The room which had gone very still breathed again. Mr. Glennville chuckled openly from his chair. The daagger by the fire did not open her eyes, but the corner of her mouth curved, and Arament Vain, thoroughly and publicly disarmed, for what could she do in the face of such sunny goodwill, but simply retreat, withdrew her hands and her smile together, and said that yes, of course, she should be delighted, how charming, and sat down to her tea with a hard bright light in her eyes that Winston did not at all like the look of.
Later, when the Vanes had gone, he found Sidwell alone on the gallery, looking out at the sea going dark, and he came and stood beside her, and for a while neither of them spoke.
"She means to make trouble," Sidwell said at last, without turning. "That one. She looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird it has decided is not quite out of reach. She wanted you, I think, or wanted the being a duchess of you, which is not the same, but does the same damage when it is thwarted." She was quiet a moment. "She will dig, Winston. Women like that always dig. And there is a great deal to find, is there not? If one digs at us, a false engagement is a fragile thing. It wants only one loose thread pulled hard enough."
"Then we shall give her nothing to pull." He said it steadily, but the steadiness cost him. Because standing there beside her in the failing light, with the whole warm, improbable fortnight behind them, and her fond mischievous face from the drawing room still burning in his mind, he was becoming afraid, genuinely, coldly afraid of a thing he had not reckoned with when he made his tidy bargain on the terrace. He was afraid that the loose thread Aramain would find, if she dug long enough, would not be the falseness of the engagement at all. It would be that it had somewhere in these three weeks, without his leave, and against every term of the agreement, quietly and entirely stopped being false on his side of it, at least, and that was a thread he did not know how or whether he could bear to have pulled.
The weather broke at the end of the third week, and out of the clear cold that followed the rain, Winston proposed, on an impulse he did not examine, to show Sidwell the whole of Foss Cliff, not the house, which she already knew better than he did, but the land, the home farm, the tenants cottages, the long gray beach below the cliffs, where a man could walk for a mile at low tide, and meet no one but gulls. He told himself it was necessary to the performance, that a betrothed couple would naturally be seen abroad together, that the tenants ought to meet their future duchess. He did not tell himself the truer thing, which was that he wanted her to himself for a whole day out from under the watching portraits and the watching county, in the one part of his inheritance he had ever loved.
They rode out after breakfast with a groom trailing at a discrete and respectable distance. And the day was one of those rare bright washed ones the coast throws up after a storm. The sea gone a hard glittering blue, the air so clean it hurt. And Winston, who had ridden this ground a thousand times, alone and grim, found that riding it beside Sidwell Glennville turned every familiar thing into something he had never properly seen.
She wanted to meet everyone at the home farm. She was off her horse before he could hand her down, admiring a litter of pups and interrogating the farmer's wife about the failed cheese and the flooded pasture, and the woman, who had curtsied to Winston in stiff terror for 11 years, was soon laughing with Sidwell over the churn like an old friend.
At the row of cottages by the mill, she remembered, she had heard it once in passing from the steward, that old Mrs. Tur's chimney smoked and she said so and turned to Winston and said would he see it mended plainly as a matter of course as though the disposal of a duke's masons were the most natural thing for her to command and he heard himself say yes of course at once and saw the old woman's astonished gratitude and understood with a strange lurch that Sidwell had just done more good on his land in one morning than he had managed with all his grim conscientious stewardship in a decade. He had governed Fosscliffe like a debt to be paid. She moved through it like a woman among neighbors.
They came midway through the morning upon the cottage of a widower named Hulleran, whose roof had gone in the storm, and who was, when they found him, upon his own ladder in the raw wind, trying to lash a tarpaulin over the hole with hands too old and too cold for the work. Winston would have ridden past with a note to the steward. He had a hundred such repairs in hand and a system for them, and a duke did not, as a rule, dismount to hold a tenant's ladder. Sidwell was off her horse, and steadying the foot of it, before he had finished framing the note in his mind, calling up to the old man in a voice of such cheerful command that Howerin came down without argument, and let her send the groom up in his place, and stood in his own doorway, blinking at the two visitors, as though the sky had opened.
"You'll take the man's ladder and finish it properly," Sidwell told Winston low, while the old fellow fetched a jug. "And you'll send Corrant tomorrow with slates and a mason. And you'll do it because he is 70 and alone and too proud to ask, and because a roof is not a favor. It is the least a landlord owes. And while the groom finishes, you are going to go in and sit with him and drink whatever dreadful thing he pours you, and let him tell you about his son who went for a soldier, because I can see from here that no one has sat with him in a very long time. And it costs you nothing but an hour, and it is worth more to him than the whole roof."
"You have known this man for 4 minutes," Winston said.
"I have known a hundred like him," she said. "So have you. You simply rode past them." But she said it without unkindness. And she took his arm and steered him in under the mended lintel. And Winston, Duke of Foss Cliffe, who did not sit in tenants cottages, sat for an hour on a three-legged stool drinking cider that could have stripped paint, listening to a lonely old man talk about a soldier son, and found to his considerable disquiet.
When they came out at last, the roof sound above them and the old man standing straighter in his doorway than he had for a year, Winston looked at his betrothed across the little garden and said roughly because he did not know how else to say it, "I have held this land 11 years and never once done that."