“Father’s dead, Mister Beguildy,” I said.
“So, so! What’s that to me, dear soul?”
He was a very strange man, always, was Beguildy.
“Tell me what I knew not, child,” he said.
“Did you know, then?”
“Ah, I knew thy feyther was gone. Didna he go by me on a blast of air
last Sunday evening, crying out, thin and spiteful, ‘You owe me a crown,
Beguildy!’ Tell me summat fresh, girl—new, strange things. Now if you
could say that the leaves be all fallen this day of June, and my damsons
ripe for market; or that the mere hath dried; or that man lusteth no
more to hurt his love; or that Jancis looketh no more at her own face in
Plash Pool, there would be telling, yes! But for your dad, it is nought.
I cared not for the man.”
And taking up his little hammer, he beat on a row of flints that he had,
till the room was all in a charm. Every flint had its own voice, and he
knew them as a shepherd the sheep, and it was his custom when the talk
was not to his mind to beat out a chime upon them.
“I came to see if we could borrow the beasts for our waggon. Jancis said
yes.”
“You mun pay.”
“How much, mister?”
“The same as for wakes, a penny a head. So you be taking the biddings?
Now who did your mam pay to write ’em?”
“Parson wrote ’em for us, and Mother put a crown in the poor-box.”
“Dear soul! The bitter waste! I’d have wrote ’em very clear and fine for
half the money. I can write the tall script and the dwarf, round or
square, red or black. Parson can only do the sarmon script, and a very
poor script it be.”
“I wish I could write, Mister Beguildy.”
“Oh, you!”
He laughed in a very peculiar way he had, soft and light, at the top of
his head.
“It’s not for children,” he said.
But I thought about it a deal. I thought it would be a fine thing to sit
by the fire, in the settle corner, and write bidding letters and
love-letters and market bills, or even a verse for a tombstone, and to
do the round or the square, tall or little, red or black, and sermon
script too if I’d a mind. I thought when anybody like Jancis angered me
by being so pretty, I’d do her letters very crabbed, and with no red at
all. But I knew that was wicked of me, for poor Jancis couldna help
being pretty.
Then Beguildy went off to cure an old man’s corns, and Jancis and I
played lovers, but Jancis said I did it very bad, and she thought Gideon
would do it a deal better.