TRESPASS
The hour the porter had set as the one beyond towards Narrowfields and
Cherrydale--places which Polly must not transgress, was creeping so
near, yet far from each other. Narrowfields could not wholly hide the
beauty of the gleaming Cherrydale!
Cherrydale, at this hour of transition, oozed sweetness from its pores,
turning into a great, dark flower, palpitating between silence and the
few sounds of the autumn night.
Adam Wild’s upland field of wheat, valued by the farmers around as
worth forty English sovereigns, became an altar of mystery. The wind
whispered over it of primal beauty, primal pain, primal gladness.
Bread of life! Life that was so beautiful, holding things like Adam
Wild’s perseverance against terrible odds; holding Susan Thorpe, with
her quiet eyes and heart of country faith; holding Polly Cherry, with
her baby ways and baby habit of clutching at things, without knowing
whether or not they would hurt. But when the dark shadows went over the
field, and the wind felt chill, and the faithless swallows made their
crave for the south--the wheatfield, food for the bodies that hold the
souls of men, said that life held also sordid things like the mortgagee
of the Wilds’ farm, weak things like Adam’s father, who had given way
to inertia since his wife died--inertia that is said to mark men with
the sign of the ape.
The swaying field of wheat became a pæan of life--wherein many voices
battled with each other, with the issue yet indistinct.
A black gate at the top of the field showed its five bars against a
sky filling with silver as the west filled with fire of gold. Between
east and west rolled broken country, with few trees, saving those seven
beeches that made sooty blurs against that spreading silver that would
soon take definite shape as a moon, an impatient moon that Adams had
made to refect his haste to gather in the wheat, whenever he saw her
like a sickle bending down towards it. To the left of his field was a
great bump of hill like that of a dromedary humped under bronze velvet.
Down below this, lay the Narrowfields’ road.
At the foot of his field was the round stone that had taken his fancy
as a step to his stile. He had carried it half a mile and laid it down
proudly as any woman adds something to her house comfort. Before he
had ventured into wheat growing in a grass-county as a last throw of
the dice against that townster who held the mortgage deeds, lovers
had found this stone very convenient to climb up to sit on the stile;
a high, uncertain, involved country stile enough. Since the wheat
growing, there was ever a man prowling in the field--a fanatical man
whose old hat the scarecrow had worn when the wheat was green, a man
whom Cherrydale said was gifted with a wonderful head-piece, had the
perseverance his whole family could have done with dividing up between
them, but withal a man who couldn’t see for looking--meaning Susan
Thorpe.
On the other side the stile were the three steps leading down upon the
road that ran glimmeringly, now, between holly hedges.
To the left from the stile, this road ran to the village, which
only showed now a church spire, gleaming with some reflection from
the light of the fire of gold in the west. The right of it led to
Narrowfields--as did that upper road now hidden beyond the top-most
glory of Adam’s triumphant field of wheat, that paragon standing
exultant over the shaven fields around.
Men’s voices sounded from the heart of its glory--its forty pounds,
that was to put confusion into that dried soul of the yellow-faced man
who said this was to be his--his, by divine right of paper deeds as
against Adam’s willingness to spill his blood to keep it.
A sudden blaze from an uplifted lantern showed the crest of an old
billycock hat with hawksbit and purple scabious thrust through a slit
in the side--then, a ruddy, credulous country face and a pair of squat
shoulders, whilst alongside was the taller form of a young man, without
hat, the shadow making his eye-sockets deep caverns, his brow a cloud,
and accentuating the horizontal line running down the deep upper
lip--the lip that according to Cherrydalers stamped a man as of the old
yeomanry, the “potato-faces.”
“It’s a seet for sore e’en,” said the voice of the older man. “I
couldn’t ha’ thowt it could be done, hereabouts. ‘If at first you
don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ Ay. A good motta. Though my Aunt
Bethsheba----” He broke off suddenly. “By th’ Mass, I nearly went
then,” he added. He had stumbled.
“Better let me go in front,” said the young farmer.
There was a wincing tone in the voice as if he had felt human pain for
the wheat touched by his godfather’s hobnailed boots.
“Ay. It’d happen be better, Addy,” said the other. “I’m not seein’ so
weel these days. We noan on us mend wi’ keepin’.”
Adam Wild did not answer.
The lantern rays flashed once across his countenance, as he led the way
along the narrow path through his wheat.
It was smiling.
It had all the kindly tolerance of a man who does not come of a
talking-stock, being entertained by the childish frankness of a man
who would talk till the cows came up. He might have stood as the type
of the old yeomanry, with their strong bodies, and equally strong, if
narrow minds. Short, dark hair almost stood erect as he walked against
the wind.
“I’d like to hear thee courtin’ a lass, Addy,” said his companion,
droll humour in his voice.
“How’s that, Uncle Nat,” he asked, and laughed.
His laughter was whole-hearted.
“Thy words might be tuppence apiece,” said the other. “But then--tha
wert born in th’ neet, an’ them as is born in th’ neet is mostly o’
that mak. An’ thy mother went out without sayin’ a word!”
In the way of the north country he referred to death as a light going
out.
Silence fell again--through which came the sea-like sighing of the
wheat.
“Tha’ll shake thysel’ free o’ yon chap wi’ th’ papers,” said Uncle Nat,
with faith. “Eh, it’s bonnie wheat. What put it in thy heyd to try grow
wheat on grassland? Eh, ay, it’ll be a rare lift to ’art thy gettin’
free. For I’ll never believe ’at th’ Wilds ’at as lived on that land a
hundred and fifty years,--to my grandfather’s countin’,--is goin’ to
be pushed off it by a chap as yellow as his own papers, an’ e’en like
he stops up a’ neet.”
Silence fell once more.
“Tha’rt fain o’ thy wheat, aren’t ta?” asked Nat.
“Ay,” answered Adam.
“Well, happen tha’rt reight not to brag on it,” said the old man. “For
we never know what’s comin’ next, in this world, as my Aunt Bethsheba
said. Eh, she were a queer un, my Aunt Bethsheba. But--tha didn’t tell
me what made thee think to grow wheat on grassland.”
“There’s bin wheat grown there before,” said Adam. “Ay, before the
Wilds had it. I read it in an old book.”
“To think a chap like thee, wi’ a’ that in thy heyd, should be content
to muck fields,” said Nat, in innocent wonder.
“I’ll pay the mortgage off out of th’ land itself,” said the young man,
in a tone of almost fanatical fervour. “I’ll tear our freedom up out o’
the ground where it was lost. Look out, Uncle Nat--the stone.”
They had reached the stile, the stone acting as a step up to it. Down
below was the road.
Uncle Nat squeezed himself through the stile.
“Three steps down,” Adam warned him.
“Ay, I know there’s three,” said Uncle Nat. “There were allus three.
I daresay, Adam, tha’s often wondered why I took an interest in thee.
Well, I’ll tell thee. Forty year sin’, to-neet, I axed thy mother if
she thought she could fancy me--at this stile. And she said ‘No--a.’
She’d a reight on it, lad. But I think she made a mistake a’ th’ same.
Safely down, now, Addy. Lad, if I were thee I’d not trust that wheat
long afore gettin’ it in. My bunion says ‘rain.’ Eh. Ay, she told me
‘No-a’ reight enough. An’ I felt sure she’d made a mistake. But it
weren’t for me to point it out to her. Not likely. An’ tha’rt as like
her as if she’d spit thee out o’ her mouth. An’ _tha’rt_ goin’ to mak a
mistake.”
They were walking along the road now.
“How’s that, Uncle Nat?”
Adam’s query was in a tone that said he guessed what track Uncle Nat
was on. Though, to be sure, his mind had never been so impudently broad
before.
“Work’s a good thing, Adam,” said the other. “An’ I can understand
thee bein’ ta’en up in this feight to keep th’ old farm. But, lad,
tha’d feight a’ th’ better--for not lettin’ luv go a-beggin’. It’s a
sad thing to turn luv a-beggin’, Adam. My Aunt Bethsheba, she said we
were born for it, an’ a chap ’at hadn’t bin made miserable ower a woman
didn’t know he were born, an’ a woman--well, she said she’d no right
to be born if she were goin’ through life like a statoo, for it were a
waste o’ good blood, an’ she might as weel ha’ ban made o’ plaister o’
Paris.”
Adam walked steadily on.
The old man cast sly glances at his face, but the lantern-bearer
manœuvered to keep the darkness on his own face, the light full on
his “Uncle” Nat’s. Though the only feeling Adam’s face showed was a
shrinking embarrassment at what he rightly judged the old man was
leading up to.
“I don’t know aught sweeter than freedom, an’ th’ earth,” he avowed,
sincerely. “An’ I don’t want to, Uncle Nat. I’m a mean man. I’d liefer
buy oats an’ rye an’ barley to put into th’ ground, than spend money
buyin’ bonnets. You should look on me as wedded--to th’ Earth. She’s
a splendid, bride. Worth dressin’. No, Uncle Nat.” It was as if he
jestingly pushed away an unwanted article.
“She could buy her own bonnets!” declared Uncle Nat.
Whereupon Adam groaned inwardly.
He was sure now that it was Susan Uncle Nat meant.
“Her mother heard her a-prayin’ for thy field o’ wheat, Addy. Tha could
fare to th’ ends o’ the yeth, an’ tha’d not find a tenderer, lovinger,
purer heart than our little Susan’s got. An’ th’ right mate for a
farmer. What is there she can’t do? Eh, Addy--tha’rt makin’ a mistake.
She’ll be snapped up in no time.”
Adam Wild walked steadily on.
“Come--Adam,” asked Nat, as if asking him to bid for something under
the hammer.
“Do--do you mean to say--that--Sue--likes me?” queried a voice out of
the darkness.
Had he not been so eager to delude himself Uncle Nat would have heard
the naked horror in the tones.
“She were prayin’ for thy wheat,” answered Uncle Nat in a voice that
said that was enough for anybody. “In the middle o’ th’ neet when she
thought everybody were asleep. Coom--Adam.”
“There’s a shrew mouse,” cried Adam, eagerly.
He lifted up his lantern, following the flight of the little creature
into the grasses edging a ditch. The light blazed on an autumn hedge,
with scarlet hips flashing amidst the gold of fading leaves. Uncle Nat
noticed that Adam’s ear-tips were almost as red as the hips. He took
this for a good sign.
“Gone,” said the young man, alluding to the shrew mouse.
“What says ta, Adam?” went on Uncle Nat as though the shrew mouse had
not been trailed across his path.
“I never thought on it before,” confessed Adam. “An’ I’m sure I’ve
never given reason----”
“There’s no reason in it,” laughed Uncle Nat. “Now--tha’s hit the nail
on th’ head, there, lad. But--she’s a nice lass, isn’t she, lad?”
“Very,” said Adam with sincerity. Then, “I think women haven’t as much
wit as hens, Uncle Nat. An’ you’ve kept hens.”
The hard gaiety of his tone had an under-current of perplexity.
“She’s as much common sense as a policeman, our Susan,” said Uncle
Nat, indignantly. “Anyhow--I can drop her mother a hint as tha’rt not
smitten. Tha can’t ha’ a young woman prayin’ for thy wheat, on false
pretences.”
Which upset Adam’s gravity at the situation arising.
His laughter rolled out into the night, waking the echoes.
After a short pause, Uncle Nat joined in it, though uneasily at first.
They had reached a long, uneven wall, dry-built, and with blacker
patches in its darkness showing where the sheep-gaps were. Nat’s hand
touched a gate. The barking of dogs arose.
“Comin’ in, Addy?” asked Uncle Nat.
Before the man could reply a thin thread of light widened into a
flood. A farmhouse door had opened, with a black figure like a fat
marionette’s stuck out against the light, with something decisive in
it, even though it was two fields’ distance away.
“She’s sin thee,” said Uncle Nat, blithely, as if that settled the
question of Adam’s going in to supper.
“Now then. Don’t let him go. He only wants pressin’,” came a voice
anything but marionette-like. Withal the voice of an elderly female
it had a hearty lustiness, and even the distance could not steal away
altogether the humorous double-meaning the speaker insinuated into the
word ‘pressin’.
Nat nudged him slyly.
“Did ta hear her?” he asked with droll pride. “She said tha’ only
wanted _pressin’_.”
His laughter rang out.
Adam did not answer him directly.
“Not this time, Aunt Sarah,” shouted Adam, genially.
His shoulders made a resolute square of blackness.
“Neet, Adam,” said Uncle Nat, stung at last, “I reckon tha’ll go
through t’ wood an’ through t’ wood an’ get a crooked stick at th’
finish----”
But Adam had already taken some paces away.
He was restlessly eager to get away from that farm--uneasily afraid of
that cherry-lipped damsel who might be peering out towards them from
behind her mother--little Susan Thorpe, laughing, industrious, modest
as a daisy, who played Ludo with Uncle Nat, till she almost fell off
her chair asleep, and for whom Uncle Nat had never lost a chance of
putting in a good word. Little Susan--little Susan, who, according to
the village gossips, would one day have a pot of money and wear silk
every day.
“Good-night, Uncle Nat,” he called.
Uncle Nat walked on in grim silence, never turning his head, for quite
half a dozen paces.
Then he came back to the gate to which Adam had also returned.
“Tak’ no gaum o’ my gruntlin’, Addy,” asked Uncle Nat. “I get like a
bear wi’ a sore back. We noan on us mend wi’ keepin’. An’--next to
havin’ had thy mother say ‘Ay’ to me, I’d have chosen thee to have our
Susan. But--tak’ no heed on me, lad. Tha’rt not mad, arta?”
There was so tender an anxiety in the question, so noble a lack of
pride, so much revelation of the way the rat-catching old bachelor
clung to the approval of this son of his soul, that Adam felt ashamed
of having been mentally setting the old man down as a meddling old fool
who was getting him, Adam Wild, into an awkward corner.
He gave Uncle Nat a slap on the shoulder that made him cry out.
“There’s naught could come between you an’ me, Uncle Nat,” he said with
earnest conviction.
Then he added, feeling the old man’s gaze upon him, expectantly, “I’ll
drop in an’ have a game at Ludo with you before you go back to Ashdale.
By th’ way, not a word of this.”
For quite suddenly it had struck him, that to definitely say that Susan
Thorpe would never be Mrs. Wild, was to be unnecessarily insulting.
There was something flattering in the thought of her praying for his
field of wheat. The picture haunted him. Susan was pretty. Moreover--he
had remembered the pot of money that could purchase the freedom of Sagg
Farm, if the worst came to the worst.
“Not a word, lad,” said Uncle Nat, laying his finger across his nose;
as if that was the usual way of taking solemn oath.
The silence that fell between them had something guilty in it.
“Good-neet, lad,” called Uncle Nat, blithely, when half-way across the
field.
But Adam was already out of earshot.
Whilst as Nat’s shoes made a soft “prop-plop” over the ground between
him and his youngest sister’s farm, he was telling himself that it
was impossible for any young man who was right in his head to go on
seeing his niece as often as Adam did--all the modest, innocent ways,
and sitting in that house of cleanly pride, and even walking home from
church with the quiet-eyed young creature with one little hand holding
her prayer-book, the other dangling at her side, a Sabbath look in her
eyes--without falling in love with her. So that when he got inside, and
Susan poured out his porridge and blue milk, and set his slippers in
the fender, the oath of the finger across the nose clean went out of
his head. He believed that he spoke the truth, as he heard himself say
that Adam had literally torn himself away--that they had been having a
very important conversation--his knowing look bringing a pleased light
to his sister’s eye, a blush to the little Susan’s, and a laugh from
the gawky man who was sitting scraping manure from great boots so that
it fell on a sheet of newspaper spread inside the fender. Which method
of self-delusion is not unknown to men in higher walks of life than
Uncle Nat’s, more clever meddlers in other people’s destinies.
His godson, meanwhile, was standing looking down on the broad stream
that flowed under the old, one-railed wishing-bridge. He held the
lantern so that the light trembled down upon the water--showing with
the fantasy of a will-o’-th’-wisp, now a great stone fringed with
foam, ghostly branches of willow and their shadows in some illumined
stone-locked pool, whilst, conscious of the beauty of the whole, his
eye was seeking out any new detail since he had passed a few days
ago. He discovered the appearance of a herb that made a splendid
autumn-cup, according to old Culpepper, and had an impulse to clamber
down the bank, and gather it by the light of his lantern. The impulse
passed as suddenly as it had come. The thought of Susan Thorpe--in love
with him--had come upon him, bewildering him into unhappy despondence.
He passed slowly forwards, missing the holes made by rain-rot, his hand
feeling the chill dews on the shaky rail with an intense delight for
the soil in which he had grown. Whilst the thought that before giving
that up, he would be glad to marry old Mother Green Teeth herself,
throbbed in his brain.
From a small knoll that met the bridge he looked upwards at a black
blotch against the sky--Sagg Farm, its two illumined windows and the
chink of light escaping from its hollowed threshold giving it a subtle
resemblance to a square-jowled ebon face with two wide-open fiery eyes,
a thin mouth spitting flame. As he looked, the only passion of his
rational life threw its spell over him. His father had given up the
ghost so far as the old place went, when Ellen Wild went out without
a word. Adam knew that even now his father would be stretched on the
settle, mumbling drunken incoherencies. As for him--it was as though
the indomitable soul of the silent mother who had died seven years ago
had passed into him. In all the world nothing mattered except that
Bob, Sary, and he should not be driven forth from the place that had
sheltered four generations of Wilds.
He brooded on the last interview with the man who held the deeds--and
walked fiercely into two gelder-rose bushes. They dashed a baptism of
dews on his stormy young face. As he disentangled himself he caught a
sight of the moon, that topaz tenderness a magic now.
At this moment, whilst freeing his coat from the innumerable invisible
fingers that seemed to cling to him out of the bushes, he heard an
echo--laughter, ghostlike, from the old Narrowfields road. Such
laughter was common to it on a Saturday night.
The thought that Uncle Nat had not closed the gate at the top of
the field haunted him. He became an irritable Fear, lamp in hand,
listening, the scorn he had of these town fools glowering from his brow.
The laughter throbbed unashamedly upon the air, nearer, yet nearer, as
he listened.
In that quiet place it had an unholy sound.
It was the town, come for sport, into the unobserved country places.
Adam’s head was up like a dog on the scent now.
With an unintelligible jumble of words he re-crossed the bridge.
Once upon the road he raced along--whilst ever the laughter met him.
In a lull, once, he heard voices, and could distinguish above the rest
a feminine one which even affectation could not make hideous. It broke
into a snatch of song, whereupon the affectation was shed immediately,
and it became only the fresh voice of youth, singing under the moon,
because the world was so fair, and to walk through the dews with a
white dress rustling and one’s hair up for the very first time, sub
rosa, too, demands some escape for the joy of the heart.
Adam was intent on that voice.
He found it useful to locate the intruders by.
The race had become a set one, between that voice and the young
farmer’s fear.
Even as his feet touched that round stone Nat had stumbled over, he
heard the bang of his gate. It always gave a long-drawn-out groan, like
the thunder-notes in “Judas Maccabeus.”
_They were in the field!_
Yet they must have noticed the trespass-board.
Stealthily he crept along, the lantern blussed by his coat, his free
hands touching the stalks of the wheat to guide himself along the
sinuous path.
Silence had fallen on the intruders as they entered the wheat-field. A
girlish giggle trickled somewhat nervously once, followed by a girlish
voice wondering what time it was. To which a youth’s voice answered
that it was too early for two pretty girls to go home.
Townsters!
The man creeping along muttered the word as some faint expression of
his scorn, his prejudice of the clan to whom belonged the yellow-faced
man who held the deeds of Sagg Farm.
Even as it left his lips he caught the flash of a girl’s white
hat--then a white bust, and around the waist a black sleeve. There was
a jumble of other figures behind these two. But it was on this first
couple that the antipathy of his gaze turned itself.
The wheat was swaying to and fro before their progress.
Quite suddenly the girl began to sing again.
She was singing “He shall feed His flock,” her head flung back. There
was no thought of faith, or religious fervour in the way she sang. Had
she sung a rag-time she would have sung it with the same fine quality
of ecstasy. The wheat-field had suggested it to her irresponsible mind.
The wheat-field took on a new significance as she sang--and as she sang
her feet trampled it thoughtlessly down. Through the surging sea of the
wheat she sang--as though she were the only person the globe had been
made for. The wheat tossed stormily as she endeavoured to free herself
from the thralldom of that black sleeve. She stopped suddenly in the
middle of a bar, with an almost peevish, “Let go, Peter! I can’t bear
to be held--when I’m singing.”
“Amen. Sister Becky will go round with the hat,” said the voice that
had previously said the hour was early for two pretty girls.
Adam, creeping up, his underlip bitten, perceived by the motion of the
wheat a movement on the girl’s part to shake off the arm.
Quite suddenly, a flapperish scream arose, the two young men guffawed,
and the unmusical laughter of another girl rang out. The group had
come to a standstill, the wheat tossing all about them. This was town
horse-play.
“Becky!” called the girl in the white dress, imploringly.
“Kiss her, Peter. Kiss her! She told me herself. Sweet seventeen, an’
never been kissed. I’ll hold her----”
Whereupon the flapper’s scream arose once more, and the wheat made a
great murmur.
“Stop that!” said Adam, springing up, and flashing his lantern on the
group, hypnotised into stillness by his sudden appearance.
The first movement came from a little wiry girl with dark eyes,
assisting a youth with receding chin and weak, blue eyes, to hold the
girl, whilst a handsome lad, with a dare-devil countenance not without
some nobility in it, was trying to kiss the girl--her face now partly
revealed through a veil of yellow hair, blue eyes full of baby tears, a
mouth that trembled.
Even as she attempted a nervous twisting of her hair into decency, she
caught the menacing look of the wrathful farmer fixed on Peter.
Peter, with an adventurous nonchalance, advanced a step to meet him.
They were facing each other on the narrow path, town wit and country
wit.
Whilst all about was the trampled wheat.
“You’re trespassing!” Adam told them.
The cool temper of the voice deceived all but Peter.
He had noticed the clenched fury of the hand that did not hold the
lantern.
“Well--what about it?” asked the youth.
“Trespassers will be prosecuted,” quoted Adam.
The cool temper became in itself a menace now.
He was speaking with the ease of one who has the law on his side, and
will use its machinery to the utmost.
“Well, then--prosecute us,” said Peter, cheekily.
But he had given a quick side-glance at the youth of the weak
chin--then, at Becky, his face more easy as he caught her dark eye.
Becky had understood.
They were going to dodge out of this mess, somehow.
“Look at _that_,” said Adam, flashing his lantern over the way they had
come.
All the human feeling Uncle Nat had thought he lacked flashed from his
eyes, throbbed in his voice.
“And for what?” he added, scornfully.
His contempt included the girls, now.
Becky stood it unmoved.
Her companion blushed.
“We were cutting off a mile of rough road,” said Peter.
His voice had as much of explanation in it as was logical with his
contempt for this clodhopper.
“You didn’t seem in any particular hurry,” retorted the farmer. “Name,
please.”
The two girls had slunk together.
Becky was whispering to Polly, advocating some policy.
With his eye on Peter, the farmer was conscious of this by-play. He
kept his feet gripping the ground that blocked their flight.
“John Grimes--” began Peter, with a cunning semblance of giving in to a
bad business.
“Won’t come off,” said Adam.
“If you don’t get out of the way, I’ll make you eat your earth,” blazed
Peter.
At that moment the nobility in him blazed up in full flame, over the
attempt his clothes made at smartness, the hint of dissipation that
would submerge him. It was the reckless courage that had discovered
continents, and founded empires--the fighting spirit for which the town
had no room. Peter ready for a scrap, was a different Peter from Peter
the mud-lark, Peter the pierrot, Peter trying to dodge girls he had
tired of.
“I wouldn’t touch any of you town mongrels with a six-foot pole,” said
Adam.
The countryman’s superior scorn of them was epigrammatic.
Whereupon Polly stepped forward and tried to talk nicely to Adam. To
the little foolish attempts to talk him round, to make sheep’s eyes at
him, the farmer returned a smile that said he was woman-proof.
A gust of wind blew one of her blue ribbons in his eyes as she said
they were sorry. He drew back, with so strong a look of contempt, that
Polly shrunk.
“Your names,” he said, rock-like.
Quite unexpectedly, Becky sprang forwards.
She pushed the big fair girl so violently that she was hurled upon
Adam’s great chest, a shrieking, scented, beribboned bundle of
flapperdom, from which he strove to disentangle himself as from an
asp. His hands got tangled in her hair, which had caught round his
coat-buttons. Whilst the thought that the others were escaping made him
ejaculate savage little words at her. His lantern dropped. He could
hear the beat of her foolish heart.
“Becky! You cat! Oh--you cat!” she sobbed.
With a desperate movement she twitched away from him.
He heard the little, tearing sound made by the hair that had caught on
his buttons.
Then he was after the youths.
Blind blows were rained amidst the wheat, then the townsters got free.
He followed them, though out-distanced. His trembling of rage had
been against him. He was not used to rage. It got into his head and
bewildered his feet. The laughter of Peter came up to him from the road.
They had trampled lawless paths through the middle of his field--and he
had followed them--and they were gone.
Some vial snapped within him, and overspilled its bitterness, such
revengeful bitterness as he had never known.
“You God-forsaken town devils,” he called suddenly. “Get back to your
town hell-holes. Why do you come here? Get back.”
Then--he heard girlish sobbing, saw the ghostly gleam of a white dress.
The old Hebrew thirst for revenge was upon him.
Only--he did not want an eye for an eye, but twenty eyes for one.
He plunged through the wheat.
“Becky!” came sobbingly.
The girl had perceived him and was trying to run.
“Now--” he said, as he reached her, grasping her shoulder.
She made no answer, save terrified gasps.
The dark fear of her eyes shone through the gloom. She was biting her
underlip in a childish attempt at restraint. It struck him that this
time she was too scared to scream.
“I’m going to trespass,” was his brief warning.
“Beck----” she began.
Then he was kissing her, in that raging passion of scorn and revenge
against the tramplers of his temple, the heretics from the town.
Each kiss was given as he would have dealt a man a blow--with the
same steady desire to crush, to leave behind a scar. He was making
the girl’s vanity the scapegoat for the vandalism of her companions.
Sacrilege for sacrilege.
Justice was satisfied at length.
“Now--get out o’ my field,” he said, thunderingly, and placing both
his hands on her sob-shaken shoulders, thrust her out, till her feet
were on the path, made her keep to it, then let her go, and watched her
humiliated struggle up the round stone, over the stile.
Sex-proud tiller of the calm, silent earth he had grown to be like, he
knew that she was on the verge of hysterics.
“Three steps down,” he told her, with polite sarcasm.
She found her voice then.
It struggled up through tears, thin, feminine, with a thread of
feminine viciousness.
“If there was only a man an’ a monkey on th’ earth,” she told him, “an’
you were th’ man, I’d take the monkey.”
She tried to laugh.
Her voice shook like Uncle Nat’s fiddle-string, when he played “Annie
Laurie.”
“Get out o’ my field,” said the contemptuous, masculine bass.
“Wait till my grandmother, Betty Harker, comes to tell your dad--” she
said with a childishness that made him smile.
Her voice was retreating.
Perhaps that gave it its forlorn sound.
The fact that it was Betty Harker’s grand-daughter he had kissed, that
the girl knew him, was staggering, but he had presence of mind to call
a counter-threat.
“Wait till I see Betty Harker!”
Only silence answered.
She was gone.
He turned, found his lantern, re-lit it, and surveyed the damage to
his field. His rage died away in impotent despair. He had found a clue
to the names of the intruders. But--Betty Harker had lent his father
twenty pounds last quarter towards paying off the mortgage.
Back again along the road, but he did not pass over the bridge and
towards the barn-like kitchen lit by two candles, with Sary preparing
supper in her dully patient way.
He went further along the road, took a wall-gap, and was soon climbing
the slopes of a rush-singing, boggart-wild hill that was the doorstep
to the moors. When he reached that dark expanse, the little pools were
black save for the moon here and there, looking as if she were trying
to drown herself, first in one, then in another, futilely. Ragged sheep
passed like ghosts before him. The wind blew the moor-grasses erect,
blew his hair erect, the dark shapes of a circle of hill rose round him
as he still went up. Whilst the screams of the peewits fell down, down,
down into an enchanted bowl of silence,--silence all the deeper for the
thin, elfin-song of the rushes.
As he reached another hill it seemed to him that the wind gripped him,
eager to help him up over the edge--into the silence, into the few
stars. He went on and on, without stopping, until he reached a cold
spring singing its way down through the bracken which made a little
rusty accompaniment. It was Robin Hood’s spring.
He plunged his bare head into the bubbling, silver coldness of it.
He was trying to wash from his mouth the touch of that soft, babyishly
round cheek, the young, cold mouth, the whole shape of that face he had
trespassed over. Whilst even as he did so one of Uncle Nat’s sly hints
of some weeks before insinuated itself into his reluctant, gibing mind.
Uncle Nat had said that love had to tumble on some folk.
But by the time he had gone over Ashdale Pike and reached home again,
he had entirely forgotten Polly Cherry.
The hotpot was quite dry.
Sary said this in her patient apologetic way as she scraped out the
dish for him. He looked at his sister with a curious wonder as to
whether she had ever had any of the hen-witted irresponsibility that
made a girl run hazards such as Polly Cherry was running. For he had
read the face of Peter.
Sary had a few grey hairs just over her temple.
“That’ll do, Sary,” he told her.
She looked at him, perceiving a human sympathy for her tiredness in
his voice, this brother of hers whom she knew to think of nothing but
clearing off the mortgage.
When he had gone to bed she roused her father.
He scrambled up, after much shaking, from the settle, blinking at the
two candles.
Whilst he was getting his supper she looked at Adam’s shoes. Ashdale
Pike soil, she could tell it by the clay there. Something was the
matter. Adam only went there after big things--such as missing to pay
the mortgage.
Then she set to to clear Bob’s coat away, and took up Adam’s from the
chair where he had flung it.
Something gleamed goldenly in the candlelight.
She looked at it fixedly.
“Look here!” she said to her father.
She pulled out several long hairs.
Benny stared at them dazedly.
Then he said, “What are we doin’ burnin’ four cannels, Sary?” His
drunken surprise had died away into drunken apathy.
“He’s ne’er made th’ bran-mash,” said Sary, suddenly.
Which startled her father for a moment.
Patiently Sary set to and covered up Adam’s omission. Then she helped
her father to bed, pushing him up, stair by stair, till he was safely
in that bare, moon-silver room. Her thorough-going brother of the one
passion was mixed up with some woman. That meant a splitting of his
untirable energy. She wondered how it was going to affect the family
fortunes as she made all ready for morning, and her heart shrunk from
the contemplation of the splendidly superior creature Adam must have
fallen in love with. Whilst at that very moment, on the same impulse
that had made the yeoman plunge his head in the spring, Polly was
allowing Peter to kiss her--in childish attempt to burn away the memory
of those kisses that had stabbed her vanity. Womanlike, she had chosen
not water, but fire. Whilst the woman Sary feared was this hen-witted
girl, irrelevant, selfish enough to share Beck’s chocolates, hide her
own, and with no charm but that of a soft, blurred type of beauty that
would make her at forty only a comfortable looking matron--this, a
singing voice, and the very essence of youthful irresponsibility, were
all the assets she had. There have been more immortal fascinators of
wiser men than Adam Wild, with less obvious qualifications. And--who
can read the heart of the most foolish girl who walks blind-folded on
the tight-rope of life, laughing at all warnings that she may fall, and
say what spells of magic, black or white, are hidden within it?