Chapter 6

"Oh, I thought you wur never coming back."

She murmured it over and over again as he kissed her, and she clung to him like a child. There was something about her words and about herself as she quivered in his arms that touched him inexpressibly. He swore that he loved her, and forgot all about the woman in Wish Ward.

That evening Caro remembered her own counsels and did not draw back from his love. She let him kiss her as much as he chose, though he saw with amusement that he frightened her sometimes. They wandered on Boarzell through webs of star-fretted mist, they drank the night together, and sacramental silences. It was only when she realised that her father would be shutting[Pg 348] up the house that Caro was able to tear herself away, and this time they parted with many kisses and vows to meet again.

He came nearly every night. If she was not at the gate he would whistle a few bars of "Rio Bay," and she would steal out as soon as she could do so without rousing suspicion. Boarzell became theirs, their accomplice in some subtle, beautiful way. There was a little hollow on the western slope where they would crouch together and sniff the apricot scent of the gorse, which was ever afterwards to be the remembrancer of their love, and watch the farmhouse lights at Castweasel gleam and gutter beside Ramstile woods.

Sometimes he would talk to her of the strange voyages he had made—how he had lived on ships ever since he was a boy of twelve, and had seen nearly the whole world, from the fiery steaming forests of Equador to the Northern Lights that make a mock day in Spitzbergen. He told her strange tales of wooded atolls in the South Seas, painting a fairyland she had scarcely dreamed, of palms motionless in the aromatic air, of pink and white shores, and lagoons full of fish all winged and frilled and iridescent—of the sudden swift sunrises and sunsets between Cancer and Capricorn, of the great ice-wall in the south, below Tasmania, which he had longed to penetrate, for who knew what lay beyond it in the Unknown? "And there's another like it what I've seen from Franz Josef Land—maybe there's countries beyond it, with gold." Then he told her of the terrible storms south of the Horn, of the uncharted Nelson Strait—of northern Baffin Land, where he had once gone on a whaler, of Rio Grande and the buried city of Tenoctitlan—"where there's gold." Gold seemed to be hidden in large quantities all over the world according to Dansay, and Caro once asked him why he had never brought any back. "Because I love what's better than[Pg 349] gold," he answered, and drew her, happy and quivering, into his arms.

She became inexpressibly dear to him during those meetings. Her timidity and innocence charmed him so completely that he preserved them longer than he had at first felt inclined to do. His vanity was tickled to think that though she was past thirty he was the first man who had kissed her. She was not bad-looking, either, with her straight black brows and huge eyes—in spite of toil she did not look her years, and during the weeks of his courtship she seemed to grow younger and prettier, she grew daintier. Yet she largely retained the qualities that had first attracted him, her admiration for him was unbounded and guilelessly expressed—she would listen in tender reverence to his yarns, and received his caresses with a humble gratitude that went straight to his heart.

As for Caro, life was a rainbow dream. The hardships of the day were gladly lived through in expectation of the joys of the evening. She felt very few qualms of conscience, even when the barrier was past which she had thought impassable. Somehow love seemed to alter her whole point of view, or rather stripped her of one altogether—after all, her point of view had never been more than the acceptance of other people's. Besides, there were things in love that she had never guessed; nobody had ever done anything to make her realise that there was beauty in it—Rose's flirtations, her father's jealous passion had never suggested such a thing. But now her life was brimmed with beauty, unimaginable beauty that welled up into the commonest things and suffused them with light. Also, about it all was that surprising sense of naturalness; which almost always comes to women when they love for the first time, the feeling of "For this I was born."

Sometimes she would have anxious moments, a strange sense of fear. "I'm a bad woman," she would[Pg 350] repeat to herself, and she would dread the thought of her sister Tilly. But the terrors did not last, they were driven away by the remembrance of what her life had been before she met Joe—its drabness, its aimless toil, its lassitude, its humiliations. She would have been a fool to spurn her golden chance when it came. It had been her only chance; after all it was not as if she ever could have married. She had had to choose between the life she had led up to that August evening and the life she was leading now, and she could not regret her choice.

She never asked Dansay to marry her. He had given her pretty clearly to understand that he was not a marrying man, and she was terrified of doing or saying anything that might turn him against her. One of the things about her that charmed him most was the absence of all demand upon him. She never asked for presents, and the few things he bought her stimulated both her humble gratitude and her alarm lest he should have spent too much money. One day he suggested that he should take her to Boarzell Fair.

"Oh, Joe, would you really!"

"Of course, if you can manage it without us being spotted."

"I reckon I cud, for f?ather ?un't going this year, he's got an auction at Appledore."

"Then you come along; I'll take you, and we'll have some fun."

"But I d?an't want you to waste your money."

"It won't be wasting it. Why, Lord love ye, I'd rather spend it on you than anything in the world."

Her look of surprise and adoration was his reward.