Under a hawthorn bush, near a white road leading up a hill, in sight of
a thatch-roofed farmhouse, two little girls were playing house. Their
names were Edwitha and Audrey, and they were cousins. Audrey's father
lived in the farmhouse and kept sheep on the Downs, and Edwitha had also
lived there nearly all her life. Her father had been lost at sea, and
her mother had brought her back to the old home, and died not long
after. The two girls had grown up like sisters, for the farmer was not
a man who did things by halves, and when he adopted his brother's orphan
child he made her his own.
The two children were almost exactly of a size, and within a year of the
same age; and both had the milky skin and rose-pink cheeks which make
English children look so like flowers. But Audrey's hair was yellow as
ripe wheat, and Edwitha's was brown like an oak-leaf in autumn; Audrey's
eyes were gray, and Edwitha's were dark and dreamy. They wore homespun
linen gowns off the same web of watchet blue, and little clumsy leather
shoes like sandals, made by the village shoemaker. This particular place
was their favorite playhouse. There were two hollows, like dimples in
the hill, and the bush bent over one like a roof, while the other had
been roofed over by a neighbor-lad, Wilfrid. He had stuck saplings into
the ground, bent the tops over and woven branches in and out to hold
them. They took root and came out in fine leaf. Wilfrid had seen
something like it in a garden, where a walk was roofed in this way and
called a "pleached alley." It looked like a bird's nest built on the
ground, but it was a very nice little bower.
At this particular hour they were making ready for a feast, setting out
the eatables on all their best bits of crockery. Whatever was broken in
the house was likely to come to them, and besides this, they found a
good many pieces of pottery of different kinds on the farm. This had
been, a thousand years before, a part of a Roman governor's country
estate. When the men were plowing they often turned up scraps of bronze,
tiles, or dishes that had been all that time buried in the earth.
Edwitha was especially fond of the tiles; and she had collected almost
enough of them to make a little hearth. The one she intended for the
middle had a picture in colors of a little brown rabbit sitting on the
grass, nibbling a carrot, with a blue flower and a yellow one growing
close by. It was almost whole--only one corner was broken.
Edwitha's dishes were nearly all of the old Roman ware. The fragments
were deep red, and some had little black figures and decorations on
them. No two fitted together, and there were no pieces large enough for
her to make out what the dish had been like. She used to wonder what
sort of people had used those dishes, and whether they lived very
differently from the Sussex people who came after them. It seemed as if
they must have. No dishes made nowadays had any such appearance.
Audrey did not care about such matters. She preferred a bowl and jug she
had which came from the pottery, and were whole, and would hold milk and
honey. When the two girls ate their dinner in their bower, as they
sometimes did, they used little wooden bowls with horn spoons.
Wilfrid was the only person Edwitha knew, besides herself, who was at
all interested in the unearthed pottery. He had brought her some of the
best pieces she had, and had asked the priest at the village whether he
knew who made such things. Father Cuthbert knew that there had been
Romans in England, and he told Wilfrid some Roman history, but there
was nothing in it about the way in which the Romans really lived.
The very road that ran past the bower had been made by the Romans. It
gave its name to the farm--Borstall Farm. It was a track cut deep into
the chalk of the hill, not more than ten feet wide, leading to the camp
which had once been on the top of the Down. Nothing was there now but
the sheep and the gorse and the short, sweet grass of the Downs. On a
level terrace-like break in the hillside, overlooking the valley, a
Roman villa had stood, a great house with white porticoes, marble
columns, tiled floors and painted walls. Mosaic pictures of the gods
had been a part of its decorations, and if any one had known it, those
buried gods were under the hillside quite uninjured--so firm and strong
was the Roman cement, and so thorough the work. Hundreds of guests and
relatives and servants had come and gone in the stately palace of the
provincial Governor; the farm lands around it had been tilled by
hundreds of peasants in its two hundred years of splendor. No wonder
there were so many fragments! A great many dishes can be broken in two
centuries.
Pincher, the old sheep-dog, had been invited to the feast in the bower,
but when it was ready he was busy elsewhere. Edwitha went looking for
him, and after she had called several times she heard his answering
"Wuff! Wuff!" and caught sight of him down among the brambles at the
boundary-line of the next farmstead. He came leaping toward her, and as
she looked at the place where he had been, she saw that a piece of the
bank had slid into a rabbit-burrow, and something red was sticking out
of the earth. It was a little red bowl.
No such bowls are made in these days. They are never seen except on a
shelf in some museum. Wise men have called them "Samian ware," because
they have been found on the island of Samos, but as some of this ware
has been found wherever the Romans went in Gaul or Britain, it would
seem that they must have had some secret process in their potteries and
made it out of ordinary clay.
The bowl was deep red, and beautifully smooth. Around it was a band of
little dancing figures in jet black, so lifelike that it almost seemed
as if such figures might come out of the copse and dance away down the
hill. Edwitha took some leaves and rubbed off the clay that stuck to the
bowl, and the cleaner she made it the prettier it was. Very carefully
she carried it back to the bower to show Audrey.
Half way there, a dreadful thought came to her. What if Audrey should
want the bowl? It was quite perfect--the only whole one they had
found--and Audrey always liked things that were whole, not broken or
nicked, better than any sort of imperfect ones. Certainly they could
not both have it.
Edwitha came to a stop, and stood quite still, thinking about it. She
knew a place, under the roots of an old tree, where she could keep the
bowl, and go and look at it when she was alone, and no one would know
that she had it. If Audrey wanted the bowl, and took it, she might let
it get broken, and then she would be willing that Edwitha should have
it; but that would be worse than not having it at all. Edwitha felt as
if she could not bear to have anything happen to the pretty thing. It
already seemed like something alive--like a strange, mute person whom
nobody understood but herself. She was the only person who really wanted
it, and she knew that it wanted her.
But under these thoughts which pushed unbidden into Edwitha's mind was
her own feeling that it was a meanness even to think them. She and
Audrey had all their lives done things together, and Audrey always
shared. She always played fair.
Edwitha took the bowl in both hands and walked straight and very fast up
to the bower.
"Audrey," she said, holding out the bowl, "see what I found."
Audrey looked at it.
"That's like your other dishes, isn't it?" she commented. "Only it is
whole. It is just the thing for the dewberries. They will be prettier
than in the basket."
Edwitha set the bowl in the middle of the table and poured the shining
dark fruit into it. It did look pretty, and it had a mat of green
oak-leaves under it which made it prettier still. Audrey began sticking
white blossoms round the edge to set off the red and green.
"I'm glad you found it," she added placidly; "you haven't one dish that
is quite whole, and I have a blue one, and a white one, and a jug."
Edwitha touched the bowl caressingly with the tips of her fingers. "I
will try to find another for you," she said.
"If you find any more," answered Audrey, pushing Pincher away from the
dish of cold meat, "you can have them. I'd rather have our dishes in
sets, I think."
Edwitha was poking about in the bank where she had found the bowl, late
that afternoon, when Wilfrid came up the bank. There seemed to be no
more dishes in sight.
"What have you found?" asked Wilfrid. He held it up in the sunlight, and
drew a quick breath of delight. "How beautiful it is!" he exclaimed in
a low voice.
Edwitha was silent. She was filled with a great happiness because she
had the bowl.
"I wonder how it came to be here," mused Wilfrid, and fell to digging
and prodding the earth.
"There isn't another in the hole," said Edwitha. "I've been here a long
time."
"This is the only bit I ever saw that was found just here. But see here,
Edwitha, this is clay. It is exactly like the clay they use at the
pottery down by the ford, but finer--I think. I tell you--I believe
there was a pottery here once."
He and Edwitha took the bowl and a few lumps of the clay, next morning,
to the Master Potter beyond the village. Wilfrid had served his
apprenticeship at this pottery and was now a journeyman. The clay proved
to be finer and more workable than that near the pottery, and the
deposit was close to the high road, so that donkeys and pack-horses
could come up easily to be loaded with their earthen pots. It was even
possible, so the Master Potter said, that it would make a better grade
of ware than they had been able to make hitherto. Finally, and most
important from the point of view of Wilfrid and Edwitha, it was on
Wilfrid's own farm, he had his old mother to support, and this discovery
might make it possible for him to have his own pottery and be a Master
Potter.
Edwitha often wished that the bowl could speak, and tell her how it was
made, and who drew the little dancing figures. In course of time Wilfrid
tried some experiments with pottery, ornamenting it with figures in
white clay on the colored ground, and searching continually for new and
better methods of glazing, baking, and modeling his wares. At last, when
the years of his apprenticeship had all been served, and he knew
everything that was taught in the old Sussex pottery by the ford, he
came one spring twilight to the farmhouse and found Edwitha in the
garden.
"It is no use," he said, half-laughing. "I shall never be content to
settle down here until I have seen what they are doing in other lands.
If there is anywhere a man who can make things like that bowl of yours,
I must learn what he can teach me. It may be that the secret has been
lost--if it has, I will come back and work here again. A man was never
meant to do less than his best, Edwitha."
"I know," said Edwitha. "Those figures make me feel so too. They always
did. I don't want to live anywhere but here--and now Audrey has gone
away, uncle and aunt could never do without me--but I wish we could make
beautiful things in England."
"Some of the clever ones are in England," Wilfrid answered. "They are
doing good work in glass, I know, and in carven stone, and some other
things, but that is mostly for the rich abbeys. I shall never be aught
but a potter--but I will be as good a one as I can."
Therefore Wilfrid took scrip and staff and went on pilgrimage to France,
and there he saw things which made him sure that men had not lost the
love of beauty out of the world. But he could hear of no master potters
who made anything like the deep red Roman ware. After a year of
wandering he came back, full of new plans, and with many tales to tell;
but he told Edwitha that in all his travels he had seen nothing which
was better worth looking at than her little Roman bowl.
[Illustration: "'HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS!' HE EXCLAIMED"--_Page 192_]