TWO MEETINGS
GEORGE and the Pig-driver left the cottage together a few minutes
afterwards. Both men had business in Crishowell, and as Rhys Walters
was now well enough to be left alone for a few hours, Williams had no
scruple in turning the key on his charge and starting with his patron
for the valley.
The hoar-frost hung on everything. Around them, the heavy air
enwrapped the landscape, making an opaque background to the branches
and twigs which stood as though cut out in white coral against
grey-painted canvas. Bumpett felt the cold a good deal and pressed
forward almost at a trot, looking all the more grotesque for the
company of the big, quiet man beside him. Some way out of the village
they parted, being unwilling to be seen much together.
When he went to see George, Bumpett generally got out of his cart as
soon as he had crossed the mountain pass, sending it round by a good
road which circled out towards Llangarth, and telling his boy to bring
it by that route to Crishowell; he thus avoided trying its springs in
the steep lanes, and was unobserved himself as he went down by
Williams' house to the village. At the carpenter's shop, where it went
to await him, he would pass an agreeable half-hour chatting with the
local spirits who congregated there of an afternoon.
He was the most completely popular man in the neighbourhood. For this
he was much indebted to the habits of his pig-driving days, when he
and his unruly flock had travelled the country on foot to the
different fairs. Then many a labourer's wife had lightened his
journeys by the pleasant offer of a bite and a sup, and held herself
amply rewarded by the odd bits of gossip and complimentary turns of
speech by which the wayfarer knew how to make himself welcome. Now
that he had become a man of money and standing, this graciousness of
demeanour had not left him; nay, it was rather set off by the flavour
of opulence, and gave meaner folk the comfortable assurance of being
hob and nob with the great ones of this world. Nevertheless, the name
of "The Pig-driver" stuck to him; as the Pig-driver they had known him
first, and the Pig-driver he would remain, were he to be made Mayor of
Abergavenny.
Rounding a corner, the old man came upon an elderly, hard-featured
woman who stood to rest and lean a basket which she carried against
the bank.
"Oh! Mr. Bumpett," she exclaimed as he approached, "oh! Mr. Bumpett."
"Come you here, woman," he said in a mysterious voice, taking her by
the elbow, "come down to the brookside till I speak a word wi' you."
"Oh! Mr. Bumpett," she went on, "so ye've heard, have ye?"
"Sh----sh!" cried the Pig-driver, hurrying her along, "keep you quiet,
I tell you, till we be away from the lane."
The Digedi brook ran along the hollow near, and at a sheltered place
by the brink he stopped. Both he and his companion were out of breath.
The woman sat down upon a rock, her hard face working.
"Indeed, I be miserable upon the face of the earth," she cried, "an I
can't think o' nothing but Master Rhys from the time I get out o' my
bed until the time I do get in again, and long after that too. An'
there's Mrs. Walters a-settin' same as if he were there and sayin' to
me, 'Never speak his name, Nannie, I have no son. Dead he have been to
the Lord these many years, and now, dead he is to me. His brother's
blood crieth to him from the ground.' I can't abide they prayers o'
hers."
"Will ye listen to me?" said Bumpett sharply. He gave as much notice
to her lamentations as he did to the babble of the brook.
"Ah, she's a hard one, for all her psalms and praises! Never a tear do
I see on her face, and there's me be like to break my heart when I so
much as go nigh the tollet in the yard and see the young turkey-cock
going by. Law! I do think o' the smacks poor Master Rhys did fetch his
grandfather, when he were a little bit of a boy, an' how the old bird
would run before him, same as if the black man o' Hell was after him!"
She covered her face with her shawl. The Pig-driver was exasperated.
"Will ye hold yer tongue?" he said, thumping his stick on the ground,
"or I won't tell ye one blazin' word of what I was to say. Here am I
strivin' to tell ye what ye don't know about Mister Walters, an' I
can't get my mind out along o' you, ye old fool! Do ye hear me, Nannie
Davis?"
At the sound of Rhys' name she looked up.
"If I tell ye something about him, will you give over?" asked the
Pig-driver, shaking her by the shoulder.
"Yes, surely, Mr. Bumpett," said Nannie, "I will. I be but a fool, an'
that I do know."
"He's safe," said Bumpett. "Do ye hear? He's safe. An' I know where he
is."
"And where is he?"
"Ah! that's telling. don't you ask, my woman, an' it'll be the better
for him."
Nannie had quite regained her composure, and an unspeakable load
rolled off her mind at her companion's words. Ever since the morning
when the mare had been found riderless, sniffing at the door of her
box at Masterhouse, and the news of the toll-keeper's death and Rhys'
flight had reached the mountain, waking and sleeping she had pictured
his arrest.
"So long as he bides quiet where he is, there's none can get a sight
o' him," said the old man, "and when we do see our way to get him off
an' over the water--to Ameriky, maybe--I and them I knows will do our
best. But he's been knocked about cruel, for, mind ye, they was
fightin' very wicked an' nasty, down by the toll."
"Is he bad?" asked Nannie anxiously.
"He was," replied Bumpett, "but he's mending."
"And be I never to know where he be?"
"You mind what I tell ye. But, if ye want to do the man a good turn,
ye may. Do ye know the Pedlar's Stone?"
Nannie shuddered. "There's every one knows that. But I durstn't go
nigh it, not I. Indeed, 'tis no good place! Saunders of Llan-y-bulch
was sayin' only last week----"
The Pig-driver cast a look of measureless scorn upon her.
"Well, ye needn't go nigh it," he interrupted. "Ye can bide twenty
yards on the other side."
"Lawk! I wouldn't go where I could see it!"
"Ye must just turn your back, then," said Bumpett crossly.
"But what be I to do?" inquired Nannie, who stood in considerable awe
of the Pig-driver.
"Ye might get a few of his clothes an' such like, or anything ye fancy
would come handy to him. Bring them down to the stone when it's dark,
an' I, or a man I'll send, will be there to get them from ye. Day
after to-morrow 'll do."
"I won't be so skeered if there's some I do know to be by," said she
reflectively.
"Can ye get they things without Mrs. Walters seein' ye?" inquired he.
"It would never do for her to be stickin' her holy nose into it."
Nannie laughed out. Her laugh was remarkable; it had a ring of
ribaldry unsuited to her plain bonnet and knitted shawl.
"No fear o' that. Mrs. Walters says to me, no more nor this mornin',
'Take you the keys, Nannie,' she says, 'an' put away all them clothes
o' his. Let me forget I bore a child that's to be a disgrace to my old
age.' 'Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good, ye see. But I must be
gettin' home now, Mr. Bumpett."
So they parted.
As George entered Crishowell by another way, and got over the last
stile dividing the fields from the village, the church bell began to
sound. The first stroke was finishing its vibration as he laid his
hand on the top rail, but he had gone a full furlong before he heard
the next. They were evidently tolling. A woman came out of her door
and listened to the bell.
"Who's to be buried?" inquired Williams, as he passed.
"'Tis Vaughan the gate-keeper," she answered, "him as was killed
Tuesday."
The young man proceeded until the road turned and brought him right in
front of the lych-gate of the church; it was open, and the Vicar of
Crishowell stood bareheaded among the graves. He went on by a path
skirting the wall, and slipped into the churchyard by another
entrance. A large yew-tree stood close to it, and under this he took
up his stand unperceived; the bell kept on sounding.
Crishowell church was a plain building, which possessed no
characteristic but that of solidity; bits had fallen out of it, and
been rebuilt at various epochs of its history, without creating much
incongruity or adding much glory to its appearance. The nave roof had
settled a little, and the walls were irregular in places, but over the
whole sat that somnolent dignity which clings to ancient stone. The
chancel windows were Norman, and very small; indeed, so near the
ground were they, that boys, sitting in the chancel pews, had often
been provoked to unseemly jests during service by the sight of
unchurch-going school-mates crowding to make grimaces at them from
outside. The porch was high, and surmounted by the belfry, and some
old wooden benches ran round its walls to accommodate the ringers. As
the sexton, who performed many other functions besides those of his
office, had just returned from the fields, Howlie Seaborne, his son,
had taken his place and was tolling till his father should have
changed his coat. He looked like a gnome as he stood in the shadow of
the porch with the rope in his hand. The sound of many feet was heard
coming up the lane, and Williams took off his hat.
The procession came in sight, black in front of the white hedges and
trees, moving slowly towards the lych-gate. First went the coffin,
carried under its dark pall, and heading a line of figures which
trailed behind it like some interminable insect. From miles round
people had come; Squire Fenton and Harry from Waterchurch, the
yeomanry officer who had been present at the riot, men from Llangarth,
gentlemen from distant parts of the country, all anxious to pay the
only respect they could to the undaunted old man whose duty had really
meant something to him. Immediately behind the dead walked a girl
muffled up in a black cloak. They were at the lych-gate. The bell
stopped.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live."
The words reached Williams where he stood under the yew-tree, and
something swelled up in his heart; abstract things struck him all at
once as real. Life was real--death very real--to die fighting like
Vaughan had died was real--certainly more real than stealing sheep. He
stood thinking, hardly definitely, but in that semi-consciousness of
thought which comes at times to most people, and from which they awake
knowing a little more than they knew before. Whether they make their
knowledge of use to them is another matter.
The Burial Service ran on to the end, and the people dispersed in twos
and threes. Some gentlemen, whose horses were waiting at the smith's
shop close by, mounted and rode away after a few civil words with the
Vicar; the labourers and their wives vanished quickly, the former
hurrying off to their interrupted work, and the latter clustering and
whispering among themselves. Soon the churchyard was empty, and
nothing was left to show what had taken place but the gaping grave and
the planks lying round it.
George remained a few minutes at his post under the tree before
emerging and going out by the same gate as the mourners, but, when he
did so, he saw that the girl had returned again and was sitting by the
mound of upturned earth. His impulse was to go back, respecting her
solitude, but Mary had heard his step and looked round at him. Their
eyes met. He had never seen the toll-keeper's daughter before, and her
beauty and the despair written on her face touched him deeply in the
stirred-up state of his mind. Remembering that he must shortly go back
to Rhys, the man by whose fault he believed her to be sitting where
she was, and share his roof with him for days to come, his soul
recoiled. And yet, the truth was worse than he knew.