SO soon as I’d milked, Gideon being still hard at it in the meadow, I
went upstairs and put on my black, and my mob-cap. I never wore it to
work in, to save washing, and folk thought I was a heathen, pretty near,
what with no mob-cap and no shoes or stockings most of the time, but
bare feet or clogs. Gideon could whittle a clog right well, and they be
grand for doing mucky work like I did. I’d made me a sacking gown, too,
short to the knee, for cleaning the beast-housen in. I know everybody
called me the barn-door savage of Sarn. But when I remembered the
beautiful house at Lullingford that was to be, and the flowered gowns
and dimity curtains and china, I didna take it to heart much.
I was very choice of my homespun gown with the cross-over, and the new
mob-cap trimmed with little sausages made of sarsnet, very new-fangled.
So I did my hair in ringlets—one on each side and two at the back, down
to my waist.
I was comfortable in my mind, thinking how we were going to send away
for simples to make me as beautiful as a fairy. While I milked, I
thought about it, and while I cleaned the sties, and while I scrubbed
the kitchen quarries.
Mother winnocked a bit, to hear I was off to Plash, for she was low and
melancholy from abiding under the shadow of death. She’d been so used to
humouring a tempersome man that she felt as restless as you do when
you’ve just cast off the second stocking-toe of a pair. She’d sit quiet
a bit in the chimney corner, and you’d hear the wheel whirring softly,
like a little lych-fowl. Then suddenly she’d give over spinning, and
wring her hands, that always made me think of a mole’s little hands,
lifted up to God when it be trapped. And she’d say, “Sunday was a week,
he had no bacon to his tea! Sunday was a fortnit, he didna like the
dumplings, and no wonder, for they were terrible sad, Prue. Twice I
o’er-boiled his eggs in that last week, and the new smock, Prue—”
At that, she’d cry a long while.
“I hivered and hovered over it, Prue, so he died afore it was done. Oh,
my dear, to think on it! It wanted but the shoulder-pieces and the
cuffs, and it would ha’ been the best smock ever I made. But I hivered
and hovered, and he couldna bide any longer. He heard the mighty voice,
child, calling among the ellums out yonder, and he couldna tarry for his
smock, poor soul. All my stitches for nought.”
“Now, Mother, you mun finish it for Gideon,” I said. “It’ll fit Gideon
right well, for he’s a fine big man, though not so broad as Father. But
he’ll fill out. Come his eighteenth birthday, I shouldna wonder but
he’ll look right well in it. So you’d best hurry up.”
“Well,” she said, “well, there’s sense in that, child. He took the sin,
to wear all his life long. He shall have the smock.”
She fetched Gideon’s Sunday coat, and took the smock out of the dresser
drawer, to measure it.
I sent up a wish that they might be enough of a size to content her. And
so they were, and she quieted down again, and set off once more,
whirring like a little lychfowl.
But it wunna for long. She gave me a look, time and again, while I was
putting on my mittens, and said—
“The ringlets be right nice, Prue.” And then: “You’ve got a very tidy
figure, child.”
And all in a minute she bent two-double over the wheel and began the old
weariful cry—
“Could I help it if the hare crossed my path; could I help it?”
“Oh, Mother, Mother!” I beseeched her, “give over crying for what we
canna mend. I canna bear to hear you cry, my dear. Mother! Look ye! I
dunna mind at all. There, there now, my lamb!” (I was used to call her
that, because she seemed so little and so lost). “There, dunna take it
to heart. Listen what I’ll tell you! _I’d as lief have a hare-shotten
lip as not!_” With that, I ran out of the house and through the wicket
and up the wood path, roaring-crying.
I cried so loud that there was a whirr of wings on this side and on
that, and far up the glade a coney heard me, and sat up in the middle of
the path like a Christian, with one paw held up, just as Parson does,
giving the blessing. Only it was a curse that his cousin, the hare, gave
me. I wondered why it cursed me so. Was it of its own free will and
wish, or did the devil drive it? Did God begrutch me an ’usband and a
cot of rushes, that He’d let it be so? In the years after, it did often
seem a queer thing that I should be obliged to work weekdays and Sundays
so as to earn enough money to put straight what a silly hare had put
crooked. And I knew it would take a deal of money to cure a hare-shotten
lip. There was a kind of sour laughter in the thought of it. It called
to mind the blackish autumn evenings, when grouse rise from the bitter
marsh and fly betwixt the withered heather and the freezing sky, and
laugh. Old harsh men laugh that way at the falling down of an enemy. And
the good ladies of a town, big with stiff flowered silks and babes
righteously begotten, laughed so behind their fans when they went to the
prison to see a lovely harlot whipped. With that kind of bitterness a
man might laugh when he was dying of a wound gotten in the king’s cause,
and one came busily in while the Parson was reading the prayer for the
dying, and cried out, “The king doth give you an earldom, and sends you
a bidding-letter to his palace.”
Ah! Those be the ways grouse laugh, and that was how I laughed in those
days. But now I sit here between the hearth and the window, with the tea
brewing for one that will be home afore sundown, and the clouds standing
upon the mountains, and when I laugh, I laugh easy, like the woodpecker
in spring. He was ever a laugher, was the woodpecker, and a right merry
laugher too. He’ll fly into an ellum tree, and laugh to see it so green.
And he’ll fly into an ash, and laugh to see it so bare, with only the
black buds and no leaves. And then he’ll fly into an oak, and laugh fit
to burst to see the young brown leaves. Ah, the woodpecker’s a good
laugher, and the laughter’s sweet as a sound nut. If we can laugh so at
the end of long living, we’ve not lived in vain.
But that evening I laughed like the grouse, and my heart was rebellious
within me.
Yet I could not but be pleased to think of the writing. I was glad also
because it would give me a hold over Gideon, since if he was too harsh
with Mother and me, I could be a bit awkward about the writing. I ran
along by the water, feeling light and easy in my best sandal-shoes,
thinking how I’d work to get the stuff that was to make me as beautiful
as a fairy, and how in a while there’d come a lover, and the axings
would be put up in church, and in another while I’d sit in my own
houseplace with my foot on a rocker and with a babe, grand and solemn,
on my knee, better than all the French wax dolls they told of, that I’d
never seen, but wanted very bad.
I was contented to see the coots swimming about with a trail of coot
chickens after them, for all the world as if they were on a string. And
I laughed to see the heron that lived on the far side of the water, and
had got a missus and a nest there, standing knee-deep among the lilies,
fair comic-struck. In after days I saw Gideon look like that, time and
again, when he’d lief talk to Jancis and couldna call to mind a single
word, or when he’d put his best cravat on and couldna get it to his
liking, looking in the glass that he bought out of his second wool
money, after he’d seen Jancis under the rosy light.
I met Jancis afore I got to the Stone House. She was bringing the oxen
in, because they were ordered for a fair and the people were coming for
’em early in the morning. Betwixt the two white beasts, with a hand on
each, with all that gold hair shining, and a face like a white rose, she
looked like the ghost of a beautiful lady that died a long while ago and
came again every midsummer and fled at cockcrow.
“Oh!” she said, “you’ve gotten ringlets, Prue. Shall I have ringlets for
Sarn Wake?”
“As you please,” I answered, very snappy. For she was pretty enough
without ringlets, and her mouth more a rose than ever. I thought how
rich the ringlets would look, hanging down like ripe yellow bunches of
white currants when they be traced very thick on the boughs, and she
saying “O!” and the fellows wanting to kiss her.
When she’d fastened the beasts in the trevis, we went indoors. “Mister
Beguildy!” I called out, “I want you to learn me to read and write and
sum, and all you know. I’m to pay in work. Gideon and me’s going to get
rich, and buy a place in Lullingford, and have maids and men, and
flowered gowns for me, and china—”
Beguildy looked at me over the rim of a great measure of mead. “Saddle
your dreams afore you ride ’em, my wench,” he said.
“How mean you, Mister Beguildy?”
“The answer’s under your mob-cap,” says he. “If I be to learn ye,
there’s to be no argling, no questions and no answers. I say the saying,
but you mun find the meaning. Now you come back to me a week-to-day and
tell me what I meant, and then for a bit of a treat I’ll show you the
bottle with the old Squire in it, old Camperdine, great-grandad to this
un, him as came again so bad every Harvest Home, and sang a roaring
bawdy song somewhere up in the chancel, only none could see un, so none
could catch un.”
“Saving you.”
Beguildy smiled. He’d got a very slow stealing smile, that came like a
ripple on the water, and stayed a long while.
“Ah. Saving me. I caught un proper.”
“What way did you?”
“If I told you, Prue Sarn, you’d know as much as me.”
“But do tell how you got him into the bottle!”
“Dear to goodness! You’ve forgotten the bargain. No questions.” He
picked up the hammer and beat upon the row of flints, making out a
little tune. And with that, in came Missis Beguildy, like the dancing
woman at the fair comes in when they sound the drum. She’d got a basket
of trout and a couple of fowl she was going to dress for the Wake the
oxen were going to. She’d got on an old bottle-green hat of Beguildy’s,
tall in the crown, such as gentlemen of the road were partial to then,
and it looked very outlandish atop of her frizzy grey hair.
“Did you hear tell?” she said to me.
She’d got a deep, solemn voice, and as she was too busy to speak often,
everything she said seemed very weighty, as if the Town Crier said it,
standing on the steps of the market in his braided coat.
“I heard as the Devil was dead,” said Beguildy, “but it inna true, for I
met un yestreen, and very pleasant spoken he was indeed, and right
pleased to have your Feyther’s company, Prue.”
“Now hush your gabble,” said Missis Beguildy, pulling the feathers out
of the fowl in handfuls, so that the room was like a snowstorm. “Did you
hear tell, Prue, as poor John Weaver strayed off the road going through
the woods in the dark of the moon last night, and was drownded in
Blackmere? Death’s very catching, poor soul.”
“Why, it wanted but an hour to dawn when he left,” I said.
“Time enow, time enow. It’s dark as Egypt in the woods down yonder.”
“Who’ll take his place?”
“They seyn there’s a nephew learning the trade. But he’s bound ’prentice
for a year or two. They’ll make shift with a hired mon, I reckon.”
“And it ud be better, a power,” burst out Missis Beguildy, “if _you_
took that sort of job.”
She took the poker from the fire and singed the fowl very shrewdly, as
if it met have been Beguildy.
“Woman, I’ve better things to think on than weaving weeds to cover the
poor dying body. Dunna I snare souls like conies, and keep ’em from
troubling the lives of men? Canna I bless, and they are blessed, curse,
and they are cursed? Canna I cure warts and the chin-cough and
barrenness and the rheumatics, and tell the future and find water,
though it be in the depth of the earth? Dunna the fowls I bless beat all
other fowls in the cock-fighting? Ah, and if I chose, I could make a
waxen man for every man in the parish, and consume them away, wax, men,
and all. Canna I do all that, woman?”
“So you say, my dear.”
Missis Beguildy set the fowl’s legs to rights and ran a skewer through,
to make all safe.
Seeing that the Wizard was becoming very angry, I told his missus how I
was going to be his scholar, and he was to learn me to spell and write.
“Will your headpiece stand it, child?” she asked. For she always
thought, in common with many people, that if there was anything wrong
with a person’s outward seeming, there must be summat wrong with their
mind as well. By that measure, Jancis, who was so silly that oftentimes
she appeared to be well-nigh simple, would be a very clever woman.
“Ah. Prue’s headpiece be right enow,” said Beguildy. “Only I do think
there be too many questions in it. But her’ll fettle into a good
scholar, will Prue. We’ll start to-day’s a week, Prue. Jancis, you can
get the besom and sweep out my room a bit. Put the tuthree books
together, gather me some quills, and be very careful of all my bottles,
for you never know who’s in ’em. We dunna want any frittening about the
place. Oh, and you met as well turn them toads out from behind the
locker; they be all dead.”
“Prue,” says Jancis, when I went out, “if you’ll tell me the way to make
ringlets like that, I’ll tell you what Feyther’s old riddle-me-ree
means. I know, because he’s said it over and over, and I’ve heard un
tell the answer.”
“I made ’em round and round the poker, my dear,” I said. “Not too hot,
and give it a good clean first. But you needna tell me the answer to the
riddle-me-ree, for I’d liefer find it out.”
* * * * *
The dew came showering on to my gown as I went past the bushes of wild
roses at the wood gate, spilling out of the hearts of the blossoms. It
was so quiet that I could hear the sheep cropping across the corner of
the mere in the glebe, and the fish rising out in the middle, and the
water lapping against the big, stiff leaves of the bulrushes.
I felt like a lady, walking out in my best on a weekday. It wasna often
that I could be spared, and it was to be a deal less often now. So I was
glad Gideon wanted me to be a scholar, for once every week I should get
the afternoon and evening off.
When a breeze came, the leaves lapped up the silence like the tongues of
little creatures drinking. Up in heaven there were clouds like the bit
of lace on Mother’s wedding-gown, and a setting moon as green as a young
beech leaf. And down under the polished water was another moon, not
quite so bright, and other clouds, not quite so lacy, and the shadow of
the spire, very faint and ghostly, pointing across the water at us.