Asenath Lear was neither a pretty woman nor a particularly young one,
but having in the first instance embraced spinsterhood voluntarily, she
was cheerfully resigned to its enforced continuance. All the world knew
she had been "asked" by Samuel Harvey of the Upper Farm, and though all
the world considered her a fool for refusing him, it still could not
throw in her face the taunt that she had never had a chance.
She had said no to Samuel because at that time she was young
enough--being but twenty--to nurse vague yearnings for something more
romantic than the stolid Sam, but the years fled taking with them the
bloom that had been her only beauty, and romance never showed so much as
the tip of a wing-feather.
"I'm doubtful but that you were plum foolish to send Sam'l Harvey to
another woman's arms, Senath," her mother told her once, "but there, I
never was one for driving a maid. There's a chance yet; ef you'll look
around you'll see 'tes the plain-featured women as has the husbands."
"'Tes because the pretty ones wouldn't have en, I fear," said Senath on
a gleam of truth, but with a very contented laugh, "men's a pack of
trouble in the flesh. I would ha' wed sure 'nough ef et hadn' been that
when you get to knaw a man you see him as somethen' so different from
your thought of him."
"Eh, you and your thoughts . . ." cried the petulant old mother, quoting
better than she knew, "they'll have to be your man and your childer,
too."
Senath, the idealist, was well content that it should be so, and when
her mother's death left her her own mistress, she went to live in a tiny
cottage up on the moors with no companions but those thoughts--the
thoughts at once crude and vague, but strangely penetrating--of an
untaught mind whose natural vigour has been neither guided nor cramped
by education.
Her cottage, that stood four-square in the eye of the wind, was set
where the moorland began, some few fields away from the high road. At
the back was the tiny garden where Senath coaxed some potatoes and beans
from out the grudging earth; and two apple trees, in an ecstasy of
contortion, supported the clothes-line from which great sheets,
golden-white in the sun, bellied like sails, or enigmatic garments of
faded pinks and blues proclaimed the fact that Senath "took in washing."
On the moor in front of the cottage stood nineteen stones, breast-high,
set in a huge circle. Within this circle the grass, for some reason, was
of a more vivid green than on the rest of the moor, and against it the
stones on the nearer curve showed a pale grey, while the further ones
stood up dark against the sky, for beyond them the moor sloped slightly
to the cliffs and the sea.
These stones were known as the "Nineteen Merry Maidens," and legend had
it that once they were living, breathing girls, who had come up to that
deserted spot to dance upon a Sunday. As they twirled this way and that
in their sinful gyrations, the doom of petrification descended on them,
as it did on the merry-makers of old when Perseus dangled the Gorgon's
head aloft. So the nineteen maidens stand to this day, a huge fairy-ring
of stone, like those smaller ones of fragile fungi that also enclose a
circle of greener grass in the radius of their stems. Two luckless men,
whom the maidens had beguiled to pipe for them, turned and fled, but
they, too, were overtaken by judgment in a field further on along the
road, and stand there to this day, a warning against the profanation of
the Sabbath.
When Senath was asked why she had taken such a lonely cottage, she
replied that it was on account of the Merry Maidens--they were such
company for her. Often, of an evening, she would wander round the
circle, talking aloud after the fashion of those who live alone. She had
given each of the stones a name, and every one of them seemed, to her
starved fancy, to have a personality of its own. Senath Lear, what with
the mixed strains of blood that were her Cornish heritage, and the added
influence of isolation, was fast becoming an old maid, and a wisht one
at that, when something happened which set the forces of development
moving in another direction. Senath herself connected it with her first
visit to the Pipers, whom hitherto, on account of their sex, she had
neglected for the Merry Maidens.
One market day--Thursday--Senath set off to a neighbouring farm to buy
herself a little bit of butter. The way there, along the high road, lay
past the field where the Pipers stood in their perpetual penance, and
Senath could see them sticking up gaunt against the luminous sky for
some time before she came up with them. For, as was only fitting, the
Pipers were much taller than the Maidens, being, indeed, some twelve
feet high.
Senath walked briskly along, a sturdy, full-chested figure, making, in
her black clothes (Sunday-best, "come down"), the only dark note in the
pale colours of early spring that held land and air. The young grass
showed tender, the intricate webs made by the twisted twigs of the bare
thorn-trees gleamed silvery. On the pale lopped branches of the elders,
the first crumpled leaves were just beginning to unfold. The long grass
in an orchard shone with the drifted stars of thousands of narcissi,
which a faint breeze woke to a tremulous twinkling. The road was thick
with velvety white dust, for it was some time since rain had fallen, and
the black of Senath's skirt was soon powdered into greyness. As she
went, she wondered what it was that gave the air such a tang of summer,
until she suddenly realized it was the subtle but unmistakable smell of
the dust that brought to her mind long, sunny days, when such a smell
was as much part of the atmosphere as the foliage or the heat. Now there
was still a chill in the air, but she hardly felt it in the force of
that suggestiveness.
"Sim' me I'm naught but a bit of stone like they Pipers," she said to
herself, as she paused to look up at them, towering above her. Then a
whimsical thought struck her. "I'll lave the Maidens be for a while and
take my walk to the Pipers," she thought, "tes becoming enough in a
woman o' my years, I should think."
She smiled at her mild jest and plodded on to the farm.
It was a fairly large house, with a roof still partly thatch, but mostly
replaced by slate. In front of it, a trampled yard reached to the low
wall of piled boulders and the road. Senath found the mistress of it
leaning on the wall, ready to exchange a word with the occupants of the
various market-carts as they drove homewards, and the business of the
butter was soon transacted. Yet, for some odd reason, Senath was not
anxious to take up her basket and go. Perhaps it was that touch of the
unusual in the false hint of summer; perhaps, too, her decision to vary
the course of her evening walk and the playmates of her imagination;
but, whatever it was, she was vaguely aware of a prompting towards human
contact. The two women sat on the low wall and chatted in a desultory
fashion for a few minutes. Then the farmer's wife, shading her eyes with
her hand, looked along the road.
"Your eyes are younger'n mine, Senath Lear," she said. "Tell me, edn
that Sam'l Harvey of Upper Farm comen in his trap?"
Senath turned her clear, long-sighted eyes down the road and nodded.
"He'll be driving out Manuel Harvey to the Farm," Mrs. Cotton went on.
"You do knaw, or maybe your don't, seein' you live so quiet, that since
Sam's been a widow-man, Upper Farm's too big for he to live in in
comfort. He's comin' to live in church-town and look after his interests
in building. You do knaw that he's putting up a row of cottages to let
to they artisesses. And Upper Farm he's let to Manuel Harvey."
"Is he any kin to en?" asked Senath, interested, as any woman would have
been, in this budget of news about her old suitor.
"No, less they'm so far removed no one remembers et. There's a power of
Harveys in this part of the world. Manuel do come from Truro way."
The high gig had been coming quickly nearer, and now drew up before the
two women.
"Evenen, Mis' Cotton. Evenen, Senath," said Sam, with undisturbed
phlegm. "Could'ee blige we weth some stout twine? The off-rein has
broken and us have only put en together for the moment wi' a bit o'
string Mr. Harvey here had in's pocket."
Mrs. Cotton bustled off into the house, and Sam climbed down, the gig
bounding upwards when relieved from his weight. He was a big, fair man,
his moustache distinctly lighter than his weather-beaten face, and since
the days when he had courted Senath the whites of his eyes had become
yellowish round the muddy hazel of the iris. Senath looked from him to
Manuel, still in the gig, and as she did so, something unknown stirred
at her pulses, very faintly.
Manuel Harvey was dark, and though his eyes, too, were hazel, it was
that clear green-grey, thickly rimmed with black, that is to be seen in
the people of that part of the world who have a strain of Spanish blood
in them, dating from the wrecks of the Armada. Those eyes, beneath their
straight brows, met Senath's, and in that moment idle curiosity passed
into something else.
Many women and most men marry for a variety of reasons not unconnected
with externals. There has been much spoken and written on the subject
of "affinities," a term at the best insecure, and often pernicious, but
very occasionally, when the two people concerned are elemental creatures
with little perception of those half-shades which are the bane of
civilization, there does occur a flashing recognition which defies known
laws of liking, and this it was which came to Manuel and Senath now.
"Falling in love" is ordinarily a complex, many-sided thing, compact of
doubts and hesitations, fluctuating with the mood and with that powerful
factor, the opinions of others. It is subject to influence by
trivialities, varying affections and criticisms, and the surface of it
is an elastic tissue setting this way and that, as thoughts ebb and flow
from moment to moment, even though far beneath it may remain
unperturbed. Yet every now and then come together two of that vanishing
race who are capable of feeling an emotion in the round--the whole
sphere of it. This sense of a spherical emotion came to Senath as she
would have pictured the onslaught of a thunder-ball, save that this fire
had the quality of warming without scorching utterly.
Looking up, as she stood there stricken motionless, she saw him
transfigured to a glowing lambency by the blaze of the setting sun full
on his face; and he, staring down, saw her against it. Her linen sun
bonnet, which had slipped back on her shoulders and was only held by the
strings beneath her chin, was brimming with sunlight, like some magic
pilgrim's pack; and her eyes, opened widely in her worn, delicately
seamed face, gained in blueness from the shadow her face and neck made
against the brightness. Even so, to most people she would have appeared
only a wholesome-looking woman in early middle life, who had kept the
clear and candid gaze of childhood; a woman rather ungainly and
thick-set. Manuel saw her as what, for him, she was--a deep-bosomed
creature, cool of head and warm of heart--a woman worth many times over
the flimsy girls who would pass her with a pitying toss of the head.
Manuel thought none of this consciously; he was only aware of a pricking
feeling of interest and attraction, and had he been asked his opinion
would have said she seemed a fine, upstanding woman enough. Then, when
Mrs. Cotton came out again with the twine and a big packing-needle, he,
too, climbed down and, his fingers being younger and more supple than
Sam's, attended to the stitching of the rein.
"Must be gwain on, I b'lieve," announced Sam, when this was in progress.
"Can't us giv'ee a lift, Senath? I'm sure us wont mind sitten familiar
if you don't, will us, Manuel, my dear?"
"Why, no, thank'ee, Sam," said Senath quickly, "I do rare and like a bit
of a walk before goin' to the bed. Evenen to you, and thank you, Sam.
Evenen, Mr. Harvey."
He raised a face into which the blood had come with stooping over the
rein.
"Evenen, Miss Lear," he muttered.
She started down the road at a good pace so as to have turned off before
they came up with her, but she heard the clip-clop of the horse's hoofs
as she drew alongside with the Pipers, and she turned in towards them
through a gap in the hedge. She pushed a way among bracken and clinging
brambles, and as she reached them the sun slipped behind the S. Just
hills, and in the glamorous mingling of the afterglow with the swift
dusk she stood, as the gig, the two men in it apparently borne along
level with the top of the hedge by some mysterious agency, passed by.
For a while she stood there, the dew gathering on stone and twig and
leaf. She glanced up at the two dark columns reared above, her hand
against the rough surface of the nearer one.
"Must give en names, too," she said, with a backward thought for her
Merry Maidens. "Why shoulden I call they after Sam and his new tenant?
That one can be Sam,"--looking at the stumpier and wider of the two,
"and the tall one, he can be Manuel."
* * * * *
There is little to tell of the love of Senath and Manuel save that it
was swift, unspeakably dear, and put beyond the possibility of
fulfilment by the death of the man. The slight accident of a rusty nail
that ran into his foot, enhanced by the lack of cleanliness of the true
peasant, and Manuel, for such a trifling cause, ceased to be. They were
fated lovers; fated, having met, to love, and, so Senath told herself in
the first hours of her bitterness, fated never to grasp their joy. The
time had been so short, as far as mere weeks went, so infinitely long in
that they had it for ever. After the funeral in the moorland churchyard,
Senath went into her cottage and was seen of no one for many days. Then
she reappeared, and to the scandal of the world it was seen that she had
discarded her black. She went about her work silently as ever, but
seemed to shun meeting her fellow-creatures less than formerly. A bare
year after Manuel's death she had married Samuel Harvey.
No one wondered more than Sam himself how this had come about. If the
marriage had been a matter of several months earlier, the common and
obvious interpretation as to its necessity would have been current
everywhere, and Sam would have had his meed of half-contemptuous pity.
As it was, no one knew better than Sam that the other Harvey's wooing
had gone no further than that wonderful kiss to which middle-aged
people, who have missed the thing in their youth, can bring more
reverential shyness than any blushing youth or girl.
Had it been any other than Senath, folk would not have been so
surprised. A woman may get along very well single all her days if she
has never been awakened to another way of life, but give her a taste of
it and it is likely to become a thing that she must have. Yet few made
the mistake of thinking that that was how it was with Senath. A strongly
spiritual nature leaves its impress on even the most clayey of those
with whom it comes in contact, and all knew Senath to be not quite as
they were. Yet she married the red-necked Samuel Harvey, and they went
to live together at the Upper Farm. And, as to any superior delicacy,
Senath showed less than most. A few kind souls there were who thought,
with the instinctive tact of the sensitive Celt, that it might hurt her
to hear the name "Mrs. Harvey" which would have been hers had she
married Manuel. On the contrary, just as though she were some young
bride, elated at her position, she asked that even old friends should
call her by the new title.
Sam was genuinely fond of Senath, and mingled with his fondness was a
certain pride at having won what he had set out to win so many years
ago; yet, it was so many years that he had been in a fair way to forget
all about it till, one evening, he met Senath as he was driving home
from market, much as when he had been with Manuel a year before. It had
struck him as odd, for Senath was not apt to be upon the highway at that
time, and although she was going in an opposite direction she asked for
a lift back in his gig. When they came to the track that led off to her
cottage, he tied up the mare and went with her to advise her as to her
apple-trees, which were suffering from blight, and by the time he left,
half an hour later, they were promised to each other. How it came about,
Sam never quite understood; the only thing he was sure about was that it
had been entirely his doing. Yet he couldn't help wondering a bit,
though it all seemed to follow on so naturally at the time, that it was
not until he was on his way back to the Upper Farm that he felt puzzled.
He was still wondering about it, and her, when the parson joined their
hands in the bleak, cold church, and Senath stood, beneath her
unbecoming daisied hat, looking as bleak and cold as the granite walls
around her.
Later, Sam found this to be a misleading impression. Never was bride
more responsive, in the eager passive fashion of shut eyes and quiet,
still mouth, than was Senath. Only now and again, in the first weeks of
their life together, she would give a start, and a look of terror and
blank amazement would leap across her face, as though she were suddenly
awakened out of a trance.
Men of Sam's condition and habit of mind do not, by some merciful law
of nature, make ardent lovers, and life soon settled down comfortably
enough on the farm. Senath was a capable housewife, and, what with the
dairy-work and cooking and superintending the washing, and such extra
work as looking after any sickly lamb or calf, she had plenty to do. And
yet, in the midst of so much activity, every now and then Sam was struck
by a queer little feeling of aloofness in Senath--not any withdrawing
physically, but a feeling as though her mind were elsewhere. He might
find her sitting on the settle with her eyes closed, although she was
obviously awake, and an expression of half-fearful joy on her face, as
on that of a person who is listening to some lovely sound and holding
his breath for fear lest the least noise on his own part should frighten
it into stillness.
However, Sam was not an imaginative man, and since the house shone with
cleanliness such as it had never known, the shining not of mere
scouring, but of the fine gloss only attained by loving care, he did not
trouble his head. Women were queer at the best of times, and besides, a
few months after the marriage, reason for any additional queerness on
the part of Senath became known to him. After she had told him the news,
Sam, ever inarticulate, but moved to the rarely felt depths of his
nature, went out into a field that was getting its autumn ploughing, and
his heart sang as he guided the horses down the furrow. Even as he was
doing now, and his father had done before him, so should his son do
after him, and the rich earth would turn over in just this lengthening
wave at the blade of the ploughshare for future generations of Harveys
yet to come. Like most men with any feeling for the land in them, Sam
was sure his child must be a son.
And to him, who had not hoped for such a thing in marrying Senath, to
him this glory was coming. Everything seemed to him wonderful that day;
the pearly pallor of the dappled sky; the rooks and screaming gulls that
wheeled and dipped behind his plough; the bare swaying elms, where the
rooks' nests clung like gigantic burrs. Dimly, and yet for him keenly,
he was aware of all these things, as a part of a great phenomenon in
which he held pride of place.
When he came in, his way led through the yard, where a new farm-cart,
just come home, stood under the shed in all the bravery of its blue body
and vermilion wheels. Senath had crept round in the shed to the back and
was studying the tailboard, one hand against it.
"Looken to see all's well to the rear as to the front?" called Sam
jovially. "That's a proper farmer's wife."
Senath started violently and dropped her hand, looking away before she
did so. "It looks fine," was all she said, and went within doors,
passing him. A small portent, so slight Sam did not even know it for
what it was, and yet something in her look and manner seemed to chill
him to the bones of him. Then, and after, he put anything unfathomable
in her ways down to her condition, and so turned what might have been a
source of discomfort to the account of his joy.
The blossom was thick upon the apple-trees when Senath's boy was born.
He had a long fight of entry, and when the sky was paling and flushing
with the reluctant dawn, Sam, who had spent the night alternately
snoring on the settle and creeping upstairs in his stockinged-feet,
heard the first wailing of his son. He heard, too, the clank of the
milk-pails in the yard without, the lowing of an impatient cow, and the
crowing--above all sounds the most melancholy to anyone upon a sleepless
pillow--of a triumphant cock. As he heard all these common noises about
his own place, he realized how much more dear they had all become to him
by reason of what was in the room above. He knew that his wife had what
is inadequately called a "bad time," but although the boards over his
head had creaked for hours to the anxious tread of doctor and of nurse,
not a cry had come until this one that heart and ear told him was from
his child. He went upstairs once more, creeping less this time, and
knocked timidly at the door, then coughed to show who it was. The nurse,
a thin, yellow-haired London woman doing parish-nursing for her
health--a woman he hated while he feared her--opened the door a slit and
looked unsympathetically at him.
"I was wanten to knaw . . ." began Sam.
"None the better for hearing you," snapped the nurse. "She must have
absolute quiet."
"I dedn't go for to mane that," explained Sam naively, "but the cheild?
'Tes a boy?"
"Oh, it's a boy, and doing all right," said the nurse, and shut the door
in his face.
Sam went downstairs and put his head under the yard-pump, and laved his
bare red arms in its flow, as men might bathe in the waters of perpetual
youth. The great rejuvenation of a new birth had come upon him. For that
is what it resolves itself into--the advent of a son to a middle-aged
man. Sam felt his term of life taking immortal lease.
Later in the day, the news that his son was weakly was broken to him,
but made very little impression. The child could not die, because it was
his. To other men, the common lot of humanity, but not so near home.
The morning was at its height, all around romance and mystery had
dissolved in the broad shining, when they told Sam his wife wished to
see him, but that he must be careful not to excite her as she was not
yet beyond the danger-point.
When he saw her, the burning colour in her face strong against the white
of her pillows, he thought they must be exaggerating, and he patted her
hand cheerfully.
"You've done fine, Senath, lass," he assured her. "'Tes a brave an'
handsome chap, is young Samuel."
"Not Samuel," answered Senath. Her voice, though low, was composed.
"What then?" asked Sam, remembering his wife was at a time when she must
be humoured as far as speech went, anyway.
"Manuel," said Senath. Then, at his start of dissent: "Yes, Manuel."
"You'm my wife, not his," said Sam. "The cheild's my cheild, not his,
and et shall be called for ets father."
"I'm Manuel's wife," said Senath, "and et's Manuel's cheild."
Sam calmed down, for he was now sure that his wife was light-headed. It
was a common symptom, he had been told.
"No," said Senath, answering his thought, "I'm not that wisht, Sam. I'm
in my right mind, and I'm only waiten on you to go. I'm waiten to go,
Sam, I'm waiten to go."
"What do you mean, lass?"
"I'm waiten till I've told 'ee why I wedded you, Sam. It was because of
Manuel."
She lay still a moment and then went on:
"Of course I had et in my thoughts to die a maid and go to him as he
left me. A woman allus thinks that to begin with. And then et began to
come clear to me--all the future. How I'd go on getting older and more
withered and wi' nawthen to show for my life. And when I saw Manuel
agan, he'd say: 'Where's the woman I loved? Where's her blue eyes, and
the fine breast of her?' And I'd have to say: 'Wasted, gone, dried-up,
Manuel.' I wanted him. I wanted Manuel as I never thought a woman could
want anything but peace, and he was taken from me. So I determined in my
heart I'd go to Manuel, and go with somethen to take to en. I married
you, Sam, because you had the same name, and was the same height, and
when I shut my eyes, I could fancy my head was on his breast, and that
et was his heart beaten at my ear. That's why I made folk call me 'Mrs.
Harvey': so I could force myself to think et was Manuel Harvey's wife I
was. That's why I used to look at your name painted up, ef et was but on
the tailboard of a cart. I used to hide the front of et, so that I could
pictur' 'Manuel' written under my hand. Sometimes I'd pictur' et so hard
and fierce that when I took my hand away, I expected to see er there,
and the sight of 'Samuel' was like a blow. I got to knaw that, and to
look away before I took my hand off."
Again she stopped and lay awhile as though gathering energy; then the
indomitable voice went on:
"At first, when you took me in your arms, et was near to turning me mad,
and I thought I couldn't go on wi' et; but I got better and better at
imagining et was Manuel, though et was like to kill me every time I woke
up. For et was like waking up every time I had to let the strain of my
imagining go for a moment. And each time et left me feelen weaker and
more kind of wisht than before. But I was glad of that, for et all
brought me nearer. When you wedded me, I swear I'd got so I made et
Manuel, and not you, who was holding me, and for nine months I've borne
his cheild beneath my broken heart. I've made et his."
She drew the little sentient bundle nearer to her, as though to defend
it from him. He stared at her, then spoke slackly, trying to urge force
into his voice.
"'Tes all nawthen but in your mind, all that. It's what's real as
matters."
"Don't you remember, Sam, how the wise woman to church-town had a spite
against Will Jacka's Maggie, and told her her cheild was goin' to be an
idiot; and how et preyed on the mind of her, and the boy has no
mouth-speech in him to this day? That was only in her mind. And how, in
the Book, Jacob put the peeled wands before the eyes of the sheep, and
the lambs came all ring-straked and speckled? I've put the thought of
this before the eye of my mind; I've thought et into bein' Manuel's
cheild, even as I belong to him and him only. And 'tes to him I'm taken
et."
Sam turned and stumbled from the room, down to the kitchen, and dropped
upon the settle. The next moment, a sudden flash of fear sent him to his
feet. He tore up the stairs, knocked into the nurse as she came out of
her room, and swept her along with him.
Senath had her shawl folded thickly over the baby's face, and she had
turned over so that her body lay upon it as she clasped it to her
breast. But the baby still lived, and when they had taken it from her,
she fell into a sullen silence, through which the tide of her life, too,
began to creep back steadily.
* * * * *
Ten years later, three little boys were playing in the yard at the Upper
Farm. One was a few years older than the other two, who were obviously
twins, fair and round and apple-cheeked, with bright brown eyes like
little animals, and slackly open mouths. The other boy was of nervous
make, with black hair that fell into eyes at once more human and more
forlorn. He was very dirty, but he had stuck a yellow jonquil through a
hole in his jersey. They were playing at moulding little men out of the
mud, and setting them about an inverted flower-pot which did duty for a
house. Suddenly, one of the little boys pushed away the mud-farmer which
the eldest had placed at the arched break in the rim, which was the
house door, and stuck his own much more primitive effort there instead.
"You'm not to put your man there, Manuel," he screamed. "That's the door
like where father do stand of a Sunday. My man must stand there, because
every one do say you'm a changeling and no proper son at all."
Manuel scrambled to his feet and ran across the yard; his hard little
boots clattered as he went. He ran into the kitchen, where his mother,
stout and comfortable-looking, was baking. The dim room was filled with
the good smell of hot bread and pastry.
"Mother, mother," sobbed Manuel, "Sam's said et again. He says I'm not
like da's son; that I'm naught but a changeling."
Senath raised a flushed face from her work and kept the rolling-pin
still a moment while her eldest-born spoke, but she did it mechanically.
"If you'd only try not to be so odd-like and so different to the rest o'
the family," she complained, "the boys would'n say it so often. There,
take this hot split and lave me be."
At ten years old, neither wounded pride nor the worse hurt of always
feeling a something unexplained about himself that did not fit in with
his surroundings, was proof against hot pastry, and Manuel went away
with it, though slowly, to a spot he knew of beside the mill-leat. There
a robin was building her nest in the alders, and there, too, if he lay
very still, with shut eyes, he could imagine all sorts of wonderful
things that the brook was saying. How he was really not the son of these
people at all, but of some wonderful prince, who would come upon a
coal-black charger, like the one in the old fairy-book, and take him
away, away from this discordant house where he felt such a very lonely
little boy. . . .
In the kitchen, Senath, about to resume her work, saw that the jonquil
had dropped from his jersey to the floor, where it lay shining, a fallen
star. Senath stood staring at it for a minute. For one flash,
bewildering and disconcerting, like the sudden intrusion of last night's
dream into the affairs of to-day, she saw herself again--that self she
never thought of as being the precursor of the present Senath, but as a
totally different person altogether, whom, try as she would, she could
not connect up. She had long ago given up trying, busy with her man and
the boys. The two younger were little trouble enough beyond the ordinary
vexatiousness of childhood, but there was something about Manuel which
was different, and which often annoyed Sam, who liked to brag about his
eldest boy, and tried always to make him out as exactly like himself.
But she was conscious that the Senath of long ago would have understood.
Now, as she stared at the jonquil, it seemed to her that that Senath was
she herself again, though she had grown to despise the dreaming,
fanciful creature of her muffled memory--perhaps there had been
something fierce and great about her, that the present Senath could
never capture again.
The moment passed, and she let the flower lie where it was, and
presently, when Sam, the successful husband, came in ruddy and clamorous
for his tea, his heavy boot trampled it, all discoloured, into a crack
of the stone flags. The little boys came tumbling in, too, also
clamorous, after the way of men-folk.
"Where's Manuel?" demanded Sam.
Both little shrill voices were obsequious with the information that he
had gone towards the leat.
"Day-dreamen, I'll be bound," said Sam, his mouth full of hot split.
"Eh, well, so were you, missus, at one time of day. Life'll soon knock
et out of him, like et has of you. And you'm all the better wi'out et,
arn't 'ee, lass?"
She said "Yes," and would have thought so if it had not been for the
memory of that moment, already faded, when she had seen the jonquil. As
it was, she sent a quick thought out to the boy who lay playing with
imaginings by the alders; a thought of vague regret and a faint hope
that it might not be with him quite as it had been with her. And whether
the thought reached his unknowing self or not, to Manuel's fancy the
leat had a finer tale and brighter hopes to tell him that evening than
usual, and he was at the age when, although he knew the corresponding
fall on entering the house must be the more severe, he never doubted
that the dreams were worth it.