Grey Wethers: A Romantic NovelSackville-West, V. (Victoria)
General
Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel
Sackville-West, V. (Victoria)
Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Romance fiction; Social classes -- Fiction
He took her into his house, where during the whole time of their
engagement he had never allowed her to come. They were in the dark cold
passage, at the end of which, in the sun, opened the little square
of garden where Lovel like any other cottager grew his cabbages,
his patch of flowers, his gooseberries, and his beans. Daisy became
excited again; she forgot Gorwyn, she forgot her discouragement and
her jealousy; she was a woman brought for the first time to her home.
She peered about her with interest, while Lovel shut the door, and the
passage became quite dark but for the door at the further end opening
bright arch-wise on to the garden. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “I can’t
see and it’s cold; leave open the door.” “For all the village to spy in
upon us?” he returned, and she perceived that in this as in everything
else he would have his way. “It’s more friendly,” she ventured, but he
did not move towards it, and she desisted: after all, she had got him,
she had fooled him, the score so far was heavily in her favour; if she
let him have his way now, she would get him more completely in the end.
“It’s rather cold,” she said nevertheless, repressing a shiver, and,
hearing a small chuckle in the shadows behind her, she turned and saw
Olver crouched up against the wall.
“Take me into the kitchen!” she cried, pressing herself against Lovel.
Kitchen! the word was reassuring; her mother had kept a spruce,
spacious kitchen, where bottled fruit stood ranged on shelves, and
trays of floury scones stood on the scrubbed deal table, and the big
Parliament clock tick-tocked in comfortable regularity against the
wall. Very different was the room to which Lovel sarcastically admitted
her; she stopped with the dismay of the conventional person suddenly
confronted with rebel views. She was shocked as at something unseemly
and profane. “Oh,” she cried, “but this isn’t a kitchen?”
She turned as though to make her escape; before her was the room with
its walls of rough stone, its rafters, shadows and cobwebs, behind
her was Lovel in the doorway and the dark passage beyond him, with
Olver crouching in it. She stared round her, and was met everywhere by
silence. “I don’t like it!” she cried in shrill terror. Lovel continued
to look at her without speaking. “Mother! dad!” she cried, “I want to
go home!” She rushed to Lovel and beat her hands against his chest.
His physical contact recalled her, and she began to sob. “Nicholas,
Nicholas,” she sobbed, “I love you, I don’t understand.” She sobbed
against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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