Chapter 2

If that autumn was cruel to Thyrza in its torture of waxing hope it was crueller still to Nell in its torture of hope’s dying. For a week after the harvest she had lived in flowery fields of memory, pied with all bright colours. When she shut her eyes she could see his face bending close to hers over the shocked corn, his thin delicate hands moving among the straw, sliding close enough to hers for an accidental touch ... she could feel them brush her neck as he helped her into his coat at the day’s end of prayer and storm....

For a week her heart drowsed in its own sweetness. Nell was happy, she grew gentler and kinder. She was no longer an ineffective little rebel, full of disgusts and grumbles—a delicious languor was upon her, a bright dimness which veiled all the jags and uglinesses of her life. During this week she did not see Mr. Poullett-Smith, but her mind rested sweetly in his memory. Perhaps the physical fatigue of the harvest, mixed with the natural inertia of her an?mic condition, both had a share in bringing about a certain passivity, or perhaps it was the change of her love from scourge to comfort which put an end to all her old restless efforts to see him, her making of opportunities, her fretting glances from [215] the schoolhouse window, her nervous strayings to church. Anyhow she did not see him till Sunday, when her glorious castle fell.

He came into Sunday-school as usual, with a benedictory smile. Her memories of him in his open shirt, with his face all red and shining and his hair caked with sweat on his forehead, made her feel a little shocked to see him again in his long black cassock, above which his face showed waxy and white. Perhaps a touch of sunburn lingered, but the black of his priestly garment wiped it out. Who would have thought, said Nell to herself, that this day a week ago he had been toiling as a farmhand, with bare arms and throat, all baked and burnt and dirty and sweaty...?

He greeted the superintendent, and talked for a few moments at her desk; then he came down among the teachers and their classes. Nell wore a white blouse and a big white hat like an ox-eyed daisy. Her book slid from her knee to the floor, and there was a scuffle among her children as Freddie Gurr from Hazard’s Green dropped the worm he had been nursing for comfort through the chills of his medi?val Sunday; but she did not hear as she half rose for her greeting, then sank back, as in the level, indifferent tones in which he had said “Good morning, Miss Sinden—good morning, Miss Pix,” he said “Good morning, Miss Beatup,” and passed on to “Good morning, Miss Viner.”

Nell’s heart constricted with pain. She told herself that she was a fool to be so sensitive, that it was not likely Mr. Poullett-Smith would greet her publicly in the manner of their harvest friendship. But she could get no comfort from her self-rebuke, for deep in herself she knew that she was wise. Doubtless there was no importance to be attached to the coldness of her friend’s greeting. Nevertheless, he had that morning, silently [216] and symbolically, declared the gulf between them. In the cornfield, working as her comrade, he had stood for a short while on her level—for the first time her efforts to attract him had been without handicap. But now the handicap was restored—he was the Priest-in-Charge of Brownbread Street, and she was the daughter of a drunken farmer. If for a few hours she had charmed him out of his eminent sense of fitness, the charm was over now. What had this dignified, cassocked ecclesiastic to do with her, a poor little nobody? His friendliness during their common toil had been a mere passing emotion; probably she had exaggerated it—even the little her memory held must be halved, and that poor remainder cancelled out by the probability that he had forgotten it.

As a matter of fact the curate had not forgotten it, but the attraction had not been robust enough to survive the loss of its surroundings. He saw that he had been unwise and rather unkind in yielding so easily to a mere temporary prepossession. His more solid affections had long been engaged elsewhere, and he spent some hours of real self-reproach for having ever so briefly faltered. He might have put ideas into the girl’s head—they had certainly been in his own. However, he reflected, there was not time to have done much harm, and he would set matters straight at once. So for the next month his behaviour to Nell was unflaggingly cold and polite, and at the end of it all the parish was told of his engagement to Marian Lamb.