As he was talking, or being talked to, by the woman on the grass outside the Dairy, her husband came back from driving out his cows. He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern look. She promptly forewent her chatter and returned indoors to her copper. The husband was evidently a taciturn man, though he spoke quickly enough when Charles asked him how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk. A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally turn up in one’s change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the century’s use, passed hands.
Charles was about to climb back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step when a black figure appeared out of the trees above the two men. It was the girl. She looked towards the two figures below and then went on her way towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairyman, who continued to give the figure above a dooming stare. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.
“Do you know that lady?”
“Aye.”
“Does she come this way often?”
“Often enough.” The dairyman continued to stare. Then he said, “And she been’t no lady. She be the French Loot’n’nt’s Hoer.”
Some moments passed before Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an angry look at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore fond of calling a spade a spade, especially when the spade was somebody else’s sin. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip—and gossips—of Lyme. Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore.
A few seconds later he was himself on the cart track back to Lyme. Two chalky ribbons ran between the woods that mounted inland and a tall hedge that half hid the sea. Ahead moved the black and now bonneted figure of the girl; she walked not quickly, but with an even pace, without feminine affectation, like one used to covering long distances. Charles set out to catch up, and after a hundred yards or so he came close behind her. She must have heard the sound of his nailed boots on the flint that had worn through the chalk, but she did not turn. He perceived that the coat was a little too large for her, and that the heels of her shoes were mudstained. He hesitated a moment then; but the memory of the surly look on the dissenting dairyman’s face kept Charles to his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not everybody in her world was a barbarian.
“Madam!”
She turned, to see him hatless, smiling; and although her expression was one of now ordinary enough surprise, once again that face had an extraordinary effect on him. It was as if after each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again. It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if he was a figure in a dream, both standing still and yet always receding.
“I owe you two apologies. I did not know yesterday that you were Mrs. Poulteney’s secretary. I fear I addressed you in a most impolite manner.”
She stared down at the ground. “It’s no matter, sir.”
“And just now when I seemed… I was afraid lest you had been taken ill.”
Still without looking at him, she inclined her head and turned to walk on.
“May I not accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction?”
She stopped, but did not turn. “I prefer to walk alone.”
“It was Mrs. Tranter who made me aware of my error. I am—”
“I know who you are, sir.”
He smiled at her timid abruptness. “Then…”
Her eyes were suddenly on his, and with a kind of despair beneath the timidity.
“Kindly allow me to go on my way alone.” His smile faltered. He bowed and stepped back. But instead of continuing on her way, she stared at the ground a moment. “And please tell no one you have seen me in this place.”
Then, without looking at him again, she did turn and go on, almost as if she knew her request was in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. Standing in the center of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was left with was the after-image of those eyes—they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more. And their directness of look—he did not know it, but it was the tract-delivery look he had received—contained a most peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not come near me, they said. Noli me tangere.
He looked round, trying to imagine why she should not wish it known that she came among these innocent woods. A man perhaps; some assignation? But then he remembered her story.
When Charles finally arrived in Broad Street, he decided to call at Mrs. Tranter’s on his way to the White Lion to explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent clothes he would…
The door was opened by Mary; but Mrs. Tranter chanced to pass through the hall—to be exact, deliberately came out into the hall—and insisted that he must not stand upon ceremony; and were not his clothes the best proof of his excuses? So Mary smilingly took his ashplant and his rucksack, and he was ushered into the little back drawing room, then shot with the last rays of the setting sun, where the invalid lay in a charmingly elaborate state of carmine-and-gray deshabille.
“I feel like an Irish navigator transported into a queen’s boudoir,” complained Charles, as he kissed Ernestina’s fingers in a way that showed he would in fact have made a very poor Irish navvy.
She took her hand away. “You shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for every moment of your day.”
He accordingly described everything that had happened to him; or almost everything, for Ernestina had now twice made it clear that the subject of the French Lieutenant’s Woman was distasteful to her—once on the Cobb, and then again later at lunch afterwards when Aunt Tranter had given Charles very much the same information as the vicar of Lyme had given Mrs. Poulteney twelve months before. But Ernestina had reprimanded her nurse-aunt for boring Charles with dull tittle-tattle, and the poor woman—too often summonsed for provinciality not to be alert to it—had humbly obeyed.
Charles produced the piece of ammonitiferous rock he had brought for Ernestina, who put down her fireshield and attempted to hold it, and could not, and forgave Charles everything for such a labor of Hercules, and then was mock-angry with him for endangering life and limb.
“It is a most fascinating wilderness, the Undercliff. I had no idea such places existed in England. I was reminded of some of the maritime sceneries of Northern Portugal.”
“Why, the man is tranced,” cried Ernestina. “Now confess, Charles, you haven’t been beheading poor innocent rocks—but dallying with the wood nymphs.”
Charles showed here an unaccountable moment of embarrassment, which he covered with a smile. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them about the girl; a facetious way of describing how he had come upon her entered his mind; and yet seemed a sort of treachery, both to the girl’s real sorrow and to himself. He knew he would have been lying if he had dismissed those two encounters lightly; and silence seemed finally less a falsehood in that trivial room.
It remains to be explained why Ware Commons had appeared to evoke Sodom and Gomorrah in Mrs. Poulteney’s face a fortnight before.
One needs no further explanation, in truth, than that it was the nearest place to Lyme where people could go and not be spied on. The area had an obscure, long and mischievous legal history. It had always been considered common land until the enclosure acts; then it was encroached on, as the names of the fields of the Dairy, which were all stolen from it, still attest. A gentleman in one of the great houses that lie behind the Undercliff performed a quiet Anschluss—with, as usual in history, the approval of his fellows in society. It is true that the more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms—if an axe is an arm. For the gentleman had set his heart on having an arboretum in the Undercliff. It came to law, and then to a compromise: a right of way was granted, and the rare trees stayed unmolested. But the commonage was done for.