Chapter 43

A WANDERER RETURNS

Ripe hay swelled in many a silver-russet billow, all brightened by the warm red of sorrel under sunshine. When the wind blew, ripples raced over the bending grasses, and from their midst shone out mauve scabious and flashed occasional poppies. The hot July air trembled agleam with shining insects, and drowsily over the hayfield, punctuated by stridulation of innumerable grasshoppers, there throbbed one sustained murmur, like the remote and mellow music of wood and strings. A lark still sang, and the swallows, whose full-fledged young thrust open beaks from the nests under Newtake eaves, skimmed and twittered above the grass lands, or sometimes dipped a purple wing in the still water where the irises grew.

Blanchard and young Ted Chown had set about their annual labour of saving the hay, and now a rhythmic breathing of two scythes and merry clink of whetstones against steel sounded afar on the sleepy summer air. The familiar music came to Phoebe's ear where she sat at an open kitchen window of Newtake. Her custom was at times of hay harvest to assist in the drying of the grass, and few women handled a fork better; but there had recently reached the farm an infant girl, and the mother had plenty to do without seeking beyond her cradle.

Phoebe made no demur about receiving Will's little foundling of the hut-circle. His heart's desire was usually her amibition also, and though Timothy, as the child had been called, could boast no mother's love, yet Phoebe proved a kind nurse, and only abated her attention upon the arrival of her own daughter. Then, as time softened the little mound in Chagford churchyard with young green, so before another baby did the mother's bereavement soften, sink deeper into memory, revive at longer intervals to conjure tears. Her character, as has been indicated, admitted of no supreme sustained sorrow. Suffer she did, and fiery was her agony; but another child brought occupation and new love; while her husband, after the first sentimental outburst of affection over the infant he had found at Metherill, settled into an enduring regard for him, associated him, by some mental process impossible of explanation, with his own lost one, and took an interest, blended of many curious emotions, in the child.

Drying hay soon filled the air with a pleasant savour, and stretched out grey-green ribbons along the emerald of the shorn meadows. Chown snuffled and sweated and sneezed, for the pollen always gave him hay fever; his master daily worked like a giant from dawn till the owl-light, drank gallons of cider, and performed wonders with the scythe. A great hay crop gladdened the moormen, and Will, always intoxicated by a little fair fortune, talked much of his husbandry, already calculated the value of the aftermath, and reckoned what number of beasts he might feed next winter.

"'Most looks as if I'd got a special gift wi' hay," he said to his mother on one occasion. She had let her cottage to holiday folk, and was spending a month on the Moor.

Mrs. Blanchard surveyed the scene from under her sunbonnet and nodded.

"Spare no trouble, no trouble, an' have it stacked come Saturday. Theer'll be thunder an' gert rains after this heat. Be the rushes ready for thatchin' of it?"

"Not yet; but that's not to say I've forgot."

"I'll cut some for 'e myself come the cool of the evenin'. An' you can send Ted with the cart to gather 'em up."

"No, no, mother. I'll make time to-morrow."

"'Twill be gude to me, an' like auld days, when I was a li'l maid. You sharp the sickle an' fetch the skeiner out, tu, for I was a quick hand at bindin' ropes o' rushes, an' have made many a yard of 'em in my time."

Then she withdrew from the tremendous sunshine, and Will, now handling a rake, proceeded with his task.

Two days later a rick began to rise majestically at the corner of Blanchard's largest field, while round about it was gathered the human life of the farm. Phoebe, with her baby, sat on an old sheepskin rug in the shadow of the growing pile; little Tim rollicked unheeded with Ship in the sweet grass, and clamoured from time to time for milk from a glass bottle; Will stood up aloft and received the hay from Chown's fork, while Mrs. Blanchard, busy with the "skeiner" stuck into the side of the rick, wound stout ropes of rushes for the thatching.

Then it was that Will, glancing out upon the Moor, observed a string of gypsy folk making slow progress towards Chagford. Among the various Romany cavalcades which thus passed Newtake in summer time this appeared not the least strange. Two ordinary caravans headed the procession. A man conducted each, a naked-footed child or two trotted beside them, and an elder boy led along three goats. The travelling homes were encumbered with osier-and cane-work, and following them came a little broken-down, open vehicle. This was drawn by two donkeys, harnessed tandem-fashion, and the chariot had been painted bright blue. A woman drove the concern, and in it appeared a knife-grinding machine and a basket of cackling poultry, while some tent-poles stuck out behind. Will laughed at this spectacle, and called his wife's attention to it, whereon Phoebe and Damaris went as far as the gate of the hayfield to win a nearer view. The gypsies, however, had already passed, but Mrs. Blanchard found time to observe the sky-blue carriage and shake her head at it.

"What gwaines-on! Theer's no master minds 'mongst them people nowadays," she said. "Your faither wouldn't have let his folk make a show of themselves like that."

"They 'm mostly chicken stealers nowadays," declared Will; "an' so surly as dogs if you tell 'em to go 'bout theer business."

"Not to none o' your name--never," declared his mother. "No gypsy's gwaine to forget my husband in his son's time. Many gude qualities have they got, chiefly along o' living so much in the awpen air."

"An' gude appetites for the same cause! Go after Tim, wan of 'e. He've trotted down the road half a mile, an' be runnin' arter that blue concern as if't was a circus. Theer! Blamed if that damned gal in the thing ban't stoppin' to let un catch up! Now he'm feared, an' have turned tail an' be coming back. 'Tis all right; Ship be wi' un."

Presently the greater of Will's two ricks approached completion, and all the business of thatch and spar gads and rush ropes began. At his mother's desire he wasted no time, and toiled on, long after his party had returned to Newtake; but with the dusk he made an end for that day, stood up, rested his back, and scanned the darkening scene before descending.

At eveningtide there had spread over the jagged western outlines of the Moor an orange-tawny sunset, whereon the solid masses of the hills burnt into hazy gold, all fairy-bright, unreal, unsubstantial as a cloud-island above them, whose solitary and striated shore shone purple through molten fire.

Detail vanished from the Moor; dim and dimensionless it spread to the transparent splendour of the horizon, and its eternal attributes of great vastness, great loneliness, great silence reigned together unfretted by particulars. Gathering gloom diminished the wide glory of the sky, and slowly robbed the pageant of its colour. Then rose each hill and undulation in a different shade of night, and every altitude mingled into the outlines of its neighbour. Nocturnal mists, taking grey substance against the darkness of the lower lands, wound along the rivers, and defined the depths and ridges of the valleys. Moving waters, laden with a last waning gleam, glided from beneath these vapoury exhalations, and even trifling rivulets, now invisible save for chance splashes of light, lacked not mystery as they moved from darkness into darkness with a song. Stars twinkled above the dewy sleep of the earth, and there brooded over all things a prodigious peace, broken only by batrachian croakings from afar.

These phenomena Will Blanchard observed; then yellow candle fires twinkled from the dark mass of the farmhouse, and he descended in splendid weariness and strode to supper and to bed.

Yet not much sleep awaited the farmer, for soon after midnight a gentle patter of small stones at his window awakened him. Leaping from his bed and looking into the darkness he saw a vague figure that raised its hand and beckoned without words. Fear for the hay was Will's first emotion, but no indication of trouble appeared. Once he spoke, and as he did so the figure beckoned again, then approached the door. Blanchard went down to find a woman waiting for him, and her first whispered word made him start violently and drop the candle and matches that he carried. His ears were opened and he knew Chris without seeing her face.

"I be come back--back home-along, brother Will," she said, very quietly. "I looked for mother to home, but found she weern't theer. An' I be sorry to the heart for all the sorrow I've brought 'e both. But it had to be. Strange thoughts an' voices was in me when Clem went, an' I had to hide myself or drown myself--so I went."

"God's gudeness! Lucky I be made o' strong stuff, else I might have thought 'e a ghost an' no less. Come in out the night, an' I'll light a candle. But speak soft. Us must break this very gentle to mother."

"Say you'll forgive me, will 'e? Can 'e do it? If you knawed half you'd say 'yes.' I'm grawed a auld, cold-hearted woman, wi' a grey hair here an' theer a'ready."

"So've I got wan an' another, tu, along o' worse sorrow than yours. Leastways as bad as yourn. Forgive 'e? A thousand times, an' thank Heaven you'm livin'! Wheer ever have 'e bided? An' me an' Grimbal searched the South Hams, an' North, tu, inside out for 'e, an' he put notices in the papers--dozens of 'em."

"Along with the gypsy folk for more 'n three year now. 'Twas the movin' an' rovin', and the opening my eyes on new things that saved me from gwaine daft. Sometimes us coined through Chagford, an' then I'd shut my eyes tight an' lie in the van, so's not to see the things his eyes had seen--so's not to knaw when us passed the cottage he lived in. But now I've got to feel I could come back again."

"You might have writ to say how you was faring."

"I didn't dare. You'd bin sure to find me, an' I didn't want 'e to then. 'Tis awver an' done, an' 'twas for the best."

"You'm a woman, an' can say them silly words, an' think 'em true in your heart, I s'pose. 'For the best!' I caan't see much that happens for the best under my eyes. Will 'e have bite or sup?"

"No, nothin'. You get back to your bed. Us'll talk in the marnin'. I'll bide here. You an' Phoebe be well, an'--an' dear mother?"

"We'm well. You doan't ax me after the fust cheel Phoebe had."

"I knaw. I put some violets theer that very night. We were camped just above Chagford, not far from here."

"Theer's a li'l gal now, an' a bwoy as I'll tell'e about bimebye. A sheer miracle't was that falled out the identical day I buried my Willy. No natural fashion of words can explain it. But that'll keep. Now let me look at'e. Fuller in the body seemin'ly, an' gypsy-brown, by God! So brown as me, every bit. Well, well, I caan't say nothin'. I'm carried off my legs wi' wonder, an' joy, tu, for that matter. Next to Phoebe an' mother I allus loved 'e best. Gimme a kiss. What a woman, to be sure! Like a thief in the night you went; same way you've comed back. Why couldn't 'e wait till marnin'?"

"The childer--they grawed to love me that dear--also the men an' women. They've been gude to me beyond power o' words for faither's sake. They knawed I was gwaine, an' I left 'em asleep. 'T was how they found me when I runned away. I falled asleep from weariness on the Moor, an' they woke me, an' I thrawed in my lot with them from the day I left that pencil-written word for 'e on the window-ledge."

"Me bein' in the valley lookin' for your drowned body the while! Women 'mazes me more the wiser I graw. Come this way, to the linhay. There's a sweet bed o' dry fern in the loft, and you must keep out o' sight till mother's told cunning. I'll hit upon a way to break it to her so soon as she's rose. An' if I caan't, Phoebe will. Come along quiet. An' I be gwaine to lock 'e in, Chris, if't is all the same to you. For why? Because you might fancy the van folks was callin' to 'e, an' grow hungry for the rovin' life again."

She made no objection, and asked one more question as they went to the building.

"How be Mrs. Hicks, my Clem's mother?"

"Alive; that's all. A poor auld bed-lier now; just fading away quiet. But weak in the head as a baaby. Mother sees her now an' again. She never talks of nothin' but snuff. 'T is the awnly brightness in her life. She's forgot everythin' 'bout the past, an' if you went to see her, she'd hold out her hand an' say, 'Got a little bit o' snuff for a auld body, dearie? 'an' that's all."

They talked a little longer, while Will shook down a cool bed of dry fern--not ill-suited to the sultry night; then Chris kissed him again, and he locked her in and returned to Phoebe.

Though the wanderer presently slept peacefully enough, there was little more repose that night for her brother or his wife. Phoebe herself became much affected by the tremendous news. Then they talked into the early dawn before any promising mode of presenting Chris to her mother occurred to them. At breakfast Will followed a suggestion of Phoebe's, and sensibly lessened the shock of his announcement.

"A 'mazin' wonnerful dream I had last night," he began abruptly. "I thought I was roused long arter midnight by a gert knocking, an' I went down house an' found a woman at the door. 'Who be you?' I sez. 'Why, I be Chris, brother Will,' she speaks back, 'Chris, come home-along to mother an' you.' Then I seed it was her sure enough, an' she telled me all about herself, an' how she'd dwelt wi' gypsy people. Natural as life it weer, I assure 'e."

This parable moved Mrs. Blanchard more strongly than Will expected. She dropped her piece of bread and dripping, grew pale, and regarded her son with frightened eyes. Then she spoke.

"Tell me true, Will; don't 'e play with a mother 'bout a life-an'-death thing like her cheel. I heard voices in the night, an' thought 't was a dream--but--oh, bwoy, not Chris, not our awn Chris!--'t would 'most kill me for pure joy, I reckon."

"Listen to me, mother, an' eat your food. Us won't have no waste here, as you knaw very well. I haven't tawld 'e the end of the story. Chris, 'pearin' to be back again, I thinks, 'this will give mother palpitations, though 't is quite a usual thing for a darter to come back to her mother,' so I takes her away to the linhay for the night an' locks her in; an' if 't was true, she might be theer now, an' if it weer n't--"

Damaris rose, and held the table as she did so, for her knees were weak under her.

"I be strong--strong to meet my awn darter. Gimme the key, quick--the key, Will--do 'e hear me, child?"

"I'll come along with 'e."

"No, I say. What! Ban't I a young woman still? 'T was awnly essterday Chris corned in the world. You just bide with Phoebe, an' do what I tell 'e."

Will handed over the key at this order, and Mrs. Blanchard, grasping it without a word, passed unsteadily across the farmyard. She fumbled at the lock, and dropped the key once, but picked it up quickly before Will could reach her, then she unfastened the door and entered.