Page:Sons and Lovers, 1913, Lawrence.djvu/246

234 heliotrope. I would have ‘W.S.P.U.’ emblazoned on my shield, beneath a woman rampant.”

“I have no doubt,” said Clara, “that you would much rather fight for a woman than let her fight for herself.”

“I would. When she fights for herself she seems like a dog before a looking-glass, gone into a mad fury with its own shadow.”

“And you are the looking-glass?” she asked, with a curl of the lip.

“Or the shadow,” he replied.

“I am afraid,” she said, “that you are too clever.”

“Well, I leave it to you to be good,” he retorted, laughing. “Be good, sweet maid, and just let me be clever.”

But Clara wearied of his flippancy. Suddenly, looking at her, he saw that the upward lifting of her face was misery and not scorn. His heart grew tender for everybody. He turned and was gentle with Miriam, whom he had neglected till then.

At the wood’s edge they met Limb, a thin, swarthy man of forty, tenant of Strelley Mill, which he ran as a cattle-raising farm. He held the halter of the powerful stallion indifferently, as if he were tired. The three stood to let him pass over the stepping-stones of the first brook. Paul admired that so large an animal should walk on such springy toes, with an endless excess of vigour. Limb pulled up before them.

“Tell your father, Miss Leivers,” he said, in a peculiar piping voice, “that his young beas’es ’as broke that bottom fence three days an’ runnin’.”

“Which?” asked Miriam, tremulous.

The great horse breathed heavily, shifting round its red flanks, and looking suspiciously with its wonderful big eyes upwards from under its lowered head and falling mane.

“Come along a bit,” replied Limb, “an’ I’ll show you.”

The man and the stallion went forward. It danced sideways, shaking its white fetlocks and looking frightened, as it felt itself in the brook.

“No hanky-pankyin’,” said the man affectionately to the beast.

It went up the bank in little leaps, then splashed finely through the second brook. Clara, walking with a kind of sulky abandon, watched it half-fascinated, half-contemptuous. Limb stopped and pointed to the fence under some willows.