With the first breath of the first summer after their return to the
island Stowell and Gell went up into the glen to camp. They had no
tent; two hammocks swung from neighbouring trees served them for beds
and the horizontal boughs of other trees for wardrobes.
There, for a long month, amidst the scent of the honeysuckle, the
gorse and the heather, and the smell of the bracken and the pine,
they fished, they shot, they smoked, they talked. Late in the
evening, after they had rolled themselves into their hammocks, they
heard the murmuring of the trees down the length of the glen, like
near and distant sea-waves, and saw, above the soaring pine-trunks,
the gleaming of the sky with its stars. As they shouted their last
"Good-night" to each other from the depths of their swaying beds the
dogs would be barking at Dan Baldromma's mill at the bottom of the
glen and the water would be plashing in the topmost fall of it. And
then night would come, perfect night, and the silence of unbroken
sleep.
Awaking with the dawn they would see the last stars pale out and hear
the first birds begin to call; then the cock would crow at old Will
Skillicorne's croft on the "brough," the sheep would bleat in the
fields beyond, the squirrels would squeak in the branches over their
heads and the fish would leap in the river below. And then, as the
sun came striding down on them from the hilltops to the east, they
would tumble out of their hammocks, strip and plunge into the glen
stream--the deep, round, blue dubs of it, in which the glistening
water would lash their bodies like a living element. And then they
would run up to the headland (still in the state of nature) and race
over the heather like wild horses in the fresh and nipping air.
They were doing this one midsummer morning when they had an
embarrassing experience, which, in the devious ways of destiny, was
not to be without its results. Flying headlong down the naked side
of the glen (for sake of the faster run) they suddenly became aware
of somebody coming up. It was a young woman in a sunbonnet. She was
driving four or five heifers to the mountain. Swishing a twig in her
hand and calling to her cattle, she was making straight for their
camping-place.
The young men looked around, but there was no escape on any side, so
down they went full length on their faces in the long grass (how
short!) and buried their noses in the earth.
In that position of blind helplessness, there was nothing to do but
wait until the girl and her cattle had passed, and hope to be
unobserved. They could hear the many feet of the heifers, the
flapping of their tails (the flies must be pestering them) and the
frequent calls of the girl. On she came, with a most deliberate
slowness, and her voice, which had been clear and sharp when she was
lower down the glen, seemed to them to have a gurgling note in it as
she came nearer to where they lay.
"Come out of that, you gawk, and get along, will you?" she cried, and
Victor could not be quite sure that it was only the cattle she was
calling to.
At one moment, when they thought the girl and the cattle must be very
close, there was a sickening silence, and then the young men
remembered their breeches which were hanging open over a bough and
their shirts which were dangling at the end of it.
"Get up, stupid! What are you lying there for?" cried the girl, and
then came another swish of the twig and a further thudding of the
feet of the heifers.
"The devil must be in that girl," thought Victor, and he would have
given something to look up, but dare not, so he lay still and
listened, telling himself that never before had two poor men been in
such an unfair and ridiculous predicament.
At length the feet of the cattle sounded faint over the rippling of
the river, and the girl's voice thin through the pattering of the
leaves. And then the two sons of Adam rose cautiously from the
grass, slithered down the glen-side and slipped into the essential
part of their garments.
Half-an-hour later, the lark being loud in the sky, and the world
astir and decent, they were cooking their breakfast (Gell holding a
frying-pan over a crackling gorse fire, and Stowell, in his
Wellington boots, striding about with a tea-pot) when they heard the
girl coming back. And being now encased in the close armour of their
clothes they felt that the offensive had changed its front and
stepped boldly forward to face her.
She was a strapping girl of three or four and twenty, full-blooded
and full-bosomed, with coal-black hair and gleaming black eyes under
her sun-bonnet, which was turned back from her forehead, showing a
comely face of a fresh complexion, with eager mouth and warm red
lips. Her sleeves were rolled back above her elbows, leaving her
round arms bare and sun-brown; her woollen petticoat was tucked up,
at one side, into her waist, and as she came swinging down the glen
with a jaunty step, her hips moved, with her whole body, to a rhythm
of health and happiness.
"Attractive young person, eh?" said Victor.
But Gell, after a first glance, went back without a word to his
frying-pan, leaving his comrade, who was still carrying his teapot,
to meet the girl, who came on with an unconcerned and unconscious
air, humming to herself at intervals, as if totally unaware of the
presence of either of them.
"Nice morning, miss," said Victor, stepping out into the path.
The girl made a start of surprise, looked him over from head to foot,
glanced at his companion, whose face was to the fire, recognised
both, smiled and answered:
"Yes, Sir, nice, very nice."
Then followed a little fencing, which was intended by Victor to find
out if the girl had seen them.
Came up this way a while ago, didn't she? Aw, yes, she did, to take
last year's heifers to graze on the mountains. Seen anything
hereabouts--that is to say on the tops? Aw, no, nothing at all--had
he? Well, yes, he thought he'd seen something running on the ridge
just over the waterfall.
The girl gave him a deliberate glance from her dark eyes, then
dropped them demurely and said, with an innocent air,
"Must have been some of the young colts broken out of the top field,
I suppose."
"That's all right," thought Victor, not knowing the ways of women
though he thought himself so wise in them.
After that, feeling braver, he began to make play with the girl,
asking her how far she had come, and if she wouldn't be lonesome
going back without company.
She looked at him quizzically for a moment, and then said, with her
eyes full of merriment,
"What sort of company, sir?"
"Well, mine for instance," he answered.
She laughed, a fresh and merry laugh from her throat, and said,
"You daren't come home with me, Sir."
"Why daren't I?"
"You'd be afraid of father. He's not used of young men coming about
the place, and he'd frighten the life out of you."
Victor put down his tea-pot and made a stride forward. "Come
on--where is he?"
But the girl swung away, with another laugh, crying over her shoulder,
"Aw, no, no, plaze, plaze!"
"Ah, then it's you that are afraid, eh?" said Victor.
"It's not that," replied the girl.
"What is it?" said Victor.
She gave him another deliberate glance from her dark eyes--he thought
he could feel the warm glow of her body across the distance dividing
them--and said,
"The old man might be sending somebody else up with the heifers next
time, and then...."
"What then?"
She laughed again with eyes full of mischief, and seemed to prepare
to fly.
"Then maybe I'd be missing seeing something," she said, and shot away
at a bound.
Victor stood for a moment looking down the glen.
"God, what a girl!" he said. "I've a good mind to go after her."
"I shouldn't if I were you," said Gell. "You know who she is?"
"Who?"
"Bessie Collister."
"The little thing who was in Castletown?"
"Yes."
"Then I suppose she belongs to you?"
"Not a bit. I haven't spoken to her from that day to this," said
Gell, and then he told of the promise he had made to his father.
"But Lord alive, that was when you were a lad."
"Maybe so, but 'as long as you live'--that was the word, and I mean
to keep it. Besides, there's Dan Baldromma."
"That blatherskite?" said Victor.
"He'd be an ugly customer if anything went wrong, you know."
"But, good Lord, man, what is going to go wrong?"
When they had finished breakfast and Gell was washing up at the
water's edge, Victor was on a boulder, looking down the glen again,
and saying, as if to himself,
"My God, what a girl, though! Such lips, such flesh, such...."
"I say, old fellow!" cried Gell.
Victor leapt down and laughed to cover his confusion.
"Well, why not? We're all creatures of earth, aren't we?"