THE SQUIRE’S BROTHER
FOUR days later she went to walk in Hawthorn Forest. It was a golden
afternoon, and she had hastened her work and got it out of hand. The
roof was mended, the beehives were back, the cottage taking on an air
of having been lived in all this while. Old Heron earned by scrivener’s
work. It was not much that he found to do, but it gave them plain fare
and plain clothes to wear. Joan, too, from time to time sold to a
merchant flax that she had spun.... She had gone no way into the forest
since their return, there had been each day so much to do! But to-day
an image had haunted her of how the forest used to look in its garb of
May.
She let the gate-latch fall behind her and went out in the grey-green
gown that she had spun and dyed herself. She wore a small cap of linen
and a linen kerchief. Sunday she would wear a bluish gown, and a cap
and kerchief of lawn. She was tall and light upon her feet, grey-eyed
and well-featured, with hair more gold than brown, with a warm,
sun-flushed, smooth, fine-textured skin, and a good mouth and chin and
throat. The sun was three hours high; she meant to have a long and
beautiful time.
So close to the forest edge was the cottage that almost immediately
great trees were about her, leaf-mould and flowerets beneath her feet.
The forest was hardly yet in full leaf. There spread about her a divine
pale emerald fretwork, and gold light in lances and arrows, and closing
the vistas purple light in gauzy sheets and curtains. The boles of
the trees were marvels, the great spreading branches kings’ wonders,
every slight fern illustrious. The stir and song of hidden birds, the
scurrying of a hare, a glimpse down a beechen aisle of a doe and fawn,
filled a cup of delight. She was Greek to it all, a country girl of
Attica. Merely to live was good, merely to vibrate and quiver to the
myriad straying fingers of life, merely to be, and ever more to be,
with a fresh intensity!
On she wandered with a light step and heart, now by some handbreadth of
sward, now in a maze of trees. Now and then she stood still, gazing and
listening and smelling the good earth. Once or twice she rested upon
some protruding root or fallen log, nursed her knees and marked the
minute life about her.
Happy, happy, happy! with the blood coursing warmly and sanely through
her veins, with her senses keen at the intake and her brain good at
combining.... Open places, small clearings, existed here and there in
the forest with, at great intervals, some hut or poor cottage. So it
was that she soon came in sight of the burned cot and trodden bit of
garden whence Mother Spuraway had plucked the rue.
The place lay curiously, half in gold light, half in deep shadow. The
stone chimney was standing, together with some portion of charred
rafter. There were currant and gooseberry bushes, and a plum tree,
but the bit of garden-hedge was broken down and all things had run to
waste. Joan, drawing near, heard children’s voices, and presently,
touching the cleared space, came into view of six or seven village
boys, who, roaming at will or sent on some errand through the wood,
had found here a resting-stage and fascination. They were after
something—she thought a bird’s nest—in a crotch of the plum tree that
brushed the blackened chimney. She stood and watched for a moment, then
called to them. “Leave that poor bird alone!” Two or three, turning,
laughed and jeered, and one small savage at the foot of the tree threw
a stone. Joan was angry, but she could not help the bird—they probably
had nest and eggs by now. She went on, past the burned cot, and was
presently in the greenwood again.
After a time she found herself upon the Oak Grange road, running across
this corner of the forest. She had not meant to go this way, but a
memory came to her of a stream flowing over pebbles, of an old house
and an oak tree around which they used to say the fairies danced at
night. She walked on upon the narrow and grass-grown road, and after a
little time it led her out of the wood and to the edge of the pebbly
stream. There was a footbridge thrown across, but she did not mean to
go over to the other bank. She had no acquaintance at the Grange. She
had heard Goodman Cole say that the old miser, Master Hardwick, was
still alive, but was rarely seen without the house. Will the smith’s
son had once worked at the Grange, but she did not know if he were
there yet.... She sat down on a stone at this end of the bridge, and
regarded now the old ruinous house sunk in ivy, with the long grass
and ragged shrubs before it, and now the giant oak where the fairies
danced, and now the bright blue sky behind with floating clouds, and
now the shallow, narrow river with its pebbly shore, and now she
regarded all in one. _Ripple, ripple!_ sang the water.
She sat there some time, but at last, with a long breath, she stood up,
looked a moment longer, then turned and, reëntering the wood, faced
homeward. She had strolled and sauntered and spent her time. Now the
sun was getting low in the west. Presently she left the road and took
the forest track that would bring her again by the burned cot.
Through the thinning wood she saw the place before her, in shadow now,
except that the top of the plum tree was gold. She thought that she
still heard the boys’ voices. Then, just at the edge of the clearing,
she came suddenly face to face with a man.
He was a tall man, plainly dressed in some dark stuff. Stopping as he
did when he saw her, stepping aside a pace to give her room, he chanced
to come into a ray of the last slant sunlight. It showed his face, a
lined, rather strange, not unpleasing face. He was carrying in the
hollow of his arm a grey and white cat. The creature lay stretched out,
half-dead, blood upon its fur.
“Ah,” said Joan, “it was that they were tormenting!” She stood still.
She was sympathetic with animals; they were like everything else,
living and loving to live. She thought they were very like human beings.
“Aye,” said the man. “But it can recover. It is starved as well.” He
looked at this chance-met young woman. “I meant to carry it back to
Dorothy at the Grange,” he said. “But I am on my way to visit a sick
man and it will be much out of my road. Do you live anywhere near?” He
knit his brows a little. He thought that by now he knew all faces for a
long way around, but he did not know her face.
“Aye,” said Joan. “I live at Heron’s cottage.—If you wish me to, I’ll
take her and give her milk to drink and let her lie by the hearth for a
while.”
They were standing beneath the very last line of trees, before there
began the bit of waste and the ruined garden. The village boys were
there yet, turned—all but two of them—to some other idle sport about
the chimney and the fallen beams. These two, loath to give up the beast
they were tormenting, and childishly wrathful against the intruder,
stood watching him from behind a thorn bush.
“Will you do so?” said Aderhold. “That is well! I am going your way
through the wood. I will carry it until we reach the path to the
cottage.”
They moved from the clearing and the sight of the thorn bush. It
was dim now in the wood, with an evening wind and darkness stealing
through. They walked rather swiftly than slowly.
“I heard that Goodman Heron had come back,” said Aderhold. “You are his
daughter?”
“Yes. I’m Joan.”
“You have been away a long time.”
“Aye. Three years come Saint John’s Eve.”
“Three years.—I have been here three years.”
“You are the physician?” asked Joan. “You live at the Oak Grange with
Master Hardwick?”
“Aye. At the Oak Grange.”
“They say that fairies dance there and that a demon haunts it.”
“‘They say’ is the father and mother of delusion.”
“I would wish there were no demons,” said Joan, “but some fairies are
not ill folk. But the minister saith that God hates all alike.”
They came to the edge of the forest, before them the threadlike green
path to Heron’s cottage. “I must go on now by the road,” said Aderhold.
Joan held out her hands and he put in them the white and grey cat. “You
are a good maid to help me,” he said. “I have little power to do aught
for any one, but if I can serve you ever I will.” He turned to the road
and the sick man, she to the cottage gate.
The next morning there came a visitor, indeed, to Heron’s cottage,
Master Harry Carthew, the squire’s brother, who fastened his horse to
the elm at the gate, and came up the path between the daffodils in his
great boots and his sad-coloured doublet and wide-brimmed hat. Joan,
watching from the window,—her father was just without and would meet
him,—thought how handsome a man he was, but also how stern was his
aspect, stern almost as if the world were all a churchyard, with graves
about.... It seemed that he had some writings that he wished copied.
As she moved about the kitchen she heard his voice in explanation. The
voice, she thought, was like the gentleman, a well-made voice, and yet
hard, and yet melancholy, too. She heard him say that he would ride by
in a day or so for the writing—and then he said that the day was warm
and asked for a cup of water.
Old Heron turned his head. “Joan!”
Joan filled a cup with fresh well water, set it on a trencher for
salver, and brought it forth to the squire’s brother. He lifted it to
his lips and drank. Goodman Cole’s advice to the contrary, Joan stood
with a level gaze, with the result that she was aware that as he drank
he looked steadily at her over the rim of the cup. It was not a free or
distasteful look, rather it had in it melancholy and wonder. He put the
cup down and presently went away.
Two days thereafter he came with other papers to be copied. A pouring
rain arrived upon his heels and he must sit with old Heron in the
kitchen until it was over. The room was bright and clean. Joan,
having put for him her father’s chair, sat to one side spinning; old
Heron took a stool. They were yeoman stock, and the squire’s brother
was gentry. Carthew spoke little and the others waited for him to
speak. The room was quiet save for the whirr of the wheel and the rain
without. The white and grey cat lay by the hearth. Old Heron had thrown
fresh faggots on the fire, and the tongues of flame threw a dancing
light.
The little speech there was, and that solely between the two men, fell
upon the affairs of the country. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot
was seven months old, but England still echoed to the stupendous noise
it had made. Old Heron said something that bore upon the now heavily
penalized state of the Catholics.
“Aye, they pulled down their own house on their own heads!” answered
Carthew. He spoke with a stern, intense triumph. “I would have them
forth from England! There is warrant for it in all histories. As the
Spaniards pushed out the Jews, so I would push them out!”
The rain stopped; he rose to go. Old Heron opening the door, let in a
burst of fresh sweetness. Joan stood up from her wheel, and, as Carthew
passed, curtsied. He made an inclination of his head, their eyes met.
There was that in his look that both challenged and besought, that, at
all events, left her troubled enough.
Again two days and he came to recover what was copied. Again she sat
and span, and again she was conscious that he looked at her rather than
at her father, and that, though he spoke aloud only to her father,
there was some utterance trying to pierce its way to her. He went
away—but the next day he came again, when there was no looking for him.
Her father was away to the village. She was at the well, beneath the
apple tree, by the heartsease bed. She turned from lifting the cool,
brimming, dripping bucket, and saw him close beside her.
“Good-day,” he said.
“Good-day, sir.—He is not here. Father is not here!”
“I am sorry for that,” he answered; then, after a silence in which she
became aware that he was fighting, she knew not why, for breath, “But
you are here.”
“Aye,” said Joan. “I—I have so much to do.” She left the bucket on the
coping of the well and started toward the cottage. “Father went but a
little while ago. You may overtake him, sir,—”
Carthew stood before her. “I have seen you at church three times. I
have seen you here three times. For years I had not thought of earthly
toys—my mind was set on the coming of the Kingdom of God.... And now
_you_—_you_ come.... I think you have bewitched me.”
Joan’s heart beat violently. A strong presence was beside her, before
her. She wrenched herself free. “You must not speak so, sir. You must
not speak so, Master Carthew! I am naught to you—you can be naught to
me.” Brushing by him, she began to walk swiftly toward the cottage.
He kept beside her. “You are much to me—and I will be much to you....
God knoweth the struggle, and knoweth if I be damned or no!—But now I
will abide in this land that I believed not in—but I will serve Him
still; even where I am, I will serve Him more strictly than before! So
perhaps He will accept, and not too dreadfully condemn.... Do not doubt
that I mean honestly by you.”
“What you mean or mean not, I know not!” said Joan. “But I am all but a
stranger to you, sir, and I will to remain so! Will you not go?—and my
father shall bring you the writings—”
Carthew’s hand clasped and unclasped. He had gone further than he ever
meant to go to-day. Indeed, he had no plan, no gathered ideas. He might
have pleaded that he was himself a victim, struck down unawares. Forces
within had gathered, no doubt, for a violent reaction after violent,
long-continued repression, and chance had set a woman, young and fair,
in the eye of the reaction—and now in his soul there was a divided
will and war, war! His brow showed struggle and misery, even while his
eyes and parted lips desired wholly.
With effort he won a temporary control. “I did not mean to frighten
you. I mean no harm. I will say nothing more—not now, at least. Yes, I
will ride away now, and come for the writing another day.—See, I am
naught now but friend and well-wisher!”
That a squire’s brother should conceive that he might take some slight
liberty with a cotter’s daughter, that he might, on a May day and none
looking, snatch a kiss or steal an arm about her, was truly, in Joan’s
time, neither a great rarity nor a great matter. If it went no further
than that, it need not be especially remembered. Rebuff with vigour,
if you chose, but so that the thing ended there, it was no hanging
matter! At the castle, page or esquire might have been more forward
than Carthew, and Joan, though she sent them about their business,
might have done so with some inward laughter. But Master Harry Carthew!
He was a Puritan, strict and stern, he was always with the minister,
he walked with the Bible and by the Bible. He was no hypocrite either;
it was easy to see that he was earnest. Then what did he have to do
with coming here so, troubling her so? Joan felt a surge of anger and
fright. Something boding and pestilential seemed to gather like a mist
about her.
The two, both silent now, moved out of the shadow of the fruit trees
into the blossomy handbreadth before the cottage door. As they did so,
Alison Inch came by the gate, saw the horse fastened to the elm, and,
looking through the wicket, Carthew and Joan. If she had meant to come
in or no did not appear; she stood stock-still for a moment, then put
herself into motion again and passed on.
If Carthew saw her, he paid no attention. But Joan saw her, saw her
face quite plainly. When Carthew—with a sudden and harsh “Good-bye for
this time; or, good-bye forever, if so be I can yet kill this thing
within me!”—strode away and through the gate, and, mounting his horse,
rode off with a stiff bearing, not looking back, she stood for a moment
or two with a still, expressionless face, then, moving slowly to the
doorstep, sat down and took her head into her hands. She was seeing
again Alison’s face. “That’s what she meant the other day—she meant
that at church I was minding, not the psalm, but that man.... Then,
doth she mind him so herself that she looked so, there at the gate?...
Woe’s me!” mourned Joan. “Here’s a coil!”