-but what surer demonstration could there be of the old bachelor's intention gracefully to hand on the torch?

Yet something else had also changed. It was some moments before Charles realized what it was. The immortal bustard had been banished; where its glass case had last stood was now a cabinet of china.

But still he did not guess.