Book Four

C H A P T E R O N E: _Harvest Home_

NEVER in all my days did I see a corn harvest like that one. We started swiving, that is reaping, at the beginning of August-month, and we left the stocks standing in the fields till it should be time for the love-carriage, for the weather was so fine that they took no harm. It was the custom, if a farmer hadna much strength about him, that he should fix on a day for the neighbours to come and give a hand in the lugging of the grain. But up to that time, the weather being so good, we worked alone. It was up in the morning early, and no mistake! Such mornings as they were, too, with a strong heady sweetness in the air from the ripened corn, and the sun coming up stately as a swan into the vasty sky that had no cloud. Mother was very peärt and lively, what with the hot weather, which was good for the rheumatics, and the thought of the easing-off of the work which was to come when the harvest was gotten in. She’d be up and about at five, getting us our breakfast, and then off we’d go, with only just enough of clo’es on to be decent, and with our wooden harvest bottles full of small beer. We always had a brewing for the rep, that is, the reaping. This year we brewed a deal more, for there’d be all the neighbours to find in victuals and drink at the love-carriage. Looking back, it always seems to me that there was a kind of dwelling charm on all that time. Gideon was more contented than I’ve ever seen him, for there were two things that contented him, namely, to work till he dropped, and to finish what he set out to do. To see all his farm set with these rich stooks, sound and ripe, with never a sign of the weevil nor of mildew nor the smut, was very life to him. He was all of a fever to get it safe in stack, but we were bound to wait till the day fixed. Jancis was to come on that day, to help in the leasing. And it seemed to me as she ought to go atop of the last load with blossoms about her, like the image they were used to set up there, for she seemed a part of the harvest, with all that pink and gold.

As for me, I went all dazed and dumb with wonder. To think it was true. “The Maister be come!” To think as he’d looked at me and hadna hated me! To think as all that time we spent in the midst of the painted dragon-flies by the mere was true, as true as daily bread! When I called to mind the things he’d said, and still more the things he’d looked, I was like to swound. Dear to goodness, how I did sing, those early dawns, when the dews lay heavy after a ketch of frost, and the corn rustled and stirred in the wind of morning!

When we went out, the leaves of the late-blooming white clover would be folded tight, and the shepherd’s hour-glass shut. I’d watch them, in the minutes I took for rest, opening soft and slow like timid hearts. Then Mother would come with our nooning, creeping over the fields in her black like a little sad-coloured bird, and sometimes singing _Barley Bridge_ in her old, small voice, that yet was sweet. Then, after the noon-spell, through the long, blazing evening, (for with us all the time after noon is calling evening) I’d watch the shepherd’s hour-glass shutting up again, and the white clover leaves, folding as the dews came. We took turns to go whome and milk, then we’d have our tea in the field, and at it again. All the while I thought of Kester, as would soon be working at the coloured weaving in the great city. But when my heart said he was working for me as well as hisself, I hushed it, saying that it was but his flaming look that made me think it, for he hadna said it, and so it was only that the wish fathered the thought. But I did dream of the fifty pounds I was to have, a great fortune, it seemed. And I did plan how I’d get to be cured as quick as might be, so when Kester came back after his time away I’d stand afore him with as proper a face as even Felena, though I hoped not so forrard.

At last the day of the love-carriage came, and a tremendous blue day it was, with a sky like a dark bowl, Worcester china colour. We’d got fifty people coming, no less, counting the women-folk. I was up afore dawn getting all ready, setting the china, both ours and what we’d borrowed, on the trestles in the orchard, helping Gideon to put the casks of beer in the yard, ready for the men to fill their harvest bottles, and fetching water from the well for the tea. The orchard was a sight to see when the trestles were set out (for I could put all ready with no fear of rain on such a day) with the mugs and platters of many colours, and the brown quartern loaves, and the big pats of butter stamped with a swan, and the slabs of honeycomb, dough cakes, gingerbread, cheese, jam and jelly, let alone the ham at one end of each trestle and the round of beef at the other. Even Gideon didna begrutch the food on this day. For it was one of the laws you couldna break, that at a love-carriage everybody must have his bellyful.

It was very early when the waggons began to roll into the fold, with a solemn gladsome sound, and each with its own pair of horses or oxen. Each farmer brought his own men and his own waggon, and sometimes he brought two. The teams were decked out with ribbons and flowers, and some had a motto as well, such as, “Luck to our Day,” or “God bless the Corn.” It was a fine thing to see the big horses, with great manes on their fetlocks, groomed till they shone like satin, stepping along as proud as Lucifer, knowing very well how long the waggoner had been, a-plaiting their ribbons. The oxen were good to see also, for their horns were all bedecked, and about their necks were thick chains of Sweet William and Travellers’ Joy and corn. Miller came among the first, with his gig and the old coach horse, the best he had, poor man. And very good work they did, too, for it’s surprising what a deal you can get onto a gig if you put a set of wings on top.

It was time for me to go and give the folks welcome, so I got Miller’s Tim to mind the trestles, and left him with a big meat patty, sitting at the top of one of the tables, with half the patty in one cheek, ready to drive away birds and cats and dogs, and even goblins out of fairyland, after the patty. The ox-driver from Plash had dizened his beasts up proper, with bulrushes nodding on their horns, and there were Sukey and Moll each riding one. Their mother wasna coming till late, and they were wild as mountain finches. Then came Felena, riding the shepherd’s rough pony, with the panniers to put her leasings in. When I saw those green eyes of hers shining like jewels in her brown face, all flushed with summer, and the long, slim shoulders of her, and that red mouth, I almost hoped Kester would forget to come after all. Missis Beguildy and Jancis came, but Beguildy wouldna. The cousin from Lullingford that got the toothache so bad came, and his missus. Then there were Callards, all packed in a great harvest wain, and a net over the five children, so that they looked for all the world like little calves on the way to market. Granfeyther Callard sat by his son, dressed out in his best snuff-coloured coat, and his beaver hat, for all it was so hot. There was a posy in his hat, which he waved like a lad as they came creaking in at the fold gate, shouting—

“Harroost! Harroost! Never was such God A’mighty’s weather!”

He always said harroost, it being the old way of saying harvest. Then came Sexton, tall and black, a bit sour, but the best man of his age with a pikel anywhere round. Missis Sexton had a vast apron of blue gingham, with pockets, for leasing, and it made her look bigger than ever. It did seem a blasphemy to speak of her leasing, as if Solomon in all his glory had put on an apron and gathered up the ears.

Tivvy was dressed out very grand, as often was the way of girls at such “_dos_” as this, for a “_do_” was a thing that came but seldom, and where else but church, where all but bonnets was swallowed by the pew, could you show your gown with the flounces, or your gown that was cut low?

Tivvy had a straw bonnet with quilled muslin under, a sprigged gown cut low with a rose at the breast, white stockings and new black sandal-shoes. Jancis was pretty past telling in her blue poplin and a sunbonnet, and Sukey and Moll had tight frocks of white cotton with red roses sprinkled on them.

The Callard children ran about like a clutch of chickens when you empty ’em out of the basket, but Miller’s Tim was as mim as a mute, feeling so grand to be trusted with all the feast to mind. Missis Miller and Polly, I may say, came first of all, and there was Miller’s man as well, and Sexton’s Sammy, a queer, long lad like an eel, with twice as many teeth as he wanted, and a power of texts in his head that ud fly out at you on every excuse, and hit you like a startle-de-buz will on a summer evening. It seemed as if all the texts his dad had ever read had lodged in his big head, and so he’d always got one pat.

“Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest to send down labourers into His harvest,” he says. But the publican from the _Mug o’ Cider_, whose missus was looking after the bar so he could come, Gideon being like to be a good customer in the future, catched him up very quick.

“Dunna begin the prayers till I’ve had a quart, lad,” he says, “for they might be answered, you being Sexton’s lad, and I’m welly parched.”

The men gathered together by the beer barrels, and as more came, they went and got their beer. Towler came, and shepherd, Felena’s maister, a tall, brown man, all bones, striding with his long kibba, which is a stick of six foot or so, to walk with, held about the middle.

“Well, shepherd!” pipes up Granfeyther Callard, “han you seed the sun dance yet, Easter morning, on thy mountain?”

Shepherd took no notice, for being with the dumb sheep so much, he was pretty near as silent as the miller, though not quite, for nobody could be. But the father of Moll and Sukey said—

“Nay, but ’tis his missus sees the moon dance, midsummer as we know well.”

“When she dances with the devil!” screeched Sukey.

“And not the devil only,” says Missis Sexton.

Felena didna seem to care. She was standing by me, and she whispered that she’d liefer dance, whoever it was with, and be jimp and souple, than be as stiff as a tombstone like Missis Sexton.

“She brought him up into the high place of Baal, Numbers twenty-two,” said Sammy. And after that there didna seem anything more to say about it.

Gideon came up to settle each man’s work, and he looked right well in his nice clean smock, well broidered, with the sleeves rolled up to show his great arms, and a pikel over shoulder.

“Now, Gaffer!” pipes up old Callard. “What bin ’e going to give I to do?”

“You shall go atop of the waggon I sarve,” says Sexton, “if ye promise to take as quick as I chuck.”

There was a laugh, for nobody ever liked the job of settling the sheaves Sexton heaved, he being the quickest heaver anywhere round, and never tiring.

“Oh,” says Mug o’ Cider, “we’ll put you on the leader of the foremost waggon for a lucky image, wunna we, lads? You can holler _Haw-woop!_ and _Jiggin!_ and be a sight more use than any of us.”

The old man took this as a great compliment, and nought would do but his son must help him up there and then.

“Well, lads,” says Gideon, “we’d best be shifting if we’re to bring the harvest whome this day.”

“Harroost! Harroost!” calls out old Callard. “_Haw-whop!_”

Obedient to the word, the lead-horse went forrard, and all the waggons and carts moved slow past the house. Mother stood on the door-sill, nodding and smiling, and saying—

“Thank you for us, I’m sure! My son Sarn’ll be obleeged to ye.”

So we went out under the blue sky to lug home the corn, the big waggons with solid wheels rolling over the stubble, Granfeyther Callard shouting “_Jiggin!_” when he meant “_Haw-woop!_” being quite tipsy with enjoyment, and causing a great confusion, the horses not knowing what to do. The rest of us followed on, strung out over the fields in bright colours, children and dogs running hither and thither, while in the rickyard the men told off to make the stacks put the logs in place ready for the stacks to be built on, got all prepared against the first waggon came back loaded high with grain, and then stood leaning on their pikels, talking over the work of the coming day, each man as busy about the planning of it all as if the harvest was his’n, and each man as glad of the grain as if he was to have the selling of it. For that was the manner of the love-carriages in time past.

In the noon-spell I went up to the high pasture, to see if there was any sign of Kester. He was coming across the far meadows, by a field path, and I stayed so long watching him, who was all the world to me, that they’d started work again afore I went back. It was a pretty thing to see, in such a place, on such a day. The farm being all under corn now, it looked like a boss of gold in the dark woods and meadows around. And all the bright colours of the women’s gowns, the creamy smocks and a tuthree coloured shirts of the men, the shining horses and deep-coloured oxen, the yellow stooks with blue shadows under, the towering yellow loads on the wains, made up such a picture as you wunna often see in a lifetime, anyway in these days.

It was merry to hear, also. The voices rang so sweet in the thin, still air. I could hear old Callard’s “_Haw-woop!_” and “_Jiggin!_” and the other men’s shouts, and Jancis laughing out high and sweet at summat Gideon did say, and the children crying out, “Mother, I’ve gotten two pinnies full now!” “Mam, I’ve found six ears together!” From the rickyard came the far calls of the rickmakers, and, times, a pigeon cooed in the deep woods, where the mere lay like glass, and, times, a jay would scold, or a woodpecker laugh out. Never a cloud was in the sky, nor any hint of trouble in the little airs that stirred in the leavy hedges. And there, two fields off, one field off, and now in the same field, was the man I could never think about but in those words, “The Maister be come.”

From a long way off he saw me, and waved his hat, so that the well-shapen head I did love was bare, with the dark hair just so upon it, that you must long to stroke it.

I came down from the high pasture and stood beside Gideon’s waggon, knowing that Kester would come to get his orders from the maister of the day.

There was some chaff, Kester being so late.

“Weaver’s forgot the day and come to-morrow instead!”

“Dunna be so forrard, Weaver, come on Plough Monday!”

“He bin late, but he bin full of power and might and young blood,” said old Callard, for nobody of that family would ever hear a word against Kester.

“The last shall be fust, and the fust last, Matthew twenty,” says Sammy.

“Luck to the day, Gaffer!” Kester called to Gideon.

“And thank you kind for coming,” answers Gideon.

“What be I to do?”

“Ever done any harvesting?”

“Ah.”

“Can ye pitch?”

“Ah.”

“Well then, you take my place a bit while I go the rounds, oot? Sexton’s tother side from you, and he’s a terrible quick pitcher. But you canna be too quick for young Callard and Towler.”

“But mind not to push pikel too fur when the load be low,” called old Callard, “for I mind once a fellow did that, and he stuck it right into the chap atop. Ah! like a piece of toast on toasting-fork he was, poor fellow, and hollered so that the team bolted, ooth the pikel still in.”

But Kester did very well and made toast of none. His eyes would laugh at me now and again, and once, when the empty waggon tarried, he came where I was leasing, and said—

“You still go frommet me a bit, I see, Prue Sarn. It mun be toerts, not frommet.”

I put the ears this way and that way, but no words came.

Then he said, slow, with a laugh at the back of his voice, but with a cosseting sound as well—

“There, there, my dear! None shall touch you now!”

All the strong life of the man was gathered in his eyes, and blazing full on me. So he’d heard! Folk do sometimes when they seem nigh dead. He’d heard and remembered the words I’d said when his head was on my bosom and my heart was all rent with love. What could I say? Nought. Where could I hide my burning face, that his eyes did so dwell on? Nowhere at all.

“Hi, Weaver!” they called. “Waggon be come and we be hindered for ye!”

“I never knew a mother’s love, nor yet a sister’s, nor yet a sweetheart’s.” He said it ever so softly, but despert earnest, so that the words burnt in. “But if I had, I should have forgot ’em all three when you said those words to me, Prue Sarn!”

With that, he turned sharp and went back to the waggon.

What a day that was! Gold? I should think it _was_ gold! I leased and leased, and it was just as if every armful was some precious, heavenly treasure. Nearly all the fields were clean and bare when we had our tea under the hedge shade, for it grew no cooler as the shadows lengthened, being one of those mid-September days when all the gathered warmship of the summer seems to be spent and squandered in love of the golden grain.

The sun was low in heaven and the harvest-beer low in cask when Mother banged the tray for me to come and help with the urns for supper. They were loading the last waggon, and I told Tim, who’d been a good, faithful watcher, that he could go to the field and ride home atop along with the other children, in the triumph. Then we brought out the urns, and the cask of home-brewed, very strong and good, and set about cutting up the meat and bread.

We heard ’em shouting from the fields, and in a while there it came, the biggest waggon, with Jancis’s white oxen and the oxen from Plash lugging it, Granfeyther Callard driving, all the children on top, and Jancis with them, waving green boughs and bunches of poppies, and Gideon, looking taller than customary in his smock, walking glad and solemn beside the load.

Deary me, how the tears do spring! Tears like Mother and I shed then, for the joy of it all, and other tears, for what came to pass after. For if in the mid of that great golden day you’d sent a sough of wind, and a mutter, and black clouds running up the sky, and darkness and thunder and forkit lightning, it couldna have been worse nor less expected than the storm that broke on us so soon.

The waggon came on, and all the people followed, singing and shouting, till they came to the gate of the rickyard.

There stood Parson, with Mother and me close by, to bless the corn.

“People!” he said, “let us give thanks for daily bread!”

And all the people said—

“We give thanks unto the Lord.”

“God bless the corn and the master of Sarn,” says Parson, “and may his good deeds return unto him as doves to their mountains.”

“Amen!” said the people.

“Missis Sarn bids me say that the feast is spread in the orchard, and all are welcome,” said Parson.

Gideon stepped forrard.

“The harvest’s whome, friends, and thank ye kindly,” he said. “Let every man who’s lent a hand claim task-work of me from this on, till I’ve paid my debt.”

We sate at the trestles in the long light of sunset. At least, the company did, but we at the urns were kept busy enough and hadna much time to sit down.

“Well, Weaver,” says Mug o’ Cider, “I hear tell as they’re making it pretty warm for ye, for stopping the bull-baiting. But I bear no grutch, I’m sure.”

“Nor yet me. I like a man that likes a dawg,” says Towler.

“Nor yet me,” says Mister Callard from the next table.

“But there’s some not to hold nor to bind,” said Mug o’ Cider. “I hear ’em in the bar, nights. Oh, I say nought! Landlord’s a dumb dog with pricket ears. Ah! That’s landlord. But they mean ye no good, Weaver. It’ll go hard but they’ll take thy work away if they can. And if they can do a spite to you and yours, they ool. They’ve worked on Squire, too.”

“I know, thank ye kindly all the same,” said Kester. “It was Squire I was hindered for to-day. He wanted to buy my cottage. Nothing would do but he must buy it. He knows very well that if he did he’d soon turn me out of the place, for all the rest belong to him or friends of his’n. Offered me a deal of money, did Squire.”

“Shall you consider it over?”

“Dear to goodness, no! I shall bide.”

There was something very pleasant to me in the way he said that. It was as if he builded a tower of refuge afore my eyes. He met go for a little while, a year even, but for his life-long he’d bide. And it was only fifteen mile away, and less as the crow flies.

“And _you’d_ best look out, too, Prue Sarn,” says Mug o’ Cider. “Grimble took it very ill, you knifing his dawg. Not but what you did it well, I must say. I’m sure any farmer as kills his own meat ud be glad of ye, or you met go for a doctor’s mon and do right well.”

“Mine said she couldna believe it when Prue Sarn drave the knife in,” went on the landlord. “Thought she’d seen a ghostly vision, her did. Said a feather would have knocked her down, her did. Which shows it must have bin pretty bad for it inna easy to knock the missus down, she’s like a bouncing ball.”

“I do wish I’d been there,” said Sukey. “I’d have knifed the dog for ye in a minute, Mister Woodseaves. What did I give ye at the Beguildy’s love-spinning, Mister Woodseaves?”

“Play kiss in the ring with us after, Mister Woodseaves!” says Moll. “You kiss right well, I know!”

Felena leant forrard across the narrow table.

“Oot play?” she said. “Oot play, Weaver?”

Just then there was a call from the next table.

“Husht, husht! Sexton’s going to say a few words.”

When Sexton spoke, the four walls of the church seemed to grow up round you, and you could smell the damp, musty smell of it, and hear the flies plaining in the windows. For whether he was reading, “He took unto him a wife and begat Aminadab,” or “The golden bowl be broken,” or speaking at a harvest supper, it was all the same.

“Friends,” says Sexton, “we’ve had a good day. I’m sartin there’s not a man among us as hanna sweated proper, even Granfeyther Callard has, I’ll be bound.”

“Oh, ah! I sweated right well!” calls out the old man, very pleased.

“And now we be enjoying good victuals and drink, and after that a game or two—”

“The people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play, Exodus thirty-two.”

This was Sammy.

Sexton looked very angrily at his missus, as much as to say—

“Stop Sammy!” and she said—

“Husht, Sammy! Feyther’s speaking. Dunna you forget as you can only call to mind other folks’ words, but Feyther makes it all up new as he goes on.”

She settled down again to watching Sexton, for all the world like a cat watching a whirring wheel.

“I say we’ve had a good day, and Sarn’s had a good harvest, and I ask ye for why? Because he’s industrious, people, and his sister’s industrious, and his mother’s industrious. You couldna find in ten parishes a more industrious family. Not like some I could mention, as never do a hand’s turn, coddling about with old ancient wicked books. Ah! There’s some I could mention, as I dunna see the face of here to-day, that a bit of work would be the saving of. Well, neighbours, we all know as God helps those that help theirselves, and when we look at all them grand ricks of grain, I’m sure we see it’s true. And we wish you well, Sarn. And I’m in behopes the young woman’ll be industrious too. For I hear tell the next randy we come to at Sarn is to be a wedding. And may it bring more prosperation and not less, though of course we may think our thoughts, knowing where she’s from and what’s bred in the bone’ll come out in the flesh—”

But fortunately there was a stir when he got to that, and a call from the other tables—

“There’s two riders at the gate.”

And there was the young squire, and Miss Dorabella with him. They rode across the orchard, and the young man called out, “Give you good evening, folks, and luck to the corn!”

For he was ever hail-fellow-well-met with all men, I’ll say that for un, and it made him well liked.

Miss Dorabella seemed quite to forget she’d quarrelled with Gideon. She drew up by his table and smiled, sparkling her black eyes.

“Well, Sarn,” she said, “you’ve worked your will with the farm, I see. You’ve got a desperate good crop. Are you going to offer us a drink of harvest beer, to drink your health?”

I could see she admired him for a strong man, which he was. I never met but one stronger. And I could see that the Squire had told her to make it up with Gideon, and very likely sent young Mister Camperdine to see she did it for it was common property that she’d sarved him wi’ sauce at the _Mug o’ Cider_, and the Squire couldna afford to lose a man that was like to do well. Gideon looked at her straight and sullen, but she kept on smiling for all that, a bit conquering and a bit pleading. Then they gave her up the best pewter measure full of ale, and she says—

“Health and prosperation, Sarn!”

Then she tossed it off, for she could drink ale with any man, and in those days it wunna so long since ale was a lady’s only breakfast drink. Then she gave back the measure and leaned down, holding out her hand, stripping off the grand gauntlet, and she says—

“Your hand, Sarn!”

Well, he was done then, for he couldna refuse a lady’s hand. So he took it in his great fist, and young Mister Camperdine nodded, as if to say she’d done enough now, and she put on her glove again. All the while I saw Jancis looking at her in a way that meant she was frit of her, and also that she couldna abide her. But looking at Miss Dorabella, with that sort of stony handsomeness she’d got, and then at Jancis, so soft and pinky-sweet, it didna seem to me that Jancis had much to be afraid of. They gave young Mister Camperdine some ale then, and when he’d wished well and drunk it, he said—

“I thought maybe Beguildy was here, but I don’t glimpse him.”

Missis Beguildy stood up and curtsied.

“No, sir, he inna here, though a should be. And you’d best not look for ’im at home, sir, for I doubt you wouldna find ’im. But if you come to-day’s a week——”

I thought that was right clever of Missis Beguildy. She wanted to give Gideon and Jancis time, and to keep the young gentleman away as long as she durst, while she thought how to manage Beguildy.

“Right!” calls out the young fellow as they rode off.

“To-day week, and mind Venus is there!”

Jancis began to giggle at that. She always did at any mention of the silly affair. And it seemed so funny to her that he should be enquiring so anxious after the very woman his cousin had sarved wi’ sauce, and she at table all the while. But I crouched down on the bench, to seem short, and not to let him see my shape, so that Jancis went off into a fit of laughter again, and said I looked for all the world like a broody hen. We had some sport together over the young squire. Then up came Missis Beguildy, very put-about, wondering what to do with Beguildy till the wedding day was safely come. All of a sudden she thought of summat, and laughed and slapped herself till I thought she’d be took ill.

“Dear now, I’ve thought of it!” she says. “I’ll ask my cousin from Lullingford, as is here by the mercy of God, to send a message to my maister this very night, to say as hers is took ill (I mun think what he’s to have. Summat cruel bad!) and as there’s no cure but the old famous cure, to eat seven loaves baked at one baking by the seventh child of a seventh child, and she’s to offer good money (you can pay after you be wed, Jancis, for you’ll be having butter-money or summat) and off he’ll go, dang-swang, to look for a seventh of a seventh, and it’ll go hard but we’ll be in peace till Michaelmas.”

“Oh, mother,” says Jancis, giving her a kiss, “you’d ought to have been a great general to ride along with Lord Wellington and lay traps for Frenchmen!”

It was all fixed up before the games and dancing began, and I felt sorry for Beguildy till I remembered what a wicked old man he was, wanting to sell his child unwilling.

By this it was near dark, and the moon rising, big and raddled. They got together a dozen fellows, mostly middle-aged or old, to whistle for the dancing. They danced in the rickyard, among the stacks of golden corn, sweeping up the straw with besoms first. Old Callard had been chosen for a whistler, and very proud he was, for being the oldest he chose the tunes and set the measure, and so he could feel that all the merry life in a manner depended on him, which is pleasing to old folks.

“_Barley Bridge!_” he says.

The pretty tune sounded out clear on the quiet air.

I was standing under one of the stacks, watching. It was a gay thing to see. Gideon was dancing, holding Jancis close and strong. Missis Sexton was sailing about, and Felena too, jimp as a fairy. Even Mother made shift to dance a few steps.

The twelve were whistling like a nest of throstles, sitting in one of the empty waggons—

“_Open the gates as wide as the sky. . . ._”

when Kester found me.

“So that’s where you be,” he said. “Not dancing?”

“No.”

“For why?”

“I amna like other girls.”

He considered that. Then he said—

“Well, I mun be going. I’m off to prentice myself for ten months to learn the coloured weaving in London Town. Then I can do piecework at home, and care nothing for Grimble and his gang. Coloured weaving brings in a tidy bit, and I’ll send it by coach every few months.”

“When’ll you be raught back!” I said, as if I was drowning.

“I’ll be back for next August fair, and I’ll come and talk with you a bit then, Prue Sarn.”

“Maybe you’ll forget.”

“I dunna think so.”

“Well, God bless ye,” I says.

“And you.”

He turned to go. Then he turned back.

“But it’s foolish in you not to dance,” he says. “A wench with a figure like an apple-blow fairy!”

He gi’d a little laugh and went.

So he knew about Venus! Oh, I was shamed and dumbfounded! I was angry with Jancis too, for she must have told him, though she never would confess it, but giggled and said he must have noticed my nice shape through my clo’es, so that I was more shamed and vexed than ever.

Mother was tired and wanted me to help her to bed. After, I looked from her window on to the rickyard, that had been void, but for one big haystack, all peopled now with dark shapes. As I stood there, Gideon and Jancis suddenly came round the corner of the house, and as they went by, slow and seeing nought but each other, I plainly heard Gideon say, “Nay, Jancis, I’ll make sure of what’s mine. To-morrow night when your father’s gone, come down and let me in.”

I didna hear her answer, for they were past the window then, and besides, I drew back, for I canna abide an eavesdropper. So that was in his mind! He couldna trust his dear love even for a sennight. I thought, well, maybe it was no harm, for they would be wed so soon. And indeed, whether it was agen the church or no, I was bound to be glad that Gideon should show any human feeling. Times, he seemed like a frozen man. When all were gone, and the chattels fetched in out of the dew, it was getting on towards dawn. So I went up to the attic and wrote in my book. But first I took a sheet of paper and put down in very neat writing—

“A figure like an apple-blow fairy.”

“’Twas me he meant,” I said over and over, “poor Prue Sarn!”

And a glow began in my heart, warm and pleasant as a gledy fire. For what is there in this earth, or in heaven, if it comes to that, like the knowledge that you’ve found favour in the eyes of him that is your dear acquaintance, and the Maister? I left off wondering what he thought of my hare-shotten lip, for indeed it seemed he thought of it not at all. I called to mind a thing he’d said while we watched the dragon-flies, about sin. He said if you thought of it rightly it just wunna there. It was gone like the shrouds of the dragon-flies when they’d wrostled free. What did you want to go hunting about after the shroud for, when you could look at the bright fly? Maybe that was how he thought of me. My poor hideous lip was, as it were, my sin, though a kind of innicent wickedness. It was my sin, and all the rest of me was my righteousness, and my glory, and the way I made him glad. I cried a long while for very joy, and such a rushing happiness went through me as seemed to make all the blood in my veins new, and I felt as if it was so pure and strong it might even cure me of my ill. There was some truth in it, too, for my lip did never look quite so bad from that day.

Morning came fresh and sweet, and the rooks went streaming out across the windy sky, to our stubble, with sleepy, contented caws falling scattered here and there. On the way to milk I stopped by the rickyard to give thanks for the corn. Why then in that hour did I think of those words, “The precious bane”? Why did I think of that which men will garner with their harvest, and treasure, though it is as fire-grass in a haystack? Why did a cold boding horror stir in my heart, where all was gay and warm, as a catch of frost will strike in your garden plot of an autumn evening, when the dahlias are at their proudest—wine-colour and clear gold, every quill in place, blooming high above the wall, with bees about them—so that in the morning all is winter-sad?

C H A P T E R T W O: _Beguildy Seeks a Seventh Child_

THAT very evening, so Jancis told us next day, Missis Beguildy gave the pretended message, and the day after the love-carriage Beguildy set out, full of importance, with his ash-wood kibba, to find the seventh child and bring back the bread. I said it did seem a shame to deceive the poor man so, but Jancis said, “No danger! It makes him happy, and we’ll give him the money if he finds the seventh child, so what more is to do?”

She was looking as pretty as a pink, was Jancis. She stayed a bit, to help in the washing-up, and then she sat in the kitchen while I worked, sewing a seam in her wedding clo’es. After tea when she was going, Gideon said—

“Mind you dunna forget!”

She coloured up as pink as codlins-and-cream, and ran along the wood-path. After supper Gideon said, careless like, “If I be late, Prue, and you want to go to bed, put the key over stable door.”

I said I would, and no more. But I saw him shaving hisself very particular, and putting on his Sunday stock, so I knew that whatever date parson met have got fixed for the wedding, the wedding was now, and I fetched a rose for his coat. He looked very bashful over that, but I said that when a fellow went to see his girl so soon afore the wedding he must always wear a flower. That seemed to make it all right, thinking I guessed nought, and off he went, whistling loud and clear, up the wood path where the leaves were turning rusty, and sighs were sounding here and there, and the airs breathing autumn, and the brown cobs falling with little thuds, for lads to play conquer to their own let and hindrance. Sad, and very sad I thought it in the wood path when Gideon’s tall figure was passed away, and the mere lapped, and the boat was knocking on the steps, and an owl hooting. Why was it so sad, I wondered, when the wedding was fixed so soon, and the glory roses blooming, corn safe housed, and in my own heart the Maister come! Yet there was that about the evening which you feel when summat has died. I went the rounds to see if all was well. Mother was asleep, brown and small and peaceful in the big bed. Bendigo was in stable, very comfortable, for he was old and nesh, and we fetched him in before October. All was well, and I wondered what the harm was, that I felt in the air. I was to know afore long, though for a little while things kept on as usual. Every night I put the key in the stable, but said nought. Every morning Gideon’s bed was all tossed and tumbled, but I knew very well he hadna slept in it. He whistled about the place as merry as any other man, not under breath any more. I was glad for him, and glad to be making ready for Jancis. They were to have the guest chamber, which, not having been used for many years, was in very bad repair. So I’d bought a few rolls of cheap paper out of the butter-money, and I was papering it unbeknown to Gideon. Mother was in the secret, and she’d come and clasp her hands and say, “Looks a pretty paper! Doing it right well you are, my dear. Roses and all! Roses be lucky, to my mind. Your Aunt Dorcas had roses in her bride-chamber, and not one of her children ever died, nor ailed, nor cried. I mind she made a joke over that. ‘Neither die nor cry,’ she says. I hope Sarn’s wunna cry much, for I canna bear to hear a child cry. Sarn ud roar ever so, it was awful to hear un. Beat on the cot, a would, summat cruel. Mun always get what a wanted very quick, but if it tarried, he wouldna forget, he’d cry the day long, but he’d get it.”

I’d got the paper on, and I was about putting a bit of glazed calico round the dressing-table when Missis Beguildy came rushing to our place, like a wild woman. It was such pleasant weather too, with little birds in the new ricks and the first apples falling. It was early in the morning when she came. I’d been churning. I hadna seen Gideon, for he’d taken a crust out into the field where he was ploughing. I was in the dairy when Missis Beguildy rushed in.

“Oh, my dear!” she cries out. “Oh, my dear, the worst as could happen’s come to pass.”

“Goodness me, what?”

I was frightened to see her face.

“He comed back!”

“Who? Not Mister Beguildy?”

“Ah! No less. And all going so well. Him away till a fortnit anyway I thought. And the two of ’em so sweet together. I didna think Sarn could be so fairspoken to anybody as what he was to me, and Jancis like the Queen of the May. ‘Mother,’ she says, ‘I be more gladsome than I thought any could be.’ All, and your brother too. It eased him to see that his doubts and fears about young Camperdine were nought. If I hadna let un come he’d a thought the young man was at our place. ’Twas the only way. The more anybody wants a thing, the more they do think others want it. But seeing all was fair and square, he was fair and square too. ‘Mother,’ he says, for indeed it inna long till I shall be afore Him above and all the blessed angels, ‘Mother, leave me bide the night over from now on, till we be wed. Soon, it is,’ he says, ‘or I wouldna ask it. And her’s willing.’ So I gave them our room, and slept on Jancis’s box bed in kitchen. I put the best dimity counterpane on their bed, and the best sheets, without a patch, and a tidy bit of drugget on floor, and I killed a fowl and made a nice bit of bread sauce, and left ’em to their supper, pleasant and to theirselves afore the fire, and stayed out till they’d done, though they did say as nice as nice as I mun sup with ’em. But newly wed is newly wed, ring or none. And when they were abed I’d tidy the place and wash up. And I’d just done, and I was setting afore the fire thinking of the time when I wed Beguildy, and what a proper young man he was, though you’d never think it, and deserve my thoughts he didna, the grutching, wicked old man. I was setting there very peaceful, and thinking I must draw the bolt and rake the fire out, when there was a little sound without, and in came Beguildy. I could ha’ dropped on floor.”

“Well, missus,” he says, “where be Jancis?”

“She be asleep,” I says.

“And since when did ye give the wench our room and sleep in box bed?”

With that he rushes in, and there they were. ’Twas hell let loose, and no mistake. He put such a curse on Sarn as I never heard nor shall hear.

“And for all you’ve crept in the like of this, you shanna have the wench in wedlock,” he says.

“You canna stop it,” says Sarn. “No power in the ’orld can stop it now.”

“Yet stop it I will,” says the mester. “Hanna I cursed ye by fire and by water? Hanna I told ye you were born under the threepenny planet and canna keep money? Hanna I said you’ll be poor in life and die in the water? Eh?”

“Well, it’s a pity for ye, seeing you be a wise man and all, to be put in the wrong,” says Sarn, “but harvest be in and I be a rich man.”

“You binna a tenth nor a hundredth part as rich as young squire. His pockets be crammed ooth French money,” shouts Beguildy. “You shanna have my girl, Sarn.”

“I’ve got her, seemingly,” says Sarn, as calm as calm could be, and that drave Beguildy right out of mind. “He puck up the blunderbus as he keeps by the window ready for the fox, and he went for your brother with the butt end.”

“Dear to goodness!”

“You may as well say that, Prue Sarn. I screeched and Jancis screeched, and I ran in from the kitchen, for I’d kept out, thinking Sarn met not like it, him being in his night-shirt, and as fine a man as you could wish, but not wanting to cause any awkwardness more than already. But afore I could get in, Sarn knocked mine flat on floor, and a lay like a log and none deserved it better. For a very curst man is Beguildy, and obstinate, and bearing ill will year after year. I do believe the root of the matter is your dad asking him for that crown when he’d made mind up it was to be a present. Ah! Though mine he is, I canna but say he’s a terrible man to bear a grutch. Well, Sarn knocked un flat, and he says, ‘Take his feet, oot, Mother, and we’ll put un in kitchen. For whether he’s dead or quick, I’ll not be disturbed any more this night.’ Ah. He said that. And he says, ‘Swing for it I may, but I wunna be disturbed this night.’ Cold and quiet as a frozen mere, but a terrible man to rouse, is your brother. So I doused mine with water, and I gid him some spirits, and in a while he come round, but I took the precaution to tie him to the bed afore that. He struggled cruel, but it was a good rope, and I fed spirits to un regular, and in a while he calmed a bit and quietened, and then slept. So in the morning your brother went, and I untied the mester, and when he woke up I says, what fetched him back? So he says, ill news travels fast, and he supposed he’d got ears, and he hadna but just got as far towards the mountains as Mallard’s Keep when a man told un Sarn slept at our place now. Interfering meddlers, folks be! So I got him a bit of breakfast and he went out. Quiet as quiet he be, so I’ve come to warn ye, for when he’s quiet-angry he’s deadly.”

I said, what harm could an old man the like of that do, and especially as we knew all his spells and what-nots were but foolish games? But it made no difference, and she only kept on saying there was harm brewing, and God send the wedding day quick, and she went off home as wild-seeming as she came, wringing her hands, with wisps of hair blowing in the stormy wind. For there was a real tempest blowing, that had been rising for two or three days, and it blew up the loose straws and the chaff in the rickyard till the air was full of them, dusty and choking. Out in the field I had to go close up to Gideon and shout afore I could make him hear. There was a roar in the tree-tops like the sound of weirs after the snow melts, and a howling in the chimneys that made you glad of four walls and a roof. I said to Gideon when we were at our tea, did he think it would blow the tops off the stacks? But he said no, they were well weighted. It was only two days now till the dealer came to price the grain, and only three days after that till the wedding. Knowing this, and being easy in mind about Beguildy, since he’d taken no harm from the blow, I listened to the wind very contented, and made some rounds of toast, and thought about Kester. For I do think there’s nothing makes you feel so contented as a roaring wind in the chimney when all’s well. I said should we go to bed early, and Gideon said we might as well, seeing we’d worked hard and the harvest was in. So we went at eight, and I fell asleep in a minute with the sound of the loud, dry tempest in my ears.

When I woke, sudden, I thought, “It be the Judgment!” There was a great light and a roaring, very dreadful to hear, and knockings and cries out of the night. I lay there, mazed, saying “_Our Father_” as fast as I could, and wishing I’d been more regular at church. Then I heard Gideon’s voice calling from window, and other voices below, and one was the voice of Sexton’s Sammy. This comforted me in my foolish fear, for I felt as if Sammy would be able to think of a text, and mouth it too, even on Judgment night. For night it still was, and early too, since we found out after that we’d not been abed much more than two hours. Gideon came rushing past my door, shouting for me, so I got up and put on my clo’es, for I supposed that whether it was the Judgment or not I’d better wear them, though in the pictures the redeemed go in their night rails. But I did feel that I must wait to get to heaven afore I could be at my ease to stand afore Sexton’s Sammy in my night-gown.

I ran downstairs and out, and then I saw. I thought even the end of the world would have been better than that, for then we’d have been provided for, with no more harvests to get in nor money to gather with pain and labour. It would be the same for all in that hour, but this was for us only, and crushed us as a waggon wheel crushes an ear of wheat.

For it was the corn burning that made the roaring noise. It was the harvest, all of it, the whole garnering of all those years of work, the very stuff of Gideon’s soul, and our future. It was no great comet nor flaming star raging across the sky to herald in the end of all, no trumpet of an archangel pealing and whining along the black night betwixt the trembling worlds. It was only the corn. Only all we had! Only that which was to make a kindly man, a loving man, of our Gideon, since having it he would leave slaving by day and dark, and making us all slave, and would work only like any other man. Only the corn, that meant a bit of comfort for Mother, a bit of hope for me. Only the corn, that would give Jancis dear children, and the place of wife by fireside, and a bit of love, maybe. Oh, my soul, it was the corn! I clung to the rickyard gate, and my hair was lifted in the fierce-hot wind. There were black figures running in the red light, most like a picture of hell, but they were nought, and less than nought. The vasty roaring wind went on, taking the fire with it. I could see that the thing must have started with the barley, that was on the west of the rickyard, whence the wind was coming. There was no barley now. Where it had been were two great round housen made of white fire, very fearful to see, being of the size and shape of the stacks, but made of molten flame. There was no substance in them, and it was marvel how they stood so. Now and again a piece of this molten stuff would fall inward with no sound, and there could be seen within caves of grey ash and red, sullen, smouldering fire. So it will surely be when the world is burned with fervent heat in the end of all. It will go rolling on, maybe, as it ever has, only it will be no more a kindly thing with mists about it, a pleasant painted ball with patterns of blue seas and green mountains upon its roundness. It will be a thing rotten with fire as an apple is rotten when the wasps have been within, light and empty and of no account. So was our barley, falling inwards with no sound, as though one went here and there within, unseen. It was a worse thing to see than if it had fallen down in a heap, for being yet a stack, it seemed like a jest of some demon, saying—“Well, what is to do? There be your stacks of barley! Make barley bread and eat.” I looked at those two abodes of demons, of the roundness and height of our good barley stacks, and I remembered the barley, oh, the sweet barley, rustling in the wind of dawn! I called to mind the ploughing for it, in such good behopes, and the sowing of it, between the sowing of the winter wheat and the sowing of the summer wheat, Gideon and me walking up and down the fields with the bags of seed slung over shoulder, or with a deep round lid to hold enough of seed for one crossing of the field there and back, and swinging out our arms with a great giving movement, as if we were feeding all the world, a thing I dearly loved to see. For reaping, though it is good to watch as be all the year’s doings on a farm, is a grutching and a grabbing thing compared with sowing. You must lean out to it and sweep it in to you, and hold it to your bosom, jealous, and grasp it and take it. There is ever a greediness in reaping with the sickle, in my sight. There is not in scything, which is a large destroying movement without either love or anger in it, like the judgments of God. Nor is there in flailing, which is a thing full of anger, but without any will or wish to have or keep. But reaping is all greed, just as sowing is all giving. For there you go, up and down the wide fields, bearing that which you have saved with so much care, winnowing it from the chaff, and treasuring it for this hour. And though it is all you have, you care not, but take it in great handfuls and cast it abroad, with no thought of holding back any. On you go, straight forrard, and the bigger your hand the better pleased you are, and you cast it away on this side and on that, till one not learned in country ways would say, here is a mad person. For it would seem as if you were feeding all the birds of the country, since there was always a following of rooks in the furrows, and starlings, and many small birds, which would be very unprofitable chickens.

It is a pretty thing to see the golden seed tossed in the air with sunshine on it and the light spring wind scattering it here and there; or if it is winter wheat, then it will be, very like, a still brown day with the mellowness of old beer in the colours and the scent of the air. I was always ready for the sowing, though Gideon did not care about it, and indeed would often seem to begrutch casting the grain from him, and would sow too thin and so waste land and labour. I thought of all this, and of the fair evenings when we had walked forth, Mother and me, to look at the young barley pushing up, bright and sparse, then thickening, till the brown earth was all greened over, and springing taller and brighter, stiff and pointed, and then softening and lengthening yet more, with the wind running in it like a boat furrowing the water, and finding a voice at last, and a song, and sending up its green, plaited ears to swell and ripen, till at the end they stood perfect as if the Lord had but that moment lifted His hand from them, all made of purest, clearest gold. Gold leaves, gold stalks, gold knops for heads, and these knops bearded thick with gold as well. Yet it was an innicent gold, and not that gold which is called the bane. Oh, how I could mind it, on those still Sunday mornings when I went to the well, and would set down the buckets for a little while and go out into the corn fields that lay beneath the vasty pale blue peace of the sky like creatures satisfied and at rest! There would be small birds about, making low contented cries and soft songs. There would be a ruffling breeze, and rooks far up the sky, and a second bloom of pale gold flowers on the honeysuckle wrathes against the blue. There would be warmship that lapped you round, and the queenly gift of the scent of corn. What other scent is like it? There is so much in it, beyond other sweets. There is summer in it, and frost. There is water in it, and the heart of the flint which the corn has taken up into its hollow stalks. There is bread in it, and life for man and beast.

All these thoughts, moithered and bewildered, came to me as I clung to the gate with the parching wind upon my face, too stunned to move. There are misfortunes that make you spring up and rush to save yourself, but, there are others that are too bad for this, for they leave nought to do. Then a stillness falls on the soul, like the stillness of a rabbit when the stoat looks hotly upon it and it knows that there is no more to be done.

The fire was in the two biggest stacks of wheat now. It had gone upon them and they were not. Soon they would be as the barley was. They were good stacks, those, of a solid squarish oblong, and as high as might be with safety, for we had such a harvest that we could only make room by having the stacks high. It was good wheat too, long in the straw, and no touch of mildew. It had taken the most time of all both to sow and to reap, and in the lugging it had the biggest waggons all day. And now it was gone! It was a great mound of fire with the black shapes of two stacks in it, and soon the fire would be passed on and there would be no more sound, but just two grey-white housen for demons, with baleful red gleams in the crumbling passages within. There were more stacks of wheat by the hedge, but the next to the blazing stacks was the oats. The lovely oats, so pale and fine, like ferns for a lady’s table!

They were so sweet, the oats, so very fine and fair, like midsummer grasses come golden. I did ever love the oats best of all. And suddenly I was all mother to the oats. The fire met have the wheat and the barley, but it should not take my oats. I clomb over the gate and ran where the little figures moved. I caught Gideon by the sleeve.

“You mun save the oats!” I screamed. “Oh, save the oats, as is so fair and fine!”

But he said nought. He was working like a madman, and I saw that it was the oats he was trying to save, the oats and the stacks by the hedge. He and Sammy were digging trenches between the blazing stacks and these, to fill with water.

“Where’s Tivvy?” I said, for now I was come to myself I wanted all the help there was.

“Gone for Feyther,” said Sammy, sweating and groaning over his spade, for the fire was gaining on them.

“Shall I take Bendigo and go for help?” I said. “Or shall I get the buckets and begin fetching water?”

“Ah, that!” says Sammy. “Do that, for help ud be too late, a power.”

Not a word did Gideon say. He was stricken with a dumb madness, but he worked like ten men. What with the horror of mind and the stress of labour and the great heat of the fire, the sweat ran down his face in a river and his clo’es were as if he had been in the water. And being so wet, and so near the fire, he went in a cloud of steam, which had a very strange look, as if he had been put under some curse or was already in hell.

I loosed Bendigo and the oxen and cows, such as were lying in, and they went pounding away into the woods, half crazy with fear. I woke Mother and told her she must dress and come to the mere and dip while we made a chain for the buckets, to send them from hand to hand. I got together all the pails and buckets, and thought it seemed a pitiful thing that with all that great mere full of water we could only slake our fire with as much as we could get into our little buckets. And I’ve thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket’s smallness.

Mother came with me like a child, very mazed and quiet.

“Must I dip now, Prue?” she said.

“You can begin now, and have all the buckets ready,” I answered. “But the time when you must dip your best will be in a tuthree minutes when we come.”

“Now, Sarn,” says Sammy, “you mun leave digging and come for water.”

For though it may seem a thing not to be believed, all that awful night, though it was Gideon that did the most of the work, it was Sammy or me that gave the orders. Gideon would go at what he was set at in a frenzy, and go on after it stopped being any use, working like an ox at the threshing floor. He threw down the spade when Sammy spoke, and came with us to the mere. Mother was toiling over the dipping. She looked smaller and smaller as the trouble thickened about her, like a person that had eaten some fairy stuff to make her not able to be seen. She seemed no more than one of those little brown birds that will light down by the water for a while in their journeying and then be gone, nobody knows where.

“Now here comes Feyther, thanks be to the Lord,” said Sammy. He was a good lad that night, was Sammy, and while the fire lasted he never said but one text, and that a very tempestuous one, “Burning and fuel of fire,” though he must have thought of no end of them.

Sure enough there was Sexton bursting through the wood, and Tivvy not far behind, and an angry voice crying on the wind a long way back, that was Missis Sexton, who misliked being by her lonesome.

“Now,” says Sammy, “Feyther can go in the rickyard and chuck on the water to dout the fire, Tivvy can gather the empty buckets as fast as he throws ’em down, and run back to Missis Sarn with ’em, and you and me and Prue’ll run with full ones. I did think we might make a chain and pass from hand to hand, but we be too few, Sarn.”

Gideon spoke for the first time.

“I never,” he said with a wild, pale face, “never had much strength about me, only me and these two.”

And with that he put his arm across his face as he was used to do when he was a lad and things went badly wrong, and cried.

Ah, I tell you it was a thing few would have cared to see, a great, strong masterful man like that, crying like a little lad.

“Now, now, Sarn!” says Sexton, shocked as we all were, “Now, yo munna take on. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.”

At that Gideon came to himself.

“The Lord?” he says. “No. It wunna the Lord! It was Beguildy. When we’ve douted the stacks I shall fetch un and roast un.”

No words of mine can tell you the awful way Gideon said that. I wanted to ask how he knew, if he did know, but there was no time for words. We were running to and again with two full buckets each, which, after an hour or so, is enough to try a strong man, leave alone a woman. Water carrying is an easy job if there’s no hurry and you can use a yoke. But to run stumbling through a roasting heat, which we did for most of the journey, and to know that if you tarried the oats would go, and maybe if you didna tarry, was enough to take the spirit out of anybody. The oats did go. The fire leapt the ditch and all, and there was a new, tremendous blaze. I lost heart after that, and though I ran, it was with no hope.

“Oh, I be so tired,” said poor Mother. But I couldna let her rest.

“If we canna save it,” I said, “you’ll never get free of tending swine, Mother.”

So she bent her poor old back again, standing half in the water, in spite of the rheumatics. The cry went up to save the barn, for if the barn was lost, the house was lost. At that, Mother left dipping for water, so I was forced to get Tivvy to do it, and we had to bring back our own empty pails. I looked up once, and there was Mother fetching things out of the house. I looked at them after, and there was her sewing and the copper fruit pan, and a sampler she did when he was little, and Father’s picture cut out in black paper, done by parson’s brother-law, who was part foreign. People thought he must be simple to play with scissors and paper like a child, though they owned that he did it very well, and said that being part foreign he knew no better. Though Mother had been so mortal feared of Father in life, she treasured this picture in the queerest way. So there it was with the other things and six pots of damson cheese, and Pussy in a basket.

It was only at dawn, when the wind dropped and a fine, quiet rain began to fall, that we got the fire under. At least, it had burnt itself out, and we managed to save barn and house. The red light was gone from the sky and the burning from the mere. For all night it had seemed that the water in the mere was turned to fiery spirit, and was burning too. Everything was there, confused and topsy-turvy, the red and yellow flames, the smoke, bellying in the wind, the white-hot stacks, hollow and canting, the farm and the barn and our little black figures like mommets in the tumult.

Not long after it was over came Missis Sexton, who had suffered frittening of Bendigo, that came snorting and trampling through the wood so that she thought it had been the Black Huntsman. There were many hollow trees about the Sarn woods, they being old forest land, so she crept into one, and stayed till the light began to come. And then, once in, she could not get out, for she was more than ornary stout and also had so many clo’es, and though in the stress of fear she squoze herself in, it was not easy to get out again in cold blood. But when she did come, she soon got us all some breakfast, and indeed we were in need of it, not only for what was past, but to face the day.

“Why, look’s Tivvy and Prue white as ghosses!” she said. “And you, Missis Sarn, should be abed, and to bed you shall go when you’ve had bite and sup. And as for you, Sarn! Why, man, man, you fritten me worse than Bendigo, indeed to goodness! Now then, where’s ours? Draw up now, draw up, take bite and sup, people!”

She said it just as she said, “Take your places for the game of Costly Colours.”

“But what I’d lief know,” says Mother, “is how Sexton and Sammy knew our ricks were afire?”

“I knew,” said Sammy, “because Tivvy and me were coming back latish from the mill, and we saw Beguildy coming along very quiet and sneaking this way. So I says to Tivvy as we’d follow, for I’ve been keeping an eye on Beguildy a goodish while, he being a wicked old man and the power of the Lord far from him. By their fruits you shall know them. And it seemed a funny time for him to be coming to Sarn, he being one for early bed always. So we followed on slow, keeping a long way back. And just as we came to the end of the wood there was a tremendous blaze from the far corner of the rickyard, and in a minute Beguildy came running up wood path, so we only had just time to hide. As soon as he was past, we did run to the rickyard, and it was the little stack in the corner, and just by it was this.”

Sammy held up the lid of Beguildy’s tinder box, which everybody knew well, for he’d put his name on the inside of the lid in red paint, being proud of his writing.

“What a fool, to drop un!” says Missis Sexton.

“Nay, Mother,” says Sexton, “Beguildy’s no fool. ’Twas the hand of the Lord took the tinder box lid off’n un and chucked it there for Sam to see. Ah, so it was.”

“In the hand of the Lord there is a cup, Psalms seventy-five, eight,” said Sammy.

“Only it wunna a cup,” giggled Tivvy, who was always sillier when she was excited, “’twas the one-half of an old iron tinder box.”

“’Tis the curse!” moaned Mother. “He did curse my son Sarn by fire and by water, and this be the first. Dear Lord knows what the second’ll be. ’Tis the sin you did eat, Sarn. There’s bin harm on the place ever since you did it. Ah, ever since my poor maister died in his boots the place has been ill to live in, very ill it’s been, what with the pigs and the rheumatics and the everlasting ploughing, and now all gone, as if it hadna been.”

“Ah, fire’s a greedy feeder,” said Missis Sexton.

“I will consoom them in a moment, Numbers sixteen. This great fire will consoom us, Deuteronomy five. Fire consoomed the palaces of Benhadad, Jeremiah forty-nine,” said Sammy.

“Three texes at a birth! Good lad, good lad!” cried Sexton.

“Only it’s Beguildy did ought to be consoomed,” remarked Missis Sexton.

“And the awful thing about such wickedness,” says Tivvy, “is that it’s in the blood. It goes on from father to child. You’d never know when it ud break out. I wonder at you, Mister Sarn, I do, to be thinking of taking the child of a viper in wedlock. I never did like the Beguildys, Jancis in especial.”

“Indeed to goodness, the girl’s right!” cried out her Mother, and Sexton added—

“What’s bred in the bone’ll come out in the flesh.”

Gideon looked around, with a grey lined face, like an old man’s. He was never the same again after that night. You canna knock an ox on the head with the mallet and then expect it to be just as it was. He made to speak, but the words were slow in coming. Just then there was a trampling and traversing without, and Bendigo trotted past the window.

“Ha!” says Gideon, and makes for the door.

I knew what he was going for, and I rushed after him. By good fortune the cows were coming back from the wood, making soft mooing plaints that it was long past milking time. So instead of pleading for Beguildy I said—“Look’s cows coming, they’ll be stanked if they inna milked.”

“Ah, you mun mind not to let ’em get like that’n,” Missis Sexton cautioned from the room. “A brother-law’s cousin of mine had the best herd ever you saw. Cheshire, he come from. Grand cows they were, and never ailed, and plenty of everything there was in that house, good milk and butter and cheese, and buckets and buckets of skim for the pigs, and fine fat pigs they were, and a fine fat man my brother-law’s cousin was, and a fine fat woman he’d got for wife, and twelve fine fat children.”

I may say that Missis Sexton, being so fat herself, always judged folk by it, and if they were thin they might as well never have been born, in her sight.

“Ah,” she went on, “they were all as fat as butter, filled the pew at church to bursting, until the day he let the cows get stanked. Ah! That was a bad day for ’em. There was no prosperation after. The cows dwined and the pigs dwined, and in a bit the family dwined too, and in a little while, of all that fine fat family there was nought left but fourteen miserable rails.”

Tivvy was in a fit of giggling, for her Mother’s stories ’most always made her laugh, though many’s the beating she had for it.

“Milk first, lad,” I says to Gideon, “and go to the Stone House after.”

God forgive me to deceive him so, but I wanted to save him from the sin of murder. No sooner was he in the shippen, milking, than I took Bendigo to the door and cried out to Sexton to mount and ride, and take Sammy too, for Bendigo could carry both as far as Plash, and to take Beguildy and march him off to the parish constable at Lullingford all in a courant, and save him from Gideon. For if he was locked up Gideon couldna get at him, and he’d only suffer what was right according to the law.

“I see,” says Sammy. “Let me fall into the hand of the Lord, and not into the hand of man. Two Samuel twenty-four. Ah, we’d best go, Feyther.”

“Will Jancis and Missis Beguildy go to prison too?” enquired Tivvy.

“Surely to goodness no! They’ve done nought. In fact Jancis be a very tidy wench, and if she’d had the right spirit in her, and meekened her soul and gone softly in good sadness, I dunno but I’d have taken her in wedlock myself,” said Sammy.

They only got off just in time, for Gideon came running from the shippen, crying upon them to stop.

“They’ll take Beguildy to prison,” I said. “You munna have murder on your soul, lad, things be bad enough without that.”

“It would have eased me,” he answered with a strange look. “It’s all dammed up within. Choking, choking me. ’Twould have eased me to kill un. I’ll never mend of it now.”

“But you couldna kill the father of your wife-to-be,” I said.

“Wife? What wife?”

“Why, Jancis! You’ll be wed to Jancis come a week now.”

“What?” he says, with a wild, fierce look, “Do ye think I’ll wed with the devil’s daughter? I tell ye, if it was to save my life and all, I’d never wed with her. Nay, I’ll never see the wench again, not of choice, not unless she do force herself into my company.”

“Gideon, Gideon! Dunna say it! Oh, Gideon, there be things in life as is better than money and that’n. Leave be, lad! It inna meant for us to be rich. Let you settle down and be content, and marry the poor child as loves you so well, and if so be money comes, all the better. And if so be it dunna, none the worse. But deny the poor girl marriage after what’s took place, you canna. Your heart canna be as hard as that.”

“It is. The granite mountain, quartzite, brytes, inna as hard. If you leave that girl come nigh me, I’ll tromple out her life like I would a clothes-moth’s. And so I warn ye. Rotten. That’s what they be. Like father like child. A fause smiling face, but any minute, any minute she met burn the place to the ground. I shouldna wonder but she fetched the flint and tinder for un last night Camperdine may take her and welcome. I make him a present of her.”

“But, Gideon, you’ve bin as good as wed to her this last week. And suppose there was to be a baby, what then?”

“A baby? What? My child and hers? I tell ye, if any such thing came to pass, I’d strangle it. Hark ye, their blood’s black. Foul, foxy, vermin. That’s what they be. They’re not fit to live. Thanks be to God, folks can swing for arson. I’ll see he swings for it. And you tell the girl to keep away from me. It’ll be the better for her.”

I durst say no more. What could I say, when the human kindness in my poor brother had been scorched up in the fire and was not? Only a fool will dip and dip in a dry well. He looked a deal taller as he stood there, with his back to the dark driving woods, where the rain was lashing now, that would have saved all last night, where the autumn storm was moaning, and the dry leaves churning and boiling in the air as the weeds will in the mere at the troubling of the waters. His clo’es yet clung to him, all scorched and darkened with the fire. His face was grimed, so that the lines that had not showed were very clear to see, and there were more lines, I was sure, since last night. His eyes, that were so cold, like water, blazed with hatred when he thought upon Beguildy or any of hisn, but at other times his face was blank and dim, like the face of one without hope, spent and foredone, a lost face. I said should we dig taters, for I thought maybe it would be a bit of comfort, to think he’d got summat. He came without a word, and worked hard and well, but every now and again he’d stop, and look about him strangely at the chill, silent mere, the overcast heavens and the stormy woods. It seemed to me that the spirit of the man was like a bird with a broken wing. And at noon, when I went to get our meal, he missed to come when I banged the tray, and I found him in the rickyard, where the heaps of ash yet smouldered, lying upon his face, as still and hard of hearing as a dead man, and indeed I do think his heart was dead from that time.

C H A P T E R T H R E E: _The Deathly Bane_

’TIS hard, and very hard, to write of the wintry time we went through after that night of grief and bitter woe. For when the quill has traced out good words of a kind meaning, it irks it to make them sad and evil. But sad and evil that time was, and there is no use in gainsaying it. For many days after the fire, the work on the farm stood still, as it often will after a death. Gideon’s one thought was to get at Beguildy, or if not that, to make him suffer the utmost of the law. Missis Beguildy was forced to give up the Stone House, for the landlord didna want a man there who burnt ricks, nor his folk so he made the excuse of the rent being late to turn them out. Everything was sold, and Missis Beguildy and Jancis went off to Silverton, where Beguildy lay in prison waiting for the assizes, with only what they stood in. At least, poor Jancis didna stand, for when she heard the dreadful news of what Gideon had said, which I told her Mother to break to her as best she could, she fell down on the floor and stirred neither hand nor foot, nor spoke a single word. They carried her to the waggon from Plash Farm, which was to take her and her mother away, and they say she lay there like a broken flower. Maybe it was as well, for if her strength hadna gone from her she’d have tried to see Gideon, and I do think he’d have struck her down in his bitter smouldering rage. It seemed to ease him to hear of their misfortune, and when the day came for them to go, he went off to a place in the woods where he could see the waggon pass by, and stood there looking down upon it, with the sullen farm labourer driving, misliking having anything to do with folk in such evil case in men’s sight, and poor Missis Beguildy sitting in the waggon all aged and wild, and Jancis lying on some straw at the bottom, like a white waxen image. I know, because Miller’s Tim was in the wood at the time, and he came running to me, frit out of his life, pretty near, to tell me all about it.

“Oh, Prue Sarn, I was in the ’ood after a tuthree nuts,” he says, “and I saw Mister Sarn a-walking by lonesome, very glooming and drodsome, and I was feared, so I did hide in a tree. And Mister Sarn went under the boughs of the big beech, where the road through the wood comes by. And in a while there was a rumbling, and I saw the waggon from Plash, and Missis Beguildy crying and taking on awful, but I couldna see Jancis. So I clomb the tree to see if she was in the bottom of the waggon, and there she was. She did look like a dead maid. Oh, she did look like the picture in the church of the little maid as was dead in the house when they fetched the Lord in, and He says ‘Rise you up!’ He says. Only He hadna said it to Jancis. And I was feared, and I came down quiet from the tree, and I saw Mister Sarn staring down upon the waggon, for you do know there’s a bit of a bank just there. And his face did frit me so that I made to run off, only then he stirred, so I kept quiet for fear he might come my way. He gloomed upon the waggon a long while, till the rumbling went ever so quiet, and wunna no more than the noise of a startle-de-buz when it be gone past, and then there was no sound at all, save the noise of a throstle banging a conker on a stone. And Mister Sarn did lift up both his fisses and did shake ’em after the waggon, and oh, Prue! his face was like the face of the Lord Jehovah in Feyther’s book, when His anger was not turned away. Then he went away, slow, looking upon the ground, and the throstle went on banging the conker on the stone, and I runned to you.”

And that was how the properest man in our countryside did see the girl of his choice go, a girl like a water-lily bud, as loved him right well.

I said to myself, “It be the bane. Oh, it be the dreadful bane.”

But after that Gideon seemed more at ease in himself. And I think it was that he had mistrusted his own heart, being afraid that if Jancis came to him he’d give in. And his purpose was not to give in, but to begin all over again, and go straight forrard to his fixed end and aim.

The morning after they’d gone, he fetched out the ploughs, and came to the kitchen door and called to me as I was making gruel for Mother, who was abed again, and had been ever since the fire, taking nought but gruel or a posset, and he said—

“Come and start of the big field, oot, Prue?”

I thought it was best not to give him a nay-word at all, so I said, Ah, I’d come. I took the gruel to Mother and said should I get Tivvy to come and sit with her a bit now and again, seeing we were starting on the ploughing. And she says—

“Oh, that bitter old ploughing! And maybe all the corn’ll be burnt like the last. No wedding, nor house nor china nor nothing, only the pigs to tend again come the spring! But maybe I wunna see the spring. I’m very middling, Prue. You mun get the doctor’s mon to me, I doubt.”

And indeed her poor hands were very thin and shrunken, and her small face browner and thinner, and she seemed more like a lost bird or a trapped creature than ever, and more in fear of Gideon.

“Dunna let him come in till I be better,” she’d say. “Dunna let my son Sarn come and make me feel as I’m a burden. He dunna love me. He’d lief I was dead and sodded.”

And she’d lift up her hands, beseeching.

So I got Tivvy to come and mind her, and all that winter of dark weather, dark within as well as without, we ploughed, turning over the stubble of that good harvest we’d lost. We were poorer than ever, and things didna prosper so well as they had, there being no heart in us. There were Tivvy’s meals to find as well, for though she came for love, being sweet on Gideon, yet we had her victuals to find, and she was a very hearty feeder. The doctor’s man cost a lot, also, and the worse the weather was, the more he charged. About the New Year there was a bitter cold spell, and ice on the roads, so his horse came down and broke its leg, and we had to pay summat towards that. Things seemed to go from bad to worse, for Gideon kept me so hard at it, driving plough, that I was forced to leave the dairy work and the fowls and pigs to Tivvy, and she was ever a bit flighty, and careless, so folks began to complain about the butter, and the fowls laid badly, and the pigs began to look thin and unkind, and Tivvy thought of nothing but to make herself look pretty and temptuous for Gideon. As January went on the weather got worse, and we had a heavy fall of snow, and Mother was so bad one night that I was forced to send for the doctor’s man again. At least, send I didna, for nobody would go, the snow being deep. There was nothing for market, the cows being dry all but one, and eggs scarce. So Gideon didna go to Lullingford, and I made up my mind to go on Sunday, when even Gideon didna plough, and once at Lullingford I could send word to the doctor by the Silverton coach. This I did, and a weary day I had of it, and a sad day also, passing the empty house of Kester Woodseaves, and thinking maybe some ill might come to him in the great city, or he might meet a lover there, and so come no more to Lullingford. But I was glad of this weary day after, for there be times when the only comfort a body has is the remembrance of hardship borne for somebody dear.

When the doctor’s man came after a good few days, he was forced to bide with us some time, on account of the badness of the roads. This irked Gideon, for the expense of the food and also his nag’s keep. He was the more put out because the doctor’s man gave a good account of Mother, for he seemed to think she should have been at death’s door afore I called the man to come from so far away. I mind we were sitting round the hearth, late on a wild night, with hail-storms taboring on the window, and a good clear fire that we were mighty glad of. The doctor’s man was a pleasant-spoken person, round and short and ruddy, with a bright red colour on his cheeks that looked as if it had a good glaze over it. He was always rubbing his hands, as if the last patient had pleased him very well, but you could never tell from this how the person had prospered, for he’d rub his hands as much over a corpse as over a quick person, and indeed, I sometimes thought, more. He was rubbing them while we talked about Mother, though not so much as he did when he told us of poor Missis Beguildy, who had ailed more and more ever since she got to Silverton, and was now said to be going into a decline. It wasna that he was an unkind man, or wished folk harm, only naturally it was more interesting to him if they were took for death than if they were only a little ailing.

“Missis Sarn’ll pull through now. Nicely, she will,” he said.

“Oh!” says Gideon. “Her’ll pull through, will her?”

“Ah. And last a-many years, I shouldna wonder. A wiry old lady! Tough, for all she’s thin and nesh-looking.”

“How many years?” says Gideon.

“Oh! It’s hard to say. Doctor might be able to, but of course I be only like his ’prentice. But it might be as much as ten, easy. Ah. I should say ten. With care.”

“Ten years!” Gideon said it in a very strange way.

“Ah, but you mun cosset her.”

“Ten years, and always like this?”

“Oh, ah! Her’ll be bed-ridden, winters, and maybe all the year round later on.”

“And she’ll be no more use?”

“Use? Why, what use could she be?”

“And you coming over a tuthree times every winter, I suppose?”

“Oh, ah, if you send for me,” says doctor’s man, taking a pull at his ale and helping himself to another piece of bread and cheese, which made Gideon scowl.

“Whenever be you going to clear supper, Prue?” he says. “I’ve had my bellyful this long while.”

“Oh, but you’re such a poor eater, Sarn,” Tivvy cries out. “It’s wonder you’re not clemmed. You want a wife to cook for ye and sarve up temptuous dishes. Chitterling puffs, now. They’re as different from plain chitterlings as heaven from hell. I made some Sunday was a week, and neither Feyther nor Sammy spoke a word all day after, they were that contented in their innards.”

“Oh, dear me, I do wish I wunna a married man,” says the doctor’s chap. “Ah, in good sadness I wish it!”

“If you wunna, it would be no manner use,” said Tivvy pertly. “I like a big man.”

Gideon took no notice, any more than he did of the chitterling puffs.

“A very big man,” went on that forrard little piece, “and dark. Big shoulders, big ’ands, arms with great big lumps of muscle and sinew, big feet, strong legs——”

“Why, missis, you be giving a list like the list in the Song o’ Solomon,” says doctor’s man.

“And hard,” went on Tivvy, taking no notice, but fixing her eyes on Gideon, “hard and never tired, lusty and lungeous and ill to thwart, but a good lover, ah, and fiery, and not to be gainsayed by the girl he’s a mind for. That’s the man for me! Ah. That’s the man Sexton’s Tivvyriah would be a right good missus to, with no other thought but to save and scrape and scrat to do his will and make him rich.”

“Well, you should have been a lawyer, Missis, so you should,” says the visitor, “and if you dunna get what you want, may I be bottled in spirits like a tadpole!”

But Gideon never lifted his eyes to Tivvy at all, only sat and glowered till she’d gone to bed. Then he said again—“And she’ll last for years, always ailing, but lasting on?”

“Ah. Indeed to goodness! Creaking doors, you know. But you mun see you keep her pulse strong. There’s the danger. If it wunna kept strong, she’d very likely go off quiet and sudden before you’d time to say sarsaparilla. Keep the pulse strong and she’ll be as merry as a robin.” We talked a bit more, and then Gideon said he was going to look the stock afore turning in.

“The brindled longhorn’s very middling,” he said. “Seems to be in a fever all the while. Heart’s like to burst sometimes. I suppose a dose of foxglove ud put her right, maybe?”

“Ah. Foxglove’ll lower the pulse as quick as anything. But you mun be careful. Be she a young cow?”

“Going four.”

“Dunna give her too much, then. When things get old and worn out they canna stand much of it.”

When the visitor was gone to bed, and Gideon back from the shippen, he sat down, hopeless-like, and said—

“Her means dying.”

“What, Brindle?” I says.

“Ah. Seems like that old devil’s put a curse on me all right.”

“It’s only the weather, and Tivvy being a bit careless, and me so busy at it, ploughing.”

“And there’s Mother,” he said, “as was used to help a bit, no use, and less than no use. A heavy burden! We’ll never pick up now she’s like that.”

“Dunna let her know you think it,” I said.

But the very next day, when I took her supper, there was Gideon standing in the mid of the room, talking very loud, and Mother like a frittened mouse.

“Well,” he was saying, “you be very middling, Mother!”

“Ah, I be ailing, Sarn,” she says, with her smile.

“It mun be a sorrow to you that you canna do a hand’s turn.”

“Ah. It be, Sarn. But come the warm weather, I’m in behopes to see to the broody hens and the rest of the fowl. Ah! And the ducks and the cade lambs.”

“But not the pigs?”

“Well, if Tim could mind ’em a bit longer I’d be glad. It does make me so rheumaticky, down by the water there.”

“It’s a big expense, giving that great lad his tea every day.”

“I know it be, and I’ll be as quick as I can getting better, Sarn.”

“I shouldna think life’s much of a pleasure to you, ailing so.”

“It be weary time and again, but in between I’m pretty comfortable.”

“What with the rheumatics and the cough and the sinking feeling, I should think you’d as lief be in the Better Land.”

“When it pleases the Lord to take me to the Better Land, I mun go without complaint, but I’d liefer be in life, for life I do know, and the worst of it, but the Better Land I dunna know.”

“You know there’s no coughs nor rheumatics there, nor sinking feeling.”

“Nor chimney corners nor cups of tea,” she says, “and I doubt it’ll be too grand for me, Sarn.”

But Gideon, standing in the mid of the room and talking very loud, said—

“You’d as lief be dead as quick.”

He went away then, but every evening he went in again and talked in the same way, which seemed a pity to my mind, for though he might mean to cheer her up, and though folk never seem to think it matters what you say to the sick, yet it seemed to me melancholy talk for a poor old ailing woman. But at last, one evening at the end of March, in a spell of wet, muggy weather, when the rheumatics were very bad, she said, when he came to what he always ended with—“I should think you’d as lief be dead as quick——”

“Well, maybe I would, Sarn.”

And that seemed to content him. He left off coming every evening, which eased Mother, for she was more in dread of him than ever nowadays, so that even Tivvy noticed it. I thought when April came in, things seemed to be going better, Mother being more cheerful, though still very weak. I got on better with my work, being free of worry, and Mother seemed quite happy with Tivvy. We were working harder than ever, and my clo’es hung about me, but I didna mind that. I was sowing the big field with wheat, while Gideon went on ploughing. It was grand out there in the fresh of the morning, with purple shadows on the wet earth, and the sun rolling up beyond the woods, and Sarn Mere like pale blue crackled glass with a light behind it. Times, the sky would be all pale blue too, with larks hanging in it. Times, the big white clouds, like new-washed and carded wool, stood upon the tops of the budding trees. The bright colours made me think of the coloured weaving, which I supposed Kester would have pretty near mastered by now. Though no word had come, since Christmas, of his doings or his well-being, I felt in myself that all was right with him. At Christmas the Silverton coachman had left a little packet for me at the _Mug of Cider_, and when I was raught back to the attic I found within a bit of cloth woven in two colours, and a letter.

LONDON TOWN. _Christmas._

DEAR PRUE SARN—

This is to wish you well as it leaves me. I can do two colours now, as you see by pattern. The women here are poor things, pale and small, mostly fair, and not a real melting dark eye among them. I was bid to a banquet at the house of an alderman that is a weaver. There was a young wench sat by me that had spared her bodice-stuff but not her blushes. I called to mind a dark stone chamber, and young Camperdine’s face in the shadows, and a woman that did what she did for loving-kindness and in bitterness of spirit, but did look like an apple-blossom fairy all the same, and did light a fire in one chap as will be very hard to dout. And so a happy Christmas and a good New Year from

KESTER WOODSEAVES.

I may say that letter was in rags by April, as if the mice had been at it.

I had sent him a letter for Christmas also, and this was it.

SARN. _Christmas._

DEAR WEAVER—

Please find herein a lockram shirt. If you wear it, they say you’ll take no harm from the smallpox or other ills. I wove it and made it of hemp, and said a good few old righteous charms over it, but no unrighteous ones. I often call to mind the day we watched the dragon-flies, at the time of the troubling of the waters, when the lilies were in blow. So farewell for now, and God send you happy.

Yours obediently, PRUDENCE SARN.

The seventh of April being a very clear-coloured morning, I called the weaving to mind, and so, as I went up and down the field sowing the bright seed, I sang _Barley Bridge_.

“_Shift your feet in nimble flight,_ _You’ll be home by candlelight._ _Open the gate’s as wide as the sky,_ _And let the king come riding by._”

Would Kester ever come riding to Sarn from London Town? I wondered. For the fair, he’d said he’d come, at the time of the troubling of the waters, when the lilies were in blow all along the marges of the mere, looking at their angels, and when blue kingfisher-flies and the bright, lustre-coloured damsels were coming out of their shrouds.

I was thinking thus, when I looked up, and there was Tivvy, coming running in a great courant, all distraught. “Come quick, Prue!” she said. “Her’s took very bad. The tea didna agree. He says, give it her strong, he says, for it’ll do more good the like of that’n. So I did. And she said it was a bitter brew. But she drank it. And in a while she went ever so quiet, and I couldna hear her breathe. And then she gave a guggle and whispers—

“‘Go for Prue.’”

* * * * *

I was only just in time to kiss Mother, who was all shrunken down in her pillows. She whispered—

“A bitter brew!” and smiled, and caught her breath, and was gone.

After a while I says to Tivvy—

“Where’s that tea?”

But she’d thrown it away.

“Gideon,” I said, “was there bane in that tea you did tell Tivvy to give Mother?”

“Now what do I know what Tivvy did give to Mother?” says he.

“Oh, Sarn, you did know!” cries Tivvy. “You said, ‘Give it her strong,’ you did.”

“Hold your tongue, you little liar,” shouts Gideon, “or I’ll thank you to tell Prue what you and me were doing in the loft, Sunday’s a week.”

With that, Tivvy went as red as fire, and hushed.

I could make nothing of them. I sent for the doctor, to see what Mother died of. And he said, were we in the habit of giving her _digitalis_, a strange word that I didna know, but he spelled it out for me, and I wrote it down. So I said no, I’d never heard tell of it. So he says, “Foxglove! Foxglove!”

“Foxglove?” I says. “No. Whatever should I give her that for?”

“What indeed?” he says, looking at me very sharp.

“What do puzzle me, sir,” I says, “is what Mother died of. She was beginning to pick up so nice.”

“That’s what I want to know, too,” he says.

“Maybe we’d ought to have a Crowner’s ’Quest, sir?” I says.

“Oh, you’d be willing to have an inquest on the body?”

“Why, yes, indeed, if it was right and proper.”

“Well, if you’re willing to have it, there’s no need to have it.”

He was a very peculiar man. I couldna make him out at all.

“I was doubtful,” he says. “But if you’re willing . . . It’s nothing but old age, I expect. They go like that in the spring sometimes. And it’s a great trouble and expense, an inquest . . . all just for the flicker of a doubt . . . and can’t do the poor woman any manner of good . . . so, if you’re willing, we won’t bother with an inquest.”

I could make neither head nor tail of that. But remembering that Doctor was an educated man, I left off trying to understand him. For there’s as much of a mystery about an educated man, that’s been schooled and colleged proper, as there is about the Trinity. So, being busy over the funeral and all, I thought no more about him, but I grieved sorely for Mother, because as she lay in coffin she did look like a frozen bird, foredone with winter.

C H A P T E R F O U R: _All on a May Morning_

IT was quieter than ever at Sarn without Mother’s quiet ways. I missed her a deal more than if I’d depended on her, for it’s the folk that depend on us for this and for the other that we most do miss. So the mother is more let and hindered lacking the little creatures clinging to her skirt than she is when they be there, for she has no heart for her work. So in the lengthening April days I’d often sit and cry, calling to mind her poor little hands uplifted, and her way of giving me a right good welcome when I came in tired of an evening. There was only Gideon and me, and Tivvy now and again. The work went on the same as ever, though there was a sadness about it all. Gideon never went into the stackyard but he cursed Beguildy, who was still in prison, with no sentence fixed. We’d heard nought of Jancis nor her mother for a good while, nor had there been another letter from Kester. The market began again. I mean, we began to go again, having plenty to fill the stall. One of us would go, and the other would mind the farm, and I heard that every time Gideon went, Miss Dorabella would come and buy summat. Indeed it was already being said that she was sweet on Gideon, and I could only hope it wouldna come to the Squire’s ears. I didna wonder at her being partial to Gideon, for indeed he was a fine, strong man, with a deal of character and power, and very good to look at, and there were few young gentlemen about Lullingford at that time, what with some of them going to bide in London, and some never coming back from the wars. Gideon never said anything to me, but I could see he was flattered at her liking, and I thought once when she came to our door for a drink of milk, that his hand shook a bit when he gave her the cup. But if he was thinking of her, I’m sure it was only the lust of the eye, and youth, and the wish to get on, and not love, such as he felt for Jancis. I didna believe he’d ever love anybody again, since that early love had been poisoned—for indeed the bane seemed to have got into it as it had into everything. But there was no doubt he was very taken up with her, and when it wasna Miss Dorabella it was Tivvy. He didna care a farden for Tivvy, but he was ready to take all she’d give, as many another young man would, especially after such an upsetting of his life, and the losing of his dear acquaintance. He seemed to want to be out along with Tivvy when he wasna working, as if he was restless, and he couldna bear to speak of Mother. This seemed curious to me, for he never appeared to care much about her in life. I mind when May Day came, and we were starting for the market, for the things must be sold, mourning or not, I said I called to mind just where, Mother stood to send us last time. And Gideon gave a bit of a start, and looked, nervous like, at the place I pointed to, almost as if he thought she’d come again. And sometimes I noticed that he’d look across at her chair, anxious and brooding. This troubled me, for it was so different from his usual ways. In all else he was the same, and the farm was the same, and the mere, and the spring. May came in warm and splendid, and the buds and blades, the opening petals and the blown petals, the wafts of sweet air and the storms of warm rain drove on over the country as in every other year. The blackbirds kept up their charm the day long, and the cuckoos were at it from four or five in the morning. Out went the coots and their young across the mere, the dippers made their well-roofed house, the wag-tails played beside the water, and the heron stood watching his long shadow in the glassy lake, as if he wondered how soon it would be as long as the steeple. The lily leaves lay green and bright, like empty boats, for the time of lilies was not yet. The young leaves on the forest trees lengthened and broadened, the grass grew long and began to ripple, the corn sprang quick and bright. The Lent lilies in the meadow wilted, and the bluebells came, like smoke bellying up the slopes of the woods. All was made anew, and the brighter the colours were, the more I thought of Kester and his weaving, and the more unkind I felt it to be on my part, to be glad of the spring, with poor Mother in her new-made grave. There came a day in the very mid of all this fine May weather, when the thorn trees along by the mere were so thick-set with blossom that they laid a solid wall of white in the water at their feet. Though it was noon, the charm of bird-song was nearly as loud as it was at dawn, for in May they never seem to weary. We were in the kitchen, having our dinner afore going out to finish earthing up the taters. Tivvy was helping, as she often did now, though she got but little thanks from Gideon, who would brood all the while, and frown, and start up sometimes as if he heard a voice.

The kitchen was pleasant after the heat outside, for it was an early year. The sun lay in quiet patches along the quarries, and the lilac outside, just past its prime, and the sweeter for it, sent a strong freshness through the open window.

Something went past the window, and there was a little soft tap on the door. It reminded me of the time when Jancis ran away and came to our door in the snow. I went to open, and there she stood, Jancis, white as a ghost, leaning against the doorpost, with a shawl wrapped about her, and in the shawl, as I could just see, a baby no bigger than a doll.

“Why, Jancis!” I says. “However in the name of goodness did you come?”

But she only looked past me, as wild and as white as any mermaid in the old tales, peering after her mortal lover.

She gave me neither word nor look. She gave Tivvy no glance even. We wunna there for Jancis in that hour. She just slipped in, like a wreath of mist from off the winter mountain or a drift of blossom from off the summer trees, or a white woman from under the mere. She’d got on the gown she was used to wear for randies, torn and crumpled but still white, and though it didna set her off as well as the blue one, it did, with the white shawl, make her look like a floating spirit out of the air, as she went across the kitchen. There she was, all of a heap at Gideon’s feet, and she had set the baby on the floor in front of him, as he sate in the big arm-chair at the table. And the table being set out with food, and he at its head, and Jancis there upon the floor, it did make me think of that story in the Bible when Jesus was at a feast, and some poor person came and asked summat, and was chid, and did up and say that not even the dogs need lack their crumbs. It was as if all the good of life was outspread there on our oaken table, till it creaked under the weight. There were the fruits of love, there was the homely bread of daily kindness, and the cup to quench all thirst, and salt to make life tasty, and all the lesser pleasures that do make life a good, sweet thing in the living. And Gideon had the helping of them. Sarn of Sarn Mere was the maister of that feast, and he might say, if he would, “Here, let me heap thy plate, and fill up thy mug!” Or he might begrutch it all.

Jancis was kneeling in the patch of bright sunshine, and she seemed as the snowflake when the day turns to a thaw. In the ticking of one moment she might be melted clean away. I called to mind that day in the dairy, when she came in behopes that Gideon might ask her to wed there and then. I called to mind the night I wished her well when Beguildy was gone to look for the seventh child, and the time I saw her coming toërts me between her white oxen, like a lady of old time that has been a long while dead. I remembered how she’d sung _Green Gravel_ that Christmas when she ran away, and how the light from the window was green upon her face, and how she was used to say—

“O I wanted to play _Green Gravel_!”

All the things she’d ever said or done seemed to be lapped around her as she knelt there with her golden hair all loose about her shoulders. That she was so pale, all white and gold, and that Gideon was so dark, and darkly clad, made it seem yet more as if she came from some other world, and the baby also, for it was white too, and its tiny head, where the wrapper fell aside, was covered with a light yellow down. There was no look of Gideon in it at all. It wunna like a real baby, but like a changeling that came into being in the mid of a summer night on the petal of a lily flower. Oh, it was a strange baby as ever I saw! I leaned against the doorpost with the tears rolling down my face, and so that I shouldna sob out loud I promised myself to give Jancis the best meal ever she had, so soon as this should be over, and she should have a new-laid egg from the slatey game hen, whose eggs were worth a mint of money for setting, she being a prize bird. Though why it should please me so to think of her eating it, when a common egg would have been quite as nice, and bigger, I dunna know. And I promised myself that the baby should have the best wash ever, for indeed it looked as if it had rolled in the ashes. And oh, dear me! how I’d stuff it with milk, and how I’d dress up the old rush cot, and make a little counterpane, and then put the well-stuffed baby to lie in the sun and sleep! And in time it would lose that wisht, awful look, so ancient, as if it knew all there was to know, and didna like it. I wanted to see it with a great big tossy-ball of golden cowslips. And all the while Tivvy sat by Gideon with her mouth fallen open with surprise, and looking almost as frittened as if she’d seen a ghost.

Gideon was like a stone man. There was no feeling in his face at all, neither pity nor anger. All that was overpast, it seemed. It was like an old tale that he’d forgotten, and Jancis was chief lady in that tale, but why she was, and who she was, and what she did was all out of mind, because the tale was lost to his remembrance. Once, at Christmas, maybe, if she’d come, he’d have knocked her down, very likely, in his anger. But then he might have kissed her after. Now he neither struck nor kissed.

All he’d felt for her had died in the fire that night of September, and the sin of the father was visited upon the poor girl. For when Gideon’s eye fell on her, he saw his burning ricks, and in her blue glance there were the red reflections of fire, as you will see on some clear morning the last wild smoulderings of the thunderstorm. That was all she meant to him now. And though his hatred of Beguildy was as savage as ever, he had no feeling at all for her, neither hatred nor desire, nor even lust, much less any love. Miss Dorabella had seized upon his mind, and Tivvy had satisfied his body. There was no place for Jancis. There he sat, in our old kitchen, so quiet, yet so full of whispers, so full of the remembrance of all the Sarns that had been here, from Tim, with the lightning in his blood, to Father, passing out from life in a dark snoring after a fit of anger. I thought of Mother spinning here day after day, whirring like a little lych-fowl. I thought of all the other Sarn women, and of myself, striving and slaving for the bane. And it seemed that the bane was like some plant, such as the catch-fly, that does wile living creatures into its banqueting hall, spreading a great feast, and see! when they are in, she catches them and grips them, and binds them, and trammels their feet, so that they cannot go. There was a heavy sweetness from the day-lilies in the border that made me think of death chambers. I wished Jancis would say summat and get it over, whether for good or ill, so that I might the sooner set about the babe. But she didna, and time went on and on. Outside, there was Sarn Mere standing up afore me like a mirror framed in some precious green gem work. There was no sound but the saddish charm of the birds near and far, and the wandering hum of a bee that came in to our kitchen, and, misliking it, blundered out again.

Then Jancis lifted up her head and looked at Gideon.

“Sarn!” she said. And again, “Sarn!”

As she said it, I got the feeling that there were many listeners, leaning down out of the air, crowded together as close as the petals of a white peony, waiting to hear what should come of this meeting.

She clasped her hands and set her blue eyes upon Gideon, seeming to leave the baby aside for a while, as if he should speak up for himself later.

“Do you mind, Sarn,” she said, “how we used to play _Conquer_ with the big pink and white snail-housen down by the water, and you nearly always won, and I lost? Do you mind how I wanted to play _Green Gravel_?”

Her faint voice stopped a while, and a strange thing happened, for as I watched her it seemed to me as if many voices, a long way off, took up the words of that old song and sang it right through, in parts, as is the manner of singers in our countryside. For if anybody sings at all, he or she can sing parts, the people being all very fond of music and having it grained into their souls. So I heard it, with the grace-notes of the trebles and the rolling of the bass voices, and the altos and the tenors taking up the words and playing with them, and all as it were, making much of the song, and speaking for Jancis through it. Very low and far it seemed, yet rich with many voices.

“_Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green!_ _The fairest young lady that ever was seen._ _I’ll wash you in milk, and I’ll clothe you in silk,_ _And write down your name with a gold pen and ink._”

What it was I heard, I never knew. Parson said it was my busy imagination playing about the past. I canna say. Only, in my imagination or in reality, I did hear it, in very truth, a part song, well sung and tuneful, with every note clear and each part intertwining as it should, but all a very long way off.

“Do you call to mind the even when you saw me under the rosy light, Sarn, when you were coming back from Lullingford ooth the sheep? And the day we found the canbottlins’ nest in the spinney, and fourteen young uns in it, and you kissed me once for every canbottlin?”

Still Gideon made no sound, nor stirred.

“And when I ran away, and Prue took me in, you did say to me, standing in the mid of this very kitchen, ‘Give us a kiss, wench!’ And in the dairy once you said I looked as if I was made of may and milk. And at Callard’s, that evening, I held the baby while Mister Callard made ’em all say, ‘Bull-baiting’s bad!’ do you mind how Grandfeyther Callard said all of a sudden, ‘I see two babbies in her arms, ours, and hers as is to come!’ And the harvest dance, when they whistled so well, and we danced?”

A quiver went across Gideon’s face at the mention of that harvest, and I wondered at Jancis speaking of it, till I saw that she’d forgotten the cause of Gideon’s quarrel with her. All she knew now was that he didna love her, and the reason was neither here nor there.

“And when Feyther went to look for the seventh child, and you came, and we were so sweet together? Ah! Even that morning after Feyther came back we were so, and you said, ‘Come five days, my little dear!’ And I said, ‘God send you happy!’ And since that, Sarn, I hanna set eyes on you till this hour.”

Still Gideon made no sign, so she laid her hand on his arm.

“Do you mind it, Sarn?” she says.

“Ah!” he said, indifferent, “I mind it, but it was long ago. Time out of mind.”

“But the babe wasna. Here be the babe, Sarn! Yours and mine.”

She held the child up as if she’d put it on his knees, but he waved it away.

“A boy!” says Jancis. “Not a girl, to cumber you with women. A boy to mind pigs for ye ever so soon, and in a few years he’ll be driving plough. Ah. I reckon he’ll be a good lad to you, and work well, and gather in twice as much as his grandad scattered abroad.”

The poor babe stirred, as if it felt the heavy burden.

Gideon looked at it, as if when it touched his life’s aim it could be seen, though invisible at other times. Then he gave a short, cruel laugh.

“That?” he says. “You offer me that to help me? Thank ye! Why, if it lives, which I doubt, it’ll never be no good but to coddle about in the house and feed on soft food.”

And as if it knew that it hadna passed the test, the poor mite set up a wail. At this Gideon pushed the table aside and got up. He went to the back kitchen door, that being the nearest way to the kitchen garden. At the door he stopped a minute.

“Best go back where you came from,” he said. “You binna wanted here, neither the one nor the other.”

With that, he shut the door and went out.

Jancis stayed where she was, seeming mazed and dumbfoundered. A pale feather borne along the air, a lily petal wandering on the water, couldna be as lost as she was then. I ran to her, and lifted her and the babe to the settle, for indeed she was so light, it was pity to feel her lightness.

“Now, lookye,” I said, “never a word shall you speak till you’ve had bite and sup! Put the kettle on, Tivvy, there’s a good girl, the while I warm some milk for baby.”

Jancis said nought, but in a little the tears began to steal down her cheeks. She took a sup of tea, and then I asked her how she got here.

“I walked,” she said, “and poor baby was so heavy. You’d never think, to look at him, what a weight he was to lug.” I knew he scarce weighed more than a good fowl, and so I knew also how weary poor Jancis must have been, to feel so small a burden so heavy.

“Whatever was your mother thinking of, to let you walk?”

“Mother’s dead.”

“Dear to goodness! I be sorry for that,” I said. “She was a right nice woman.”

“There’s kind!” says Jancis, but without any heart in it.

She was like one who, in the game of _Costly Colours_, has risked all, playing the card called _Costly_, and lost it. She was out of the game now, with nothing more to gain or lose. I didna like to mention her dad, and she said nothing about him.

“Well, your home’s here,” I said. “You know that, Jancis, my dear.”

“My home canna be here if Sarn dunna love me, Prue.”

“Ah, but it is!” I cried out. “Though I did swear on the Book to obey Gideon like a ’prentice, a wife, and a dog, yet this day I shall gainsay him. You’ll lie in my bed to-night, child. You and the little un will sleep at home from this time on.”

She gave a little sad smile, as if to say, “I wonder!” and lay holding the babe. But now Tivvy, who’d been looking more and more sulky, burst out—

“And will she sleep here indeed, Prue Sarn? I do think not! Maybe you dunna know as I’m going to wed with Sarn myself. Ah! He’s got to wed me for my sake and for his own as well.”

Jancis had opened her eyes and was watching her with a look like a Wise Woman’s I knew once, who could tell you your own thoughts.

“I know it ud be as well for you, Tivvy, if he did wed with you,” I said, pretty dry and sneering, for I never could abide Tivvy, and that’s the truth, “and I reckon he’d best not be too long about it, neither, and you Sexton’s girl and all! But the thing is, will he? And I’m pretty sure he never will. I’m sorry for you, Tivvy, and I’d never have said a word afore Jancis, only you began it.”

Tivvy’s face was scarlet, but she didna flinch.

“I said, good for him as well as for me,” she answered.

“I canna see,” I says, and God forgive me for being so sharp with the girl, “how it ud be good for Gideon, _in any way_, to marry you.”

“Oh! Well, I’ll soon show you,” she says.

“He did love Jancis once, Tivvy,” I told her. “And she was his dear acquaintance and his wife, all but the ring.”

She took no notice of that.

“I’ll tell you why it ud be good for Sarn to marry me,” she said. “Foxglove tea! That’s why.”

“Foxglove tea? Are you crazy, Tivvy?”

“Everybody knows as I know nought of yarbs. Everybody knows Sara gave the cow foxglove leaves. You and I know that the doctor said your mother seemed as if she’d had foxglove.”

She spoke slower and slower, leaning forrard with her hands on the table.

“Everybody knows, Prue Sarn, that your brother thought Missis Sarn a burden. Everybody knows he does want to get on. And _I_ know, and if he dunna marry me pretty quick everybody else’ll know too, what was in the tea he made for his mother and told me to give her strong.”

“What was it?” I said, with a sickness at the heart.

“Foxglove!”

She snapped out the word like a bite. I knew it was true.

“I can prove it,” she said, “because as it chanced Mother had come to bring Missis Sarn that night-rail she’d been sewing for ’er. And when I came down from giving Missis Sarn her tea, I poured a cup for Mother, there being some left, and Mother said in a minute, ‘This is foxglove tea.’ Ah, Mother knows right well what Missis Sarn died of, but she’ll never mouth it to a mouse if Sarn weds with me.”

“I’ll never believe it!” I cried out. But Tivvy says—

“You will. You believe it now.”

And I did. Jancis did, too. She gave a little moan and whispered—

“It was foreboded, Prue! It was to be. I’ve no home now, Prue, no home on all this earth. Neither baby nor me’s got anywhere to go. What shall us do, baby?”

The baby, being spoken to and being well content with the meal it had just finished, gave a milky smile. Jancis shut her eyes and seemed to care no more what anybody said.

But Tivvy came to the settle, and she says—

“If you stop the night over, we’ll publish it all abroad, Jancis Beguildy!”

And then I be sorry to say my temper was out, and I rushed at her and boxed her ears right well.

“Go!” I says. “Go, you cruel wench, afore I maul you. I never hated afore. But you I hate. How dare you be so curst to that poor child? You may settle with Gideon what you both do. But when you come over the door-sill, out go I. And for this day, out go you!”

And I may say she went pretty quick, very startled to see meek Prue Sarn in such a temper.

“Now lie you still, and rest, my dear,” I said. “While I go to Gideon.”

“No. Dunna werrit Sarn, Prue,” she says. “But I’ll rest. Ah. Baby and me’s both in need of rest. We’ll take a good long rest, Prue. And thank you kindly for all.”

Out I went. There was Gideon, working like seven. I do believe those unkind words he said to Jancis were but his way of brazening it out to his own heart. I do believe there was a seed of love there even then, and if it hadna been for Tivvy it might have pushed up and flowered. I was never one to hiver-hover over things, so I walked up to Gideon and said—

“Tivvy says you gave Mother poison. Be it true?”

“By gum, that wench wants a good hiding!” says Gideon. “And if she forces me to wed with her, that’s the bride-gift she’ll get.”

“You _did_ give her foxglove tea to give Mother, then?”

“Mother told me she’d liefer be dead than quick, and she was a burden.”

He never tried to soften it nor deny it, for that wasna his way.

“Well, you be a murderer, and I’ve done with you,” I said.

“You swore to do as I said.”

“Murder cancels all vows,” I answered.

“I dunna want Tivvy here. She’s no manner use.”

“Seemingly you canna choose,” I said. “It’s Tivvy or hang, as far as I can see. I’d save you if I could, for you be my brother, when all’s said, and I like you right well, too. When you’ve worked along of a person, furrow for furrow and spade for spade, as long as I’ve worked with you, lad, you do like the person right well, unless you hate him. And you I canna hate, though I’ve been trying to the last few minutes. Gideon! What for did you do such a wicked thing? Indeed to goodness you mun repent in dust and ashes, and think of nothing else at all, or the devil’ll certainly put his mark on you, so you’ll come to no good in this life, and go to the lowest hell in the other. Your own Mother, Gideon!”

But all he’d say was—

“She said she’d liefer be dead than quick, and she was a great burden.”

“Well, I’m going, and so I warn you,” I said, in a passion.

“I’m in behopes you’ll stay over hay and corn harvest,” he answers, as cool as cool could be, just as if he’d done no wrong at all, which I believe in his own sight he hadna.

“No,” I said. “Fix up with Tivvy.”

“She’s no use in the harvest. She’s so bone-idle.”

“I’ll stay till she comes, and no longer,” I said. “And I wouldna promise that, only I know she’s in a pretty taking to get wed quick. I be right down disappointed with you, Gideon, on every count.”

“You’ve no right to be. What have I done? Put an old woman to sleep as wanted to sleep. And as for Tivvy, she as good as asked me to.”

Calm? Oh, he was as calm as the mere when it was frozen deep.

“And what about Jancis?” I burst out. “What about that poor mommet of hers that you’ve brought into the world? They’re neither old nor forrard.”

For answer, he pointed across to the blackened floor of the rickyard, and said—

“You know whose child she is.”

Then, under breath, he said, as if he’d forgotten me—“But I did love her once.”

So I left him to his thoughts, and ran back to the house, calling out as I opened the back door—

“Here, Jancis, my dear, I’ve brought the slatey hen’s egg to beat up in milk for you.”

But no one answered, and when I came into the kitchen the settle was empty.

I ran across the fold and out through the gate by the mixen into the road, into that good road the Romans did make, so many a year ago. And yet, to the mere, that long while was but a little, for though it had been troubled two thousand times since then, so Parson said, yet it had been troubled uncounted thousands of times afore, and would be again, till the world and all shrivelled like the cast-off body of a dragon-fly. I ran along the road in the strong heat, and the sandy earth shone in the light, and the shadows were short and very dark. I ran round the first corner, that came soon, and the next, and even the next, in case she’d walked faster than I thought. But there was nobody on the road, no white and gold mother with a white and gold mommet. Only the camomile, in clumps on the banks, was their colour, gold and white, and as I ran the strong scent of it caught my heart. I thought maybe she’d gone up to my room to wash baby. I ran back, calling and searching high and low. But there was nobody in the house save Pussy, who looked at me, sad, and ran into every room a bit in front of me. I looked in the barn and the loft and the shippen. Why I should think she was there I canna say, only I was getting despert eager to find her by this. I ran up the wood path, in case she’d had a fancy to walk there, where Gideon so often went to send her on her way home. I ran on and on, calling till the wood-pigeons flew up with a clattering noise, but nobody answered. Only the forest stood about me. Only the varnished kingcups were yellow round the edges of the mere, each clump of blossoms multiplied by two in the clear water, and the walls of thorn-bloom lay there, white and green. A lost and lonesome feeling crept over me. I went to Gideon in the garden at the back of the house.

“I canna find Jancis,” I said.

“I told her to go back where she came from,” he answered, with the same manner of speaking as he had afore, brazening it out.

“She couldna do that,” I said, “for she’s gotten no money and her mother’s dead, and what’s come to her father only the assize court knows, seemingly, for she dunna. She walked all the way from Silverton, Gideon. She hadna any money for the coach. All those weary miles she walked to come to you. And how did you make her welcome?”

He said nought to that, but went on with his work.

“You mun come and look for the poor girl,” I said. “Now. This instant minute, you must come. You must think of somewhere else to look. Oh, think of somewhere else quick, Gideon! For I canna. And if we canna think of anywhere else, there’s only——”

With a great shudder I pointed to the mere.

“What?” he said, very angered. “What, you’d fritten me, would ye?”

He smote the spade into the earth as if there was an enemy hid there, and came with me round the house and the buildings. Then he set off up the road, saying she might have got a lift, which made me afraid for his wits, seeing that there was nobody to give lifts on that road but us and the ghostly chariots that people said you could hear, nights, rolling and grinding along the old road. But in a while Gideon came back, finding no sign of Jancis.

“We must drag the mere,” I said. “We needna go far, I doubt. She’d soon be out of her depth, being so little and small. And she’d no time to walk far. She must have gone in by the caus’y here.”

For, as I said afore, this broad stone caus’y that the Romans made ran from just in front of our house down into the village at the bottom of the mere, where the bells did play, they said, of an evening.

And it turned out that I was right, for there, just where the caus’y went into the water, was one of baby’s boots. I’d noticed that the ribbon was out of it, and that it was nearly off, and would have been right off if this un had been like other babes, kicking and laughing to feel its own might. But it was only a poor stilly waxen creature, and so, doubtless, the boot stayed on till it felt the cold water, and struggled to find itself dying as it never did to find itself living.

They lay there in a bed of lily leaves, and we took them up without a word and carried them within. I washed them and dressed them in white, and we laid them on Mother’s bed, and I mounded it up with flowers, white lilac, and thorn, golden day-lilies and golden cowslips, that the child should have made into tossy-balls in the time to come.

All the while, Gideon said nothing, nor did he look much at them, but went on with his work about the place.

But the neighbours came, all the three days afore the funeral, from near and far. For the coming back of Jancis, and the child, and the drowning, made such a tale as hadna been in our part of the country, where things go on middling quiet, even in the memory of Grandfeyther Callard.

They came and looked at her, and the women cried, though in her life they’d been hard as flint to Jancis. The younger men stood a while, saying nought, looking down upon her as if they were fain of her.

“The sins of the fathers,” said Sexton, making an oration over those two, “and not only the sins of the fathers, for it’s no use to be mealymouthed, people, and though it be sad to say it, the poor wench was no better than she should be, for the child wunna born in wedlock. No, people, it wunna even a barley child, for there was no ring in the case at all. We dunna know who the man was,” he went on, looking at Gideon in a way that showed he knew right well, and meant to say unless Gideon wed with Tivvy, “we dunna know that, but what we do know is, _where she came from_. We know who was her feyther, neighbours. We know she was sired by the devil’s oddman. We know that the burning of the ricks was as nought, yea, and less than nought, compared with the things he did secret and unbeknown. What’s come to pass was only what we had to expect, for what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, dear souls.”

“By their fruits ye shall know them, Matthew seven,” added Sammy.

Then, looking down upon the two golden heads a good while, as you might look at some rare bird you’d never see again, he said, to himself and so low that I only heard because I was nighest to him—

“They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”

And he catched his breath a bit, forgetting chapter and verse.

Callard’s children came two by two, to view the bodies. And as they stood at the foot of the bed after, looking on the babe in the crook of its mother’s arm, suddenly they cried out all together, as they were taught to do about the baiting—

“Oh, look’s pretty! The little mommet!”

And Miller nodded his head three times, as if to say, here were two kit-cats, where they should be.

Then Grandfeyther Callard stood out, and he said—“Two funerals in a month! It do make me think of the days when the great sickness was on the land, and we as were quick were weary of the buryings. And strange it is, friends all, that these two should be dead, when their ages added together dunna amount to near thirty years, while I number one-and-ninety years and yet I’ve so far missed to catch the plague that ravens through this bitter old world—the ancient plague of dying.”

Still Gideon said nothing. But the night afore we took them to the churchyard I heard him stirring, and being afraid that in a sudden horror of the spirit he might do himself a mischief, for though a slow, quiet man in daily life, he could be, now and again, hasty of a sudden, I went to see what the matter was.

He was standing beside the bed. As I went in he had just stretched forth his hand and lifted in his great brown fingers the plait of golden hair, so thick and fine, that was ever the pride of poor Jancis. When he turned at my coming, he was like a lad taken in a fault, hanging his head and muttering, as if it should explain his act, which indeed it did—

“I did love her once.”

C H A P T E R F I V E: _The Last Game of Conquer_

IF it had not been that Parson said I must be careful to write all, and leave out none, since to know all made folks kind, but to know a part made ’em worse than if they knew nothing, if it hadna been for that, I’d never have tried to write of those three months at Sarn betwixt the time of the death of Jancis and the time of the troubling of the waters. For there are some things so hard to write of that even a great scholar might boggle at it, and I, though I can do the tall and the short script, am not anything of a scholar, and words be hard to find for some things. I think, times, that in our mortal language there are no words for the things that are of most account. So, when those things come upon us we are struck silent, and can but feel and feel, till our hearts are like a bursting dam. Maybe, in the life yonder, that already I begin to glimpse on the edge of this world, we shall find the proper words. But not yet So, if I fail in what I’ve set out to do, you must pardon what I canna help, and fill up the glats in my speech with the brushwood of your own imagining.

The strangest part of that time was the silence of it. Gideon had always been a silent man, but now he was as bad as the miller. He’d come and he’d go, but not a word would pass his lips. And sometimes he’d stop all of a sudden, as he went about his work, as if he’d been struck of a heap by summat. His thoughts, I guessed it to be. Then he’d straighten his shoulders, and mighty shoulders they were, and go about his work again. I thought it would pass in time, and as nothing was settled between him and Tivvy yet, I made up my mind not to leave the poor lad all alone, but to bide still for a while. Tivvy was in a fix, for she was determined to have Gideon, and yet she was so mortal afraid of the frittening, for the frittening is said to be very bad in a place where mother and babe die together, that she durstna set foot our side of the mere at all. So there we were, in a thick, cruddled silence, that grew ever more and more solid like freezing water or souring milk. Save for the birds, that minded their own affairs and took no thought of us, there were no voices uplifted at Sarn. Evenings, when they hushed, it fell so still that I could hear Gideon’s boat, moored just by the beginning of the caus’y, knocking and knocking with small, reminding taps. And, times, in the kitchen of a night, when Gideon was out, working late at the hoeing of the young corn or at the haying, I’d hold up a bit of tasty victuals to Pussy just to make her mew. And I’d say, “There, now thee’s mewed! Good Pussy!”

When he was in, Gideon was as dumb as the drowned, save that once, on a night of bright moonlight when we were having our supper late after haying, he leaned forrard of a sudden and said—

“Did ye see that?”

“What?” I says.

“Why, somebody went by the door, in a white gown.”

But it wasna till July, in a spell of very thundery weather, hot and still and gloomy, that his strangeness came upon him in good earnest. I was sitting in the doorway, to get what air there was, for it drew off the mere, evenings. I was carding wool, and the white of it, heaped up on my black, made me look like a magpie, I thought. The lilac leaves were limp with the heat, and the mere like hot lead to look at, with the tall thick trees around it, carven out of iron. All round the marges of the mere were the lilies, lying on the heavy water, their small white buds shining. Not a bird spoke, for all were in their coverts, since the heat was so great. Even the water-birds stayed among the reeds, and the boat had given over knocking on the steps, as if the day was fixed now for the passenger to come, and there was no more to do till then. Suddenly Gideon came round the corner all in a sweat of haste, with the brummock in one hand and his hedging gloves still on, for he was busy at the hedges between hay and corn harvest. He stopped when he saw me, and put hand to head, and then broke out in a passion—

“What for do ye sit there the like of that, making game you’re Mother?”

“I never made game to be Mother,” I said. “Whatever ails you?”

“Mother was used to sit there and card wool. I thought you were Mother.”

“Well, I couldna help that,” I said. “But what did you come round the corner in such a courant for?”

“I was pleaching the big thorn hedge, and she came upon the top of it, all in white.”

“Who came upon the top of it?” I asks, impatient

“Jancis,” he says, as quiet as could be, not as if he was saying anything strange, but just as he might speak of seeing Tivvy or Polly Miller. He said no more, but went back to his work, though he gave up the hedge. He’d never argue at all about what he saw, but just say he saw it, and that was all. The next time was when he was hoeing in the big wheat field. He came into the house, very hasty, with the hoe and all, and said he’d seen Jancis ploughing with her two white oxen, in the barley field, and the child sitting up on the nighest ox.

“Now look you, Gideon,” I said, “you mun leave thinking of Jancis, or you’ll be possessed. And a man possessed is pretty far on to madness. You just think of getting on and scraping and saving as you used to, and dunna think of Jancis or Mother till you’re more settled in your mind.”

“I dunna think of Jancis. She just comes.”

“Well, set your mind on other things and she wunna.”

“What things?”

“Why, getting rich, and getting the house.”

“What for?”

“For the same reason you began of it. Because you want it.”

“I dunna want it now.”

“But why? You wanted it so much, you poisoned Mother. You wanted it so much, you gave the nay-word to Jancis. Let alone all the things you did afore, you must have been pretty well clemmed for it to do as you did.”

“Well, I dunna want it now.”

“What for not?”

“Summat went out of it when I did see ’em in the water.”

“Well, think of Tivvy, then. She’d like to go to the Hunt Ball, I know.”

“I wunna take up with Tivvy. I’d liefer swing.”

“Miss Dorabella, then. She’s sweet on you. Take up with her, and she’ll spend her money to save you from Tivvy.”

“Dorabella’s abron. I like a fair woman. Little. With blue eyes. A woman like may and milk.”

“Well, think of me then. Be a bit of company for me now and again.”

“But you be going.”

“Not till you’re more settled in mind, lad. I’ll stop on a bit, if you’ll keep a cheerful heart, and not call old grief to mind.”

But it was no use. In less than a week he came in all of a hurry and said—

“She’s at it again.”

“What, ploughing?”

“Ah. And the barley field’s as bald as a coot.”

“It’s bad seed,” I says, “that’s what it is, Gideon. It’s because you had to buy instead of putting in our own.”

But my heart was heavy, and I couldna see what the end of this would be. I even wished Tivvy would come.

It got to be the usual thing for him to say—

“She came again in the wood to-day.” Or he’d say—“Look ye! There she is, drawing in to the caus’y. There! Now she’s coming up the caus’y, dripping wet. There! Now she’s gone.”

Once he said she beckoned from the boat. But it was always out of doors he saw her, so the house was a kind of refuge, and when he suffered that strange fear, in he’d come, and be more himself. I was glad he never saw anything in the house. I was glad, too, that he never heard anything. It was like as if, being smitten to the heart with the sight of her in the water, he’d lost the power to choose what he _saw_, but could still choose what he heard. And then, at the beginning of August-month, when the corn was just on ripe, he came in and said she’d been singing _Green Gravel_ across the water.

“The sound comes in here,” he said, anxious. So I shut the window.

“Best put some wool in your ears,” I said. For indeed it was pitiful to see a man like Gideon trembling at a gleam of white in the hedge or an echo across the water. So he put wool in his ears and we got on pretty well through the first part of August. Then, it was the evening afore the fair at Sarn Mere, and many of the booths were already set up. We sat down early to our supper because there had come a letter from Miss Dorabella, brought by one of their men, with news in it about Beguildy. So I opened the letter and read it to Gideon, and he took the wool out of his ears to hear; and what it said was that they’d let Beguildy off light, because he’d had great provocation on account of his daughter.

“Domm!” says Gideon. The blazing hate in him burnt up afresh at hearing of the light sentence, and I almost thought it might cure him of seeing things. But in a little while he fell into his melancholy again, and said he’d seen Mother in the oakwood, where the pigs were.

“Now, dear to goodness,” I said, “it was nobody in the world but Miller’s Polly. She’s getting a big girl for her age, and Mother was but little.”

“No,” he said. “It was Mother. They bother me, Prue.”

“There, there!” I said, patting him on shoulder like a child. For indeed when he spoke of his haunting, he seemed as weak and full of fear as a child in the dark.

“Now see, it’ll all come right,” I said. “You must be well plucked and not mind. You was used to be so fond of _Conquer_. Well, now you must play _Conquer_ with your own thoughts.”

But he only looked at me as if he didna understand, and said—

“What she didna like was me speaking unkind of the babe. Very touchy, mothers be, about their babes.”

We sat quiet a bit, and then he said, all of a sudden—“Hark ye! She’s singing _Green Gravel_.”

He listened a long while, though I could hear nothing.

Then he leaned forrard and said she was coming up off the caus’y toërts the house. His face broke out in a sweat, as if he was feared out of his life. But indeed the weather was enough to make anybody sweat without that, it was so hot and dank at once, the worst weather of all at Sarn, which never had much air, being down in a hollow, and which was always damp from the water. On an evening such as this, the walls ran down with water, so that the whitewash shone as if with the tracks of many snails. Over the mere a mist was rising, in trails and wisps, white as wool, thickening and gathering into clotted heaps towards the mid of the mere. Sometimes a wreath of mist would be drawn out like a scarf, and other times it would stand up in the shape of a woman, but wavering upon the air. It seemed to me it might well be one of these ghosts of mist that Gideon had seen. For they rose and sank about the caus’y all the while, as the light airs on the water took them. At Sarn in August there were always heavy mists night and morning, and this was out of the common bad, because we’d had thunder-rain the night before, and a day of brooding heat after it. Bad, I say, because I never could abide mist, and we had such a deal of it, so that sometimes it blotted the farm and the woods and the church right out, as if the mere had turned to milk, and risen up and drowned all.

“Hark!” says Gideon. “Can you hear _Green Gravel_?”

So strong was his mind, and so much it had the mastery over mine, that I almost thought I did hear a wailing song. And then, without any warning, sitting in the big arm-chair with a set, yearning face, like a man enchanted, as I do think he was, Gideon began to sing the song himself. He held up his right hand, solemn, like parson giving the blessing, and he looked out through the doorway toërts the mere and the caus’y and the slow, white, curdling mist. He sang as if some power was on him that made him. You could see he was bound to sing. He had a rolling voice, a fine bass it was; and though he began very softly, it strengthened as he went on, till the music seemed to master the place. And the way he made that childish song mean such a deal!—all the love he’d had for Jancis, and how he’d wanted her to have everything so grand, and go to the Ball like a lady, and all the fear and pity of her ending. It seemed as if he was easier in mind after, having, as it were, given in and so made peace. Still watching the door, he says—

“Here’s Jancis. Soused with water she is, out of the mere.”

So I said I saw nothing.

“Why, look’s the water dripping off her gown!” he said. “See there, and there, where she goes! Sogging wet she is, by gum!”

He pointed to the floor, and indeed there was water in all the little hollows in the quarries, as if the mere had found a way to soak up through the floor. So I said, yes, I saw the water in the hollows of the quarries.

“Hark at the mud in her boots sooking! Muddy, the mere is. See now, how slow she comes—slow, like she used to walk when she spun with the big wheel. She walks slow because her clo’es are so heavy about her. It’s uphill and agen the heart for Jancis, with the mommet to carry all alone.”

Then he said, worried—

“I wish I hadna mocked at the babe.”

A long while went by. The sounds in the room were less than on the evening Father died. It was as if Sarn, all the live part of it, us and our beasts, the trees full of birds, and the wood ways with wild creatures in them, had sunk to the bottom of the mere where the village was. I was beginning to believe all Gideon said, which was not so very different, after all, from many a tale of frittening we’d heard.

“Look ye now!” he muttered. “She’s going toërts the dairy door. There, she’s gone! ’Twas in the dairy I gave her the nay-word that time afore she went to Grimble’s. There now, she’s coming back. Her yellow head does shine so, she makes me call to mind that wandering light at Lullingford New House.”

He was leaning forrard, staring down the dimmery passage that led to the dairy.

“There, look’s the wet floor!” he said. “It’s like as if she’d brought the mere in along of her. I never thought she’d come in the house. A castle’s easy kept when none comes against it. But now—”

He looked down at the wet quarries a good while.

“Why, she’s gone!” he said then. “Like a golden bee sailing away on the air, and singing as she goes. Look’s pretty!”

He stayed brooding a long time. Then he got up and told me he was going to see to the stock, for the evening was well on to night. He said that in his usual way, and I thought the frittening had lifted from his mind. But as he went out, he turned, and looked at me just as he did the night Beguildy went to seek a seventh child, and said—

“If I’m late, put the key over the stable door.”

I thought, no, if he was out so much as a half-hour, I should go after him. Indeed I almost did then. Summat told me to go. But it seemed so queer, when he was only going to see to the stock, to run after him. So I stayed where I was and began looking in Beguildy’s book, that I bought at the sale, and in the Bible, to see if I could find any cure for such bewitchments. I hadna been reading more than half an hour, if so much, and I suppose it was about nine o’clock, though it seemed later because of the muffling mist and the silence, when all of a sudden there was a taboring at the door, and in rushed Miller’s Tim and Polly too.

“Oh, Prue, Prue! we’d just brought the pigs along, being late because the black un wouldna come out of the rushes, and we’d put ’em in yard, quiet, for fear Mister Sarn ud be angry with us for being late, and we were looking for glow-worms under the orchard hedge, when out comes Mister Sarn. So we hid. And looking from under the hedge we saw him, standing by the water, with his head stooped forrard a bit, like a horse with the staggers. And I told Polly what I heard Granfeyther Callard say. ‘Sarn?’ he says, ‘Oh, Sarn’s known frittening of the beautiful bogey out of the mere, and he’ll never be his own man again.’ And while I was whispering that to Polly, Mister Sarn lifted up his head and seemed to look all around at everything, only there was not much but mist. Then he turned toërts the caus’y, going like a chap in his sleep, and went down the caus’y to the boat, and untied the boat, and got in and took up the oars, and rowed with big strokes away from the farm, straight out where the caus’y went, to the mid of the lake. So we ran round to see if we could get a blink of him, but he was in the mist. The noise of the oars went on for a while, and I wished I was in the boat. But in a bit I was glad I was on dry land. The sound of the rowing stopped.”

“Ah. Dead as dead it stopped,” said Polly.

“We held our breath to see if we could hear aught, but no! It was like the text parson learned us last Sunday, ‘There was silence over all the land till the ninth hour.’ Oh, it was solemn.”

“You should have come to me then,” I said. “But quick now! What else?”

“Why nothing else at all,” says Tim, “saving a great splash. I never heard such a splash, not even when the brindled calf fell into the water.”

“Ah. Dear to goodness, it _was_ a splash!” says Polly.

“Then it went quieter and quieter, and we held breath and listened, but there was nought. And I did call on Mister Sarn’s name, but none answered. And I was feared and so was Polly, and we ran to you.”

The boat! I must get to the boat. I ran down the caus’y, tearing off my skirt, but there was no need to swim, for the boat was coming back, since the air drew from the other end of the mere, sending the currents toërts us, and these currents were stronger at the time of the troubling of the waters. A dreadful thing it was to see that empty boat come stealing in, slow, slow. I catched it and got in, taking up the oars which Gideon had unshipped, for even in this hour he couldna do anything slipshod or careless. I pulled out, calling to the children to run for Sexton, he being the nighest. They were soon gone, and glad to go. And I rowed out to the mid of the lake, feeling in the water with the oars, looking here and there, and calling his name, though I knew all the while it was too late. I was still rowing and calling when I heard Sexton shout from the shore.

“Me and Sam will go while you rest a bit,” he said. “But we’ll never find Sarn. You canna drag the mere out there. It’s too deep. None were ever found that went in there.”

They rowed away, and as they came toward the middle of the mere. I heard them singing, as we’d sung over Father long ago—

“_Your good deeds and your bad, dear man,_ _Afore the Lord shall meet._”

Only they left out about the turf at head and foot, for the water was his grave. Ah! The whole of that great stretch of water wasna too much to make the grave of a man as strong as that one. The mile-long mist that lay upon the place wasna too grand a shroud. For though he was wrong, and did evil, and hurtid folks with his strength, yet he never did meanly, nor turned out bad work, nor lied. “The granite mountain, quartzite, b’rytes,” he said once to me, speaking of his own hardness. And he was like them all. He could no more give in than the granite can crumble like sandstone. And now he’d played his last game of _Conquer_, and what he played with wasna one of the big pink-and-white ones, but his own life.

And since the other player was one that none can ever hope to conquer, it shivered into brittle fragments in a moment, and so Gideon Sarn lost his last game.

C H A P T E R S I X: _The Breaking of the Mere_

THAT was a night of grief and fear which nothing in life has ever made me forget. Sexton and Sammy, after a vain search, went home. I was alone under the coverlet of fog, in that place full of ghostly footsteps. I said a prayer for dying men. Then I sat hour by hour beside the fire, in that dim slothfulness of the spirit which a great sorrow or a great amazement will bring. It was the strangest Wake Eve I’d ever known, and the most grievous night of all my life. I thought how Gideon forbade me to go down into the water as folk did of old time, and be cured of my