IN WHICH LOVEDAY SEES ONE MAGPIE
Upon May Day, when boys blow the May horns and girls carry sprays of
hawthorn and all good folk break their fast on bread and cream, Loveday
had to go, as was her wont (and a mortifying one to her pride since
Primrose's flouting of her), to Upper Farm. Twice before have we seen
her on that errand--when she first was love-stricken for Miss Le Pettit
in the farmhouse parlour, and again when on her search for work she saw
the querulous young Mrs. Lear in the dim kitchen. Since then she had
gone monotonously enough on her errand, avoiding speech even with the
elder Mrs. Lear as much as possible, and seeing Primrose not at all--an
easy matter, since the girl kept her room, or lay on the horsehair sofa,
languidly stitching woollen roses on a handscreen, for all the world
like the spoilt bride of some great gentleman.
There seemed never any violence of thought or emotion at Upper Farm,
even the sulks of Primrose were petty in nature, her jealousies made her
voice shrill but did not take her by the throat with that intolerable
aching stormier women know too well, while her graceless husband was
irritated on the surface of his mind as some shallow pool is fretted
over its bed of soft ooze, retaining no trace when the ripples have
died. The elder Lear, as befits a good countryman content with his
station in life, was too hard-worked for anything save a tired back on
his entry at night, and the old wife too occupied with her Martha-like
toil for searching into the sensibilities either of herself or of her
daughter-in-law.
Loveday, without reasoning on the matter, had yet ever been aware
that this slight tide of feeling was all that ever lapped against the
household at Upper Farm, therefore when she saw one magpie in the last
field before the yard gate she accepted the sign for her own despairing
heart alone. No young woman of education would have paid any attention
to such a vulgar superstition, but Loveday had no learning other than
what her elders had let fall in her hearing, both when she was supposed
to be listening for her betterment, and when it was thought she would
not understand the drift of their speech. And that a single magpie means
sorrow was one of the few solid facts Loveday had gleaned by following
the garnered sheaves of her elders.
Now, as she stepped over the topmost ledge of the granite stile, there
was a fanlike flutter of black and white in her very face, and she stood
a moment watching the ill-omened bird wheel and dip behind the thick
blossom of the hawthorn hedge.
"There goes my white riband," thought the ignorant girl, and yet even
with the quick fear there welled a fresh and fierce determination in her
undisciplined heart.
Her egotism, if not her superstition, was reproved when she reached
the farmhouse, and old Madgy, the midwife, coming to the pump for more
water, met her with news of what had happened not half an hour earlier.
The shallow creek of Upper Farm had been invaded by a violent and dark
tide, on whose ebb two lives had been borne away. Loveday, staring up
at Primrose's room, saw the withered hand of old Mrs. Lear draw the
curtains across the window behind which lay a dead mother and a babe
that had never lived.