“The other will come too soon,” Elizabeth said, “I do not want these ordinary things. You will know me so well in a year.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Andrews said.
“Let’s keep the freshness while we can, even if it’s painful,” Elizabeth whispered with sudden vehemence. “Don’t you see how quickly the time is going. It’s only a few hours till dusk. Oh, I know there’s no danger, but I’m a little frightened all the same. It’s hate again, hate coming.”
“The door’s bolted.”
Elizabeth stamped her foot in a sudden petulance. “Have your way,” she said. “We’ll pretend what you wish, be indifferent now when we are fresh, have not when we may.”
“I didn’t say indifferent,” Andrews said. He caught her in his arms. “This is how I shall kiss you in five years’ time.”
She laughed. “If I am sane, you are mad,” she said. “Was there ever such an alliance? Come, take that cloth and dry those cups.”
It was early in the afternoon when Elizabeth declared that she must go into the village and buy food. “I shall be gone at least an hour,” she said and told him what he might do to occupy himself, what plates might be laid ready on the table, what corners swept. At first he tried to prevent her going and when she insisted that love was not enough for a young man to feed upon, he insisted that he must accompany her.
“No,” she said. “You must guard the fort. Besides,” she looked at him with narrowed, faintly suspicious eyes, “if the neighbourhood knows that there’s a man sleeping here …”
He cursed the neighbourhood, for under its gaze her sanity always seemed to touch earth, to grow cautious, careful, respectable. He could not somehow square her courage and candour with respectability, and this he told her.
“Do you want me to join your harlots?” she said. “Haven’t I promised to give myself to you? But not tonight, not till we are married.”
“How wise you are,” he said in anger less against her than against his inability to value those things in which she had such faith. “Must I make a settlement also? You can’t love me if you have to wait till a form of words is mumbled over us. Or are you afraid that I shall desert you tomorrow and you’ll lose that precious respectability?” A sense of his own injustice made him pelt her the more fiercely with his words.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s not what you call respectability. It’s a belief in God. I can’t alter that for you. I’d leave you first.”
“What has He done for you?”
Her candour was very evident to him in the manner in which she met his challenge. She did not sweep it aside in a vague rush of words, as some pious women would have done. She was silent, seeking an answer. He saw her eyes sweep the bare room in a pathetic quest. Up and down they peered, up and down, and at last with a faint note of apology she brought out the brief reply, “I am alive.”
“Why so am I,” he said. “But I’m not grateful.”
“There was this morning,” she said, “and the future.”
“Don’t let’s pay gratitude in advance,” he said.
“But all the same,” her chin tilted upwards, “I’ll do what I think is right.” Without looking at him again she unhooked a basket from a nail in the wall and unbolted the door. With her back turned she said, “I love you, but if you can’t take my terms, you must go.” She slammed the door behind her and ran quickly down the path towards the road.
It was a couple of hours before she returned, long enough for Andrews to think over his words, grow repentant, curse himself for spoiling this first rapturous time in quarrelling. He did what she had commanded and was more than ordinarily scrupulous in the fulfilment of the tasks, regarding them as a penance for his hasty words. He knew that Elizabeth would take more than half an hour to reach the village, and yet an hour had hardly gone before he began to grow anxious, to torture himself with the idea of a possible meeting between Elizabeth and his enemies on the road. It was useless to tell himself that no harm could come to her in broad daylight. He was haunted still by his first image of the cottage, when it had raised itself suddenly before him in the dark in apparent isolation.
Now that he had nothing with which to occupy himself he was restless, walked hither and thither in the room, began even to speak aloud to himself. “To let her go in anger,” he said. “It was the act of a brute. Suppose that something should happen to her now before I can tell her how wrong I am. It was not respectability, it was holiness she showed.” With his eyes on the place where the coffin had lain he began to address the spirit of Mr. Jennings, not in any real belief that any portion of the dead man survived, but rather as an insurance against a very remote possibility. “Look after her,” he implored, “if you can. You too loved her.” It seemed to him that the spirit, if indeed it existed, had an unfair advantage in guardianship. It could travel with greater speed than the lagging flesh and to places where the body could not follow. Besides, Andrews thought with a whimsicality, partly sincere, he will have the ear of either God or the devil. The thought of Mr. Jennings, however, and this play with the
