THE SISTERS
Lucy was still lying fast asleep in bed. Barbara called softly, "Lucy,
Lucy," but there was no reply. Then she laid her hand upon the sleeper's
breast. Some hands have a power to thrill the spirit of those they
touch. Such power had Barbara Lynn's.
Lucy stirred. She opened her eyes, and saw her sister bending over her,
with hair unbound and glistening like a misty golden cloud.
"If I were on my death-bed," she murmured, "I should be fancying thee an
angel out of heaven."
Barbara smiled slowly.
"It's time you were waking," she replied, and began to gather up her
long locks, pleating them round her head.
Lucy flung back the coverlet, and drew her knees up to her chin.
"You've a black, black heart, Barbara Lynn, though you've the face of a
holy saint," she replied. "I believe you get a lot of pleasure out of
waking me up in the morning. I was dreaming such heavenly dreams--all
about grapes!"
She shook back her hair, which was black and glossy as a raven's wing,
but her eyes, like Barbara's, were blue. All her movements were swift
and decisive, for her spirit was made of quicksilver.
"You've an earthly mind," she added.
Barbara knotted a kerchief round her head, and glanced at a tiny mirror
hanging on the wall. A flickering rushlight vied with the grey dawn to
show the face reflected there. She sighed audibly.
"You're about right," she said. "I think it's clod-bound."
Lucy drew a curl between her lips, meditating upon her sister's reply.
"Where are you going?" she asked; "to Ketel's Parlour?"
"Not just now. I promised to help the hind with a rough bit of
ploughing--that high field where we are going to plant potatoes. It's
too steep for old Jan Straw to lead the horses there. He fell down
yesterday! Poor Jan! he'll never work no more."
The sisters were silent as they thought of the old man, hardly so
intelligent as the wild creatures of the woods and fells, but faithful
to the last drop of his blood.
"I think he'll be glad to die," said Lucy.
A faint flush swept up Barbara's face.
"He's dust," she replied, "and he's going back to the dust he came from,
like a little cloud raised by the wind. What has he ever had in life to
make him want to live?"
Lucy sank back upon her pillows, and clasped her hands behind her head.
It was not often that Barbara spoke bitterly.
"And you!" she said. "You've never a chance, either. You might be a man
for the work you do."
"I was meant for a man when I was made so tall and strong," answered
the girl, with a note of pride in her voice and a straightening of her
figure.
"Nay, nay, there's not a man in the dale, nor in the country round, that
can hold a candle to thee."
"Then I's neither fish, flesh nor fowl, for there's not a woman as tall
or strong, unless it be yon great creature we saw at the show."
Lucy gazed at her sister with critical eyes.
"You'll look finely, like a queen, when you get the crown Old Camomile
promised thee, the day he told your stars," she said.
Barbara moved towards the door, carrying her clogs in her hand.
"Don't forget it's time you were up," she replied. Not even to her
sister would she acknowledge that the prophecy gave an interest to her
life.
But Lucy would not be repressed.
"Perhaps a lord will ride by some day, and marry you, Barbara. Who
knows?"
The girl paused with her fingers on the latch.
"His horse would stick in the mud of the bridle path like a fly in a
glue-pot. He'd never get so far as Greystones. You're a silly wench,
Lucy. Lords don't come looking for wives among peasant lasses."
Lucy gurgled with laughter, which she stifled under the quilt for fear
of waking her great-grandmother.
"What a sober old maid you are, Barbara," she said. "Do you never
dream?"
The door shut with a soft snick--her sister had gone.
For a while longer Lucy lay still, gazing at the rushlight as it burnt
dimmer and the daylight increased. She wondered what life held in store
for Barbara and herself. The present was not without its excitements,
but towards the future she turned longing eyes--the Future, hidden by a
golden cloud, which some day would fade away, disclosing undreamed-of
joys.
Then she got slowly out of bed. Her toilet was not a simple affair like
her sister's. Along a shelf stood a row of little green jars and
bottles, containing balms and salves and scented waters. The sun might
tan Barbara's face and bleach her hair to the colour of ripe corn; rain
and wind and frost might redden and cut her hands, but Lucy's cheeks
were always satin smooth, and her curls black and glistening. She
tempted her sister with ointment made from cowslips, with distilled
rose-water, and balm of elder-flowers--all the sweetest odours that ever
perfumed woodland air were concentrated into those green phials--but she
tempted in vain. Barbara laughed. There were the cows to milk, the sheep
to herd, hoeing and weeding and seed-sowing to do; what time had she for
such fanglements?
The eastern clouds were rosy with the rays of the rising sun when Lucy
stole downstairs and opened the kitchen door. The four-poster stood with
its curtains closed like an Arab's tent in lonely gloom. The girl
shivered as she looked at it. The thought of the old woman lying within
took all the brightness from her eyes and the lightness from her step.
She was afraid of her great-grandmother as of something unknown. What
right had anyone so old to be still among the living? Her place was with
the dead, with the men and women whose names had become a faint memory
in the dale, but who were to her personalities, that she had touched and
handled. Lucy's mother had died when she was a baby, and the grim old
figure, that sometimes rocked her cradle, had filled her infant mind
with fear. Now that she had grown to womanhood the fear remained, though
she hid it under a gay and careless demeanour. Still, the shadow of her
great-grandmother fell like a blight on Lucy's life.
She tiptoed to the fireplace and soon had the smouldering turf in a
glow. Then, opening the outer door and stepping out into the sunlight,
she filled the kettle at the spring. It was a fair morning. The chorus
of birds had ceased and busy feathered things were marketing among the
sprouting green of the beck-side. Far away up the dale she saw the red
cows move, and knew that Barbara was somewhere near, driving them to new
pastures. Thundergay was still swathed with smokelike mists, rolling
upwards in the breeze, and gradually disclosing grey precipices, and
slatey screes, with here and there patches of emerald, where the young
ferns were beginning to spring, and higher up, wide fields of snow. Lucy
paused to pluck a cluster of primroses, and place them in her hair. But
she was startled by a cough from a stunted tree near. Among its knarled
roots crouched a little figure, wrapped in a sack to keep itself warm.
"Oh, it's you, Jan!" said Lucy. "I thought you were a sheep coughing.
You should have stayed in bed to-day and taken a rest."
The creature raised a pair of watery eyes to her face, then dropped
them.
"I's always gotten up at dawn," was the reply.
"But it's so cold!"
Again the pale eyes were raised and dropped.
"Verra cold, lass."
"You must come to the kitchen."
"Nay."
Lucy laid her fingers upon his withered hand.
"Come and get warm," she entreated. "I've got such a grand fire
burning."
The old man made no reply, but kept his gaze upon her slender fingers.
At last his voice came slowly, as though he were drawing up something
from the dark well of his memory.
"Onced I seed a hand like yourn, onced, long ago. I's forgotten when,
but I minds the hand."
"Come," said Lucy.
He rose painfully and crawled by her side. But at the kitchen door he
held back.
"Nay," he repeated.
"Why?"
"I must work."
"Rubbish," said Lucy scornfully, and again she laid her hand upon his.
"You've been working all your life, you can have a rest now. Let the new
hind--Tom, do what's to be done."
The old man stared anew at her fingers.
"I minds where I saw that hand," he said, "it was outside a white
winding sheet ... long ago."
Lucy tried to draw him into the kitchen, but he was obstinate, and
afraid of Mistress Lynn.
"I'll go and feed the chickens," he mumbled, and shuffled away round the
end of the house.
Lucy looked after him sadly, then returned to her work. As she was
shaking the sheepskin rug a coin fell out of it and lay glittering upon
the ground. Picking it up with an exclamation of surprise, she turned it
over and over. It was a sovereign. For some minutes she stood with her
brows knit and her blue eyes darkening as thought took shape. The coin
was her great-grandmother's, there could be no doubt of it. Lucy had
always had suspicions about the locked cupboard of the bridewain, which
she had never seen opened. Now she knew something was hidden
there--money most likely, perhaps many more coins like the one she had
found, perhaps bags of them. If one could be lost without a hue and cry
being raised for it, they must be as plentiful as blackberries.
What should she do? Should she keep it? Was it not her due, considering
the way she worked and yet received no recompense? The temptation to put
the coin in her pocket was strong, and she thought longingly of the many
pretty things it would buy. Then she spurned the suggestion. She
remembered Jan Straw, whose life had been bought for a few pounds and a
sup of porridge; she saw Barbara wearing out her strong young life upon
the fells; she thought of herself, drudging from daylight to
day-darkening. The bitterness of it set her teeth on edge. She looked
again at the yellow coin, and it seemed to have taken upon it a tinge of
blood.
Then the curtain rings of the bed jingled, and turning round, she saw
that her great-grandmother was sitting up, looking at her.
Lucy might fear the old woman, but she was not lacking in courage when
the moment called for it. She balanced the coin upon her thumb-nail,
spun it into the air, and caught it as it fell.
"See what I've found," she said.
Mistress Lynn stared at the shining thing, lying on the girl's palm.
"Where didst get it?" she asked sharply.
"At the end of the rainbow."
"Rainbow! fiddlesticks! Give it to me."
Lucy dropped the coin into the outstretched hand without a word. But she
stood looking down, her eyes fierce and more like the old woman's than
Barbara's were, although in face and figure there was no other
resemblance.
"Where didst get it?" again asked Mistress Lynn.
"It fell out of the rug."
"Ah! I sold some sheep to a man from the South yesterday. I thought he
had paid me short money--they're such cheats in the South! Well, well,
it must have dropped out of his hand. Thee shall have a shilling come
Good Friday, Lucy."
"A shilling!" Lucy was scornful, "a shilling!"
Mistress Lynn looked narrowly at her great-granddaughter. Between the
girl and her little love was lost.
"What ails thee at a shilling? It's over much when I come to think of
it. Thee shall have sixpence. That's enough for a young lass to spend on
fallals."
"1 wonder at you, I wonder at you, great-grandmother," exclaimed Lucy.
"I wonder at you hoarding up the money, and you so old."
"Wouldst like to see me play ducks and drakes with it in the beck?"
Lucy tossed her head impatiently.
"Why do you keep Barbara and me penniless?" she asked.
"I feed you well and clothe you warm--what more dost need?"
"Barbara," began Lucy, but the old woman interrupted her.
"What's Barbara complaining about?"
"Barbara never complains. But I know she's heart-sick for something
better than a lone life on the fells."
"If she's sweethearting," said Mistress Lynn, "if she's taken up with a
lad, I's nought to say against it," for the old woman thought that the
services of a young strong man would be of great value now that Jan
Straw was past work.
"Sweethearting!" replied Lucy. "It's learning Barbara's after!"
"Learning! Hasn't she enough learning for any lass, and more than most?
Doesn't she ken the lift like the palm of her hand, and the dales and
fells better than her ten toes?"
"It's book-learning Barbara wants."
"Book-learning! I don't hold with book-learning. Hark to me,
great-granddaughter. You'll be a good lass, and when I's gone there'll
be a nice little sum put by for you and your sister. Now, see to your
work; the porridge is burning," and the old woman sniffed the air
disdainfully.
"Oh," said Lucy, with a shrug of her shoulders, "Mickle Crags will have
buried us all by then--you and me and Barbara and the money, all in one
grave."
"Hold thy tongue," replied the old woman calmly, but with such an edge
to her words that Lucy kept her peace.
* * * * *
Later in the day Lucy went up the dale to find Barbara. She eagerly
drank in the sunlight. It comforted her like a cup of sweet wine.
From the mosses of the beck-side, where she followed the cattle
road, a whispering could be heard as of life--innumerable, and
infinitesimal--waking to activity after its long winter sleep. Bees were
buzzing; birds were mating; the village geese, in charge of a
goose-girl, were being driven to their feeding grounds; Tom, the new
hind, with a boy to drive the horses, was ploughing in a steep field;
and Jan Straw was gathering rushes. Everything was up and active.
The dale in which Greystones was situated wound into the heart of
Thundergay. On the right rose Nab Head--a grey bastion streaked with
little streams trickling from the melting snows, and now all aglitter in
the sun. On the left, gloomy as its name, hung Darkling Crag. The dale
lay between like a green lizard, basking in the warm light. It was green
with marsh-mosses, and soon would be yellow with king-cups. Lucy sang to
herself as she climbed upward:
"Oh! have you found my golden ball?
And have you come to set me free?
Or have you come to see me hanging
On the gallows tree?"
There was no smile upon her face, but her eyes were wistful. She was
hoping that Joel Hart would soon find a golden ball and come to set her
free, before Greystones, and the tyrannical old woman there, had robbed
her life of its youth and sweetness. She was just twenty, and panting to
spread her wings and fly away. She turned round to look at her home.
It was the most solitary of habitations. About it hung an atmosphere of
old forgotten things. It had a tragic air as though its past, by some
strange process, were still in being. Even on a golden afternoon such as
this, it could not exorcise the grey spirit that haunted it--the spirit
of the ancient grey stones of which it was built. The slates were green
with moss: the drip-stone was feathered with weeds which, before long,
would belt it with a flowery garland: soon the great sycamores would
burst into leaf; but even then the house would keep its gloom. It was a
fitting habitation for Mistress Annas Lynn, who was nearly a hundred
years old.
Lucy turned her eyes away from it, and looked at the mountain at the
head of the dale, down whose sides the streams slid in thin white lines
to fall with many a rainbow cascade into Swirtle Tarn, lying at its
feet, blue as a violet. Thundergay dominated the dale. Its jagged peaks
soared high above the fells around. It was the birth-place of eagles,
mists and storms; and it was also the nurse of her sister Barbara.
Her mind turned to Barbara.
If Lucy ever visualised such abstract ideas as goodness, integrity, and
justice, she saw them under the living form of her sister. Joel Hart she
loved; Barbara she worshipped. With Joel she stood on an equality--he
was as humanly imperfect as she--but Barbara stood on a mountain height,
a great, grand figure, with a great, grand heart, sublime in her
magnanimity, immovable as granite among the storms of her world.
She felt, too, that it was among the mountains that Barbara found her
secret inspiration and strength. Since childhood she had spent the
greater part of her life upon Thundergay, and, though it had been a
rough nurse, beating her with winds like scorpions, training her by
hunger and cold and weariness, yet she loved it still, but it had made
her silent.
Lucy did not put her thought into these words, but she felt them,
nevertheless.
She now left the cattle road, and followed a sheep-track round Swirtle
Tarn. A shoulder of Thundergay seemed to block her way, but the track
wound in and out of knowes and hollows, and led her at last through a
gap, where she looked down upon a scene of pastoral beauty. A lawn of
velvet grass lay by the margin of the tarn, dotted with sheep and a few
lambs--the firstlings of the flock. It sloped gently upwards, and surged
like a full green tide against the bases of the cliffs. Here was a cave,
called for generations Ketel's Parlour, in memory of some Northern
robber who had made it his eyrie. Now Barbara claimed it, and often
slept there when her work kept her abroad at night. The flocks were her
especial care, and she "shepherded and improved the same according to
the due course of good shepherding," as the old title-deeds of
Greystones recommended.
Lucy looked in. By the threshold her sister lay fast asleep, her long
limbs sunk in repose upon a bed of straw. Her head was near the
entrance, and the sun, as it got lower, flowed in golden ripples across
the threshold. When it touched her eyes she would awake, for the sun was
her clock by day, as the Great Bear was her clock by night.
Lucy did not speak, but took her knitting from her pocket, and sat down
on a rock to wait.
The cave had been partly built up long, long ago, and two narrow slits
of windows made in the artificial wall. The rusty remains of iron bolts
and hinges showed that a door had once closed the entrance. A huge slab
of slate lay across the threshold, and underneath it a little spring
that babbled out of the floor of the cave disappeared, appearing again
some few yards further down the slope.
It was not long before Barbara awoke. The sun was sinking; the tarn lay
in shadow, blue as steel and glassy as a mirror; now and then a heron
struck an evanescent star from the shallows where it splashed. But the
fellside still stood full in the vivid light, and was dyed to a rich
green, like the colour seen on old silken needlework. Upon Barbara,
standing at the mouth of the cave, the sunshine seemed to concentrate.
She looked larger and grander and more remote than a simple human being.
She might be an incarnation of some Nature-power, older than the
mountains around her, unassailed by time, and partaking of the perpetual
youth of immortals.
"One of the ewes has died," she said to Lucy, "and I've spent hours
trying to get its lamb fostered. Like enough thee'll have to take it
home, and bring it up by hand."
"Botherment!" exclaimed her sister; "haven't I plenty to do already?"
Barbara made no reply. She was wondering what it felt like to be dead,
wondering what that strange thing was which came but once, but came to
all living, to men and women and sheep, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
sent them out of the Known into the Unknown, where all mysteries might
abound.
"Hast ever thought, Lucy," she said at last, "how strange it is that we
should die like sheep and sheep like us?"
"Not I!" replied the younger girl. "My head's stuffed with lighter
rubbish," and she shuddered as her eyes fell upon a huddled white heap
under a thorn.
"It mazes me," continued Barbara, "when I think that yon poor creature
I've thought so silly mappen knows more than I do now. Death must be a
queer waking, Lucy. It's likely we'll find that we're very different to
what we fancied we were. It's likely we're not the only things with
souls. It's likely that the world wasn't just made for us, and all the
creatures for our use. Old Camomile says that every blade of grass has
its own little green soul, and loves the wind and the sunshine and the
rain, and has its ideas about the sky and the stars. Mappen it puts us
down as girt senseless creatures, too coarse-minded to understand its
thoughts."
"Old Camomile is getting old," said Lucy. "He havers a lot."
Barbara was silent. She rarely spoke because she rarely found anyone to
understand her, save the old man Timothy Hadwin, called by the villagers
Old Camomile, because he made potions, and electuaries, and essences,
curing their aches and pains as if by magic.
Lucy rolled up her wool, put the ball in her pocket, and looked slowly
round.
"It's a lonely-like place to spend the night," she said. "I wonder
you're not afraid."
"Sometimes I am," replied Barbara. She recalled nights when she had
trembled before the vastness of the hills, when the winds had deafened
her with stories of things she could not comprehend, when she had turned
from gazing at the cold light of the stars with a fear at her heart,
because they would answer nothing to all her questions.
Barbara was not educated as the world counts education. It is true that
she knew the fells and dales, the tarns and meres of her native country,
as well as the oldest shepherd, who had spent his long life among them.
She could tell the names of the constellations, and take her direction
upon the darkling moors from them. She knew when to plough and sow and
reap. No one was so weather-wise as she in the village. But this is not
education in the eyes of the world, and Barbara set little value upon
her knowledge. She could not speak the King's English, though she spoke
something much more picturesque and vigorous; she only read the simplest
books; and wrote an ungainly, but characteristic hand. She knew no
history, but her mind was furnished with a collection of tales and
legends, which held more of the inner truth of history than the bare
facts. Yet she longed with all her ardent nature for the learning
contained in books; for the power to grasp the thoughts that flashed
across her mind and left upon it an impression as of a great flying
light, which, if it had not eluded her, would have illumined her whole
being. She pined for the life of the intellect.
"I wish we could get out of our bodies," said she, breaking the long
silence. "I wish we could shake them off like an old shift, and leave
them here on the grass, while our souls sailed in the air naked-free."
"What a horrid idea!" said Lucy, shrugging her shoulders.
"But our bodies are so earthy--always wanting meat and drink, and crying
out for sleep. They throw a shadow on us, like a great rock blocking the
light o' the sun."
"I know nought about it," answered Lucy, carelessly.
Barbara laughed at the puzzle of her own thoughts.
"I know nought either," she said; "yet something in me would like to win
out if it could."
Lucy went up the sheep-path. On the brow of the knoll she paused,
looking back. Barbara was kindling a fire outside the cave, and the
smoke, as it coiled upwards, hung between them like a blue veil. Her
sister seemed to be moving among mysterious things, and there was
symbolical meaning in the blue veil. For two worlds lie side by side,
the material and the spiritual, and from either the view into the other
seems hazy and unreal. But the greatest intellects try to reconcile
them. Towards such a reconciliation Barbara, in her untutored mind, was
striving.
The sun had gone down, and, though the sky was still flushed with red
and yellow, a subdued light and solemn stillness filled the dale--a
stillness made the more impressive by the distant splashing of
waterfalls and the calling of birds by the tarn.
Lucy felt sad. She had dropped over the knoll with a sigh. Barbara had
listened to her story of the gold coin, and dismissed it without
comment. She had not been impressed by the idea of their
great-grandmother's hidden wealth. She had suggested no way of making
life easier or pleasanter. Instead, her mind was possessed by vague
ideas and strange questionings, which her sister could not understand,
and which had no bearing upon their everyday life. Lucy went home in the
waning light with reluctant feet.
But she was mistaken about Barbara's interest. For her sister had long
known of the secret hoard, and had once remonstrated with the old woman
about saving it in this way. But it had been in vain, as everything was
in vain which opposed the will of Mistress Annas Lynn. The failure of
the attempt had only served to strengthen the patience of her generous
nature--the patience which can school itself to wait for the fulfilment
of its desires, and, if need be, to receive without a murmur their
denial. No shadow of a quarrel ever dimmed Barbara's out-goings or
comings in; her intercourse with her ancient kinswoman was serene and
reverent, and she would not hazard it in an attempt that could only
result in an upheaval of the bitterest passion. Barbara then put the
matter from her. In this she was different to Lucy, who could not cease
to think and wonder and debate even after she had made up her mind.