“He comed back!”
“Who? Not Mister Beguildy?”
“Ah! No less. And all going so well. Him away till a fortnit anyway I
thought. And the two of ’em so sweet together. I didna think Sarn could
be so fairspoken to anybody as what he was to me, and Jancis like the
Queen of the May. ‘Mother,’ she says, ‘I be more gladsome than I thought
any could be.’ All, and your brother too. It eased him to see that his
doubts and fears about young Camperdine were nought. If I hadna let un
come he’d a thought the young man was at our place. ’Twas the only way.
The more anybody wants a thing, the more they do think others want it.
But seeing all was fair and square, he was fair and square too.
‘Mother,’ he says, for indeed it inna long till I shall be afore Him
above and all the blessed angels, ‘Mother, leave me bide the night over
from now on, till we be wed. Soon, it is,’ he says, ‘or I wouldna ask
it. And her’s willing.’ So I gave them our room, and slept on Jancis’s
box bed in kitchen. I put the best dimity counterpane on their bed, and
the best sheets, without a patch, and a tidy bit of drugget on floor,
and I killed a fowl and made a nice bit of bread sauce, and left ’em to
their supper, pleasant and to theirselves afore the fire, and stayed out
till they’d done, though they did say as nice as nice as I mun sup with
’em. But newly wed is newly wed, ring or none. And when they were abed
I’d tidy the place and wash up. And I’d just done, and I was setting
afore the fire thinking of the time when I wed Beguildy, and what a
proper young man he was, though you’d never think it, and deserve my
thoughts he didna, the grutching, wicked old man. I was setting there
very peaceful, and thinking I must draw the bolt and rake the fire out,
when there was a little sound without, and in came Beguildy. I could ha’
dropped on floor.”
“Well, missus,” he says, “where be Jancis?”
“She be asleep,” I says.
“And since when did ye give the wench our room and sleep in box bed?”
With that he rushes in, and there they were. ’Twas hell let loose, and
no mistake. He put such a curse on Sarn as I never heard nor shall hear.
“And for all you’ve crept in the like of this, you shanna have the wench
in wedlock,” he says.
“You canna stop it,” says Sarn. “No power in the ’orld can stop it now.”
“Yet stop it I will,” says the mester. “Hanna I cursed ye by fire and by
water? Hanna I told ye you were born under the threepenny planet and
canna keep money? Hanna I said you’ll be poor in life and die in the
water? Eh?”
“Well, it’s a pity for ye, seeing you be a wise man and all, to be put
in the wrong,” says Sarn, “but harvest be in and I be a rich man.”
“You binna a tenth nor a hundredth part as rich as young squire. His
pockets be crammed ooth French money,” shouts Beguildy. “You shanna have
my girl, Sarn.”
“I’ve got her, seemingly,” says Sarn, as calm as calm could be, and that
drave Beguildy right out of mind. “He puck up the blunderbus as he keeps
by the window ready for the fox, and he went for your brother with the
butt end.”
“Dear to goodness!”
“You may as well say that, Prue Sarn. I screeched and Jancis screeched,
and I ran in from the kitchen, for I’d kept out, thinking Sarn met not
like it, him being in his night-shirt, and as fine a man as you could
wish, but not wanting to cause any awkwardness more than already. But
afore I could get in, Sarn knocked mine flat on floor, and a lay like a
log and none deserved it better. For a very curst man is Beguildy, and
obstinate, and bearing ill will year after year. I do believe the root
of the matter is your dad asking him for that crown when he’d made mind
up it was to be a present. Ah! Though mine he is, I canna but say he’s a
terrible man to bear a grutch. Well, Sarn knocked un flat, and he says,
‘Take his feet, oot, Mother, and we’ll put un in kitchen. For whether
he’s dead or quick, I’ll not be disturbed any more this night.’ Ah. He
said that. And he says, ‘Swing for it I may, but I wunna be disturbed
this night.’ Cold and quiet as a frozen mere, but a terrible man to
rouse, is your brother. So I doused mine with water, and I gid him some
spirits, and in a while he come round, but I took the precaution to tie
him to the bed afore that. He struggled cruel, but it was a good rope,
and I fed spirits to un regular, and in a while he calmed a bit and
quietened, and then slept. So in the morning your brother went, and I
untied the mester, and when he woke up I says, what fetched him back? So
he says, ill news travels fast, and he supposed he’d got ears, and he
hadna but just got as far towards the mountains as Mallard’s Keep when a
man told un Sarn slept at our place now. Interfering meddlers, folks be!
So I got him a bit of breakfast and he went out. Quiet as quiet he be,
so I’ve come to warn ye, for when he’s quiet-angry he’s deadly.”
I said, what harm could an old man the like of that do, and especially
as we knew all his spells and what-nots were but foolish games? But it
made no difference, and she only kept on saying there was harm brewing,
and God send the wedding day quick, and she went off home as
wild-seeming as she came, wringing her hands, with wisps of hair blowing
in the stormy wind. For there was a real tempest blowing, that had been
rising for two or three days, and it blew up the loose straws and the
chaff in the rickyard till the air was full of them, dusty and choking.
Out in the field I had to go close up to Gideon and shout afore I could
make him hear. There was a roar in the tree-tops like the sound of weirs
after the snow melts, and a howling in the chimneys that made you glad
of four walls and a roof. I said to Gideon when we were at our tea, did
he think it would blow the tops off the stacks? But he said no, they
were well weighted. It was only two days now till the dealer came to
price the grain, and only three days after that till the wedding.
Knowing this, and being easy in mind about Beguildy, since he’d taken no
harm from the blow, I listened to the wind very contented, and made some
rounds of toast, and thought about Kester. For I do think there’s
nothing makes you feel so contented as a roaring wind in the chimney
when all’s well. I said should we go to bed early, and Gideon said we
might as well, seeing we’d worked hard and the harvest was in. So we
went at eight, and I fell asleep in a minute with the sound of the loud,
dry tempest in my ears.
When I woke, sudden, I thought, “It be the Judgment!” There was a great
light and a roaring, very dreadful to hear, and knockings and cries out
of the night. I lay there, mazed, saying “_Our Father_” as fast as I
could, and wishing I’d been more regular at church. Then I heard
Gideon’s voice calling from window, and other voices below, and one was
the voice of Sexton’s Sammy. This comforted me in my foolish fear, for I
felt as if Sammy would be able to think of a text, and mouth it too,
even on Judgment night. For night it still was, and early too, since we
found out after that we’d not been abed much more than two hours. Gideon
came rushing past my door, shouting for me, so I got up and put on my
clo’es, for I supposed that whether it was the Judgment or not I’d
better wear them, though in the pictures the redeemed go in their night
rails. But I did feel that I must wait to get to heaven afore I could be
at my ease to stand afore Sexton’s Sammy in my night-gown.
I ran downstairs and out, and then I saw. I thought even the end of the
world would have been better than that, for then we’d have been provided
for, with no more harvests to get in nor money to gather with pain and
labour. It would be the same for all in that hour, but this was for us
only, and crushed us as a waggon wheel crushes an ear of wheat.
For it was the corn burning that made the roaring noise. It was the
harvest, all of it, the whole garnering of all those years of work, the
very stuff of Gideon’s soul, and our future. It was no great comet nor
flaming star raging across the sky to herald in the end of all, no
trumpet of an archangel pealing and whining along the black night
betwixt the trembling worlds. It was only the corn. Only all we had!
Only that which was to make a kindly man, a loving man, of our Gideon,
since having it he would leave slaving by day and dark, and making us
all slave, and would work only like any other man. Only the corn, that
meant a bit of comfort for Mother, a bit of hope for me. Only the corn,
that would give Jancis dear children, and the place of wife by fireside,
and a bit of love, maybe. Oh, my soul, it was the corn! I clung to the
rickyard gate, and my hair was lifted in the fierce-hot wind. There were
black figures running in the red light, most like a picture of hell, but
they were nought, and less than nought. The vasty roaring wind went on,
taking the fire with it. I could see that the thing must have started
with the barley, that was on the west of the rickyard, whence the wind
was coming. There was no barley now. Where it had been were two great
round housen made of white fire, very fearful to see, being of the size
and shape of the stacks, but made of molten flame. There was no
substance in them, and it was marvel how they stood so. Now and again a
piece of this molten stuff would fall inward with no sound, and there
could be seen within caves of grey ash and red, sullen, smouldering
fire. So it will surely be when the world is burned with fervent heat in
the end of all. It will go rolling on, maybe, as it ever has, only it
will be no more a kindly thing with mists about it, a pleasant painted
ball with patterns of blue seas and green mountains upon its roundness.
It will be a thing rotten with fire as an apple is rotten when the wasps
have been within, light and empty and of no account. So was our barley,
falling inwards with no sound, as though one went here and there within,
unseen. It was a worse thing to see than if it had fallen down in a
heap, for being yet a stack, it seemed like a jest of some demon,
saying—“Well, what is to do? There be your stacks of barley! Make
barley bread and eat.” I looked at those two abodes of demons, of the
roundness and height of our good barley stacks, and I remembered the
barley, oh, the sweet barley, rustling in the wind of dawn! I called to
mind the ploughing for it, in such good behopes, and the sowing of it,
between the sowing of the winter wheat and the sowing of the summer
wheat, Gideon and me walking up and down the fields with the bags of
seed slung over shoulder, or with a deep round lid to hold enough of
seed for one crossing of the field there and back, and swinging out our
arms with a great giving movement, as if we were feeding all the world,
a thing I dearly loved to see. For reaping, though it is good to watch
as be all the year’s doings on a farm, is a grutching and a grabbing
thing compared with sowing. You must lean out to it and sweep it in to
you, and hold it to your bosom, jealous, and grasp it and take it. There
is ever a greediness in reaping with the sickle, in my sight. There is
not in scything, which is a large destroying movement without either
love or anger in it, like the judgments of God. Nor is there in
flailing, which is a thing full of anger, but without any will or wish
to have or keep. But reaping is all greed, just as sowing is all giving.
For there you go, up and down the wide fields, bearing that which you
have saved with so much care, winnowing it from the chaff, and
treasuring it for this hour. And though it is all you have, you care
not, but take it in great handfuls and cast it abroad, with no thought
of holding back any. On you go, straight forrard, and the bigger your
hand the better pleased you are, and you cast it away on this side and
on that, till one not learned in country ways would say, here is a mad
person. For it would seem as if you were feeding all the birds of the
country, since there was always a following of rooks in the furrows, and
starlings, and many small birds, which would be very unprofitable
chickens.
It is a pretty thing to see the golden seed tossed in the air with
sunshine on it and the light spring wind scattering it here and there;
or if it is winter wheat, then it will be, very like, a still brown day
with the mellowness of old beer in the colours and the scent of the air.
I was always ready for the sowing, though Gideon did not care about it,
and indeed would often seem to begrutch casting the grain from him, and
would sow too thin and so waste land and labour. I thought of all this,
and of the fair evenings when we had walked forth, Mother and me, to
look at the young barley pushing up, bright and sparse, then thickening,
till the brown earth was all greened over, and springing taller and
brighter, stiff and pointed, and then softening and lengthening yet
more, with the wind running in it like a boat furrowing the water, and
finding a voice at last, and a song, and sending up its green, plaited
ears to swell and ripen, till at the end they stood perfect as if the
Lord had but that moment lifted His hand from them, all made of purest,
clearest gold. Gold leaves, gold stalks, gold knops for heads, and these
knops bearded thick with gold as well. Yet it was an innicent gold, and
not that gold which is called the bane. Oh, how I could mind it, on
those still Sunday mornings when I went to the well, and would set down
the buckets for a little while and go out into the corn fields that lay
beneath the vasty pale blue peace of the sky like creatures satisfied
and at rest! There would be small birds about, making low contented
cries and soft songs. There would be a ruffling breeze, and rooks far up
the sky, and a second bloom of pale gold flowers on the honeysuckle
wrathes against the blue. There would be warmship that lapped you round,
and the queenly gift of the scent of corn. What other scent is like it?
There is so much in it, beyond other sweets. There is summer in it, and
frost. There is water in it, and the heart of the flint which the corn
has taken up into its hollow stalks. There is bread in it, and life for
man and beast.
All these thoughts, moithered and bewildered, came to me as I clung to
the gate with the parching wind upon my face, too stunned to move. There
are misfortunes that make you spring up and rush to save yourself, but,
there are others that are too bad for this, for they leave nought to do.
Then a stillness falls on the soul, like the stillness of a rabbit when
the stoat looks hotly upon it and it knows that there is no more to be
done.
The fire was in the two biggest stacks of wheat now. It had gone upon
them and they were not. Soon they would be as the barley was. They were
good stacks, those, of a solid squarish oblong, and as high as might be
with safety, for we had such a harvest that we could only make room by
having the stacks high. It was good wheat too, long in the straw, and no
touch of mildew. It had taken the most time of all both to sow and to
reap, and in the lugging it had the biggest waggons all day. And now it
was gone! It was a great mound of fire with the black shapes of two
stacks in it, and soon the fire would be passed on and there would be no
more sound, but just two grey-white housen for demons, with baleful red
gleams in the crumbling passages within. There were more stacks of wheat
by the hedge, but the next to the blazing stacks was the oats. The
lovely oats, so pale and fine, like ferns for a lady’s table!
They were so sweet, the oats, so very fine and fair, like midsummer
grasses come golden. I did ever love the oats best of all. And suddenly
I was all mother to the oats. The fire met have the wheat and the
barley, but it should not take my oats. I clomb over the gate and ran
where the little figures moved. I caught Gideon by the sleeve.
“You mun save the oats!” I screamed. “Oh, save the oats, as is so fair
and fine!”
But he said nought. He was working like a madman, and I saw that it was
the oats he was trying to save, the oats and the stacks by the hedge. He
and Sammy were digging trenches between the blazing stacks and these, to
fill with water.
“Where’s Tivvy?” I said, for now I was come to myself I wanted all the
help there was.
“Gone for Feyther,” said Sammy, sweating and groaning over his spade,
for the fire was gaining on them.
“Shall I take Bendigo and go for help?” I said. “Or shall I get the
buckets and begin fetching water?”
“Ah, that!” says Sammy. “Do that, for help ud be too late, a power.”
Not a word did Gideon say. He was stricken with a dumb madness, but he
worked like ten men. What with the horror of mind and the stress of
labour and the great heat of the fire, the sweat ran down his face in a
river and his clo’es were as if he had been in the water. And being so
wet, and so near the fire, he went in a cloud of steam, which had a very
strange look, as if he had been put under some curse or was already in
hell.
I loosed Bendigo and the oxen and cows, such as were lying in, and they
went pounding away into the woods, half crazy with fear. I woke Mother
and told her she must dress and come to the mere and dip while we made a
chain for the buckets, to send them from hand to hand. I got together
all the pails and buckets, and thought it seemed a pitiful thing that
with all that great mere full of water we could only slake our fire with
as much as we could get into our little buckets. And I’ve thought since
that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not
the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is
the fault of their bucket’s smallness.
Mother came with me like a child, very mazed and quiet.
“Must I dip now, Prue?” she said.
“You can begin now, and have all the buckets ready,” I answered. “But
the time when you must dip your best will be in a tuthree minutes when
we come.”
“Now, Sarn,” says Sammy, “you mun leave digging and come for water.”
For though it may seem a thing not to be believed, all that awful night,
though it was Gideon that did the most of the work, it was Sammy or me
that gave the orders. Gideon would go at what he was set at in a frenzy,
and go on after it stopped being any use, working like an ox at the
threshing floor. He threw down the spade when Sammy spoke, and came with
us to the mere. Mother was toiling over the dipping. She looked smaller
and smaller as the trouble thickened about her, like a person that had
eaten some fairy stuff to make her not able to be seen. She seemed no
more than one of those little brown birds that will light down by the
water for a while in their journeying and then be gone, nobody knows
where.
“Now here comes Feyther, thanks be to the Lord,” said Sammy. He was a
good lad that night, was Sammy, and while the fire lasted he never said
but one text, and that a very tempestuous one, “Burning and fuel of
fire,” though he must have thought of no end of them.
Sure enough there was Sexton bursting through the wood, and Tivvy not
far behind, and an angry voice crying on the wind a long way back, that
was Missis Sexton, who misliked being by her lonesome.
“Now,” says Sammy, “Feyther can go in the rickyard and chuck on the
water to dout the fire, Tivvy can gather the empty buckets as fast as he
throws ’em down, and run back to Missis Sarn with ’em, and you and me
and Prue’ll run with full ones. I did think we might make a chain and
pass from hand to hand, but we be too few, Sarn.”
Gideon spoke for the first time.
“I never,” he said with a wild, pale face, “never had much strength
about me, only me and these two.”
And with that he put his arm across his face as he was used to do when
he was a lad and things went badly wrong, and cried.
Ah, I tell you it was a thing few would have cared to see, a great,
strong masterful man like that, crying like a little lad.
“Now, now, Sarn!” says Sexton, shocked as we all were, “Now, yo munna
take on. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.”
At that Gideon came to himself.
“The Lord?” he says. “No. It wunna the Lord! It was Beguildy. When we’ve
douted the stacks I shall fetch un and roast un.”
No words of mine can tell you the awful way Gideon said that. I wanted
to ask how he knew, if he did know, but there was no time for words. We
were running to and again with two full buckets each, which, after an
hour or so, is enough to try a strong man, leave alone a woman. Water
carrying is an easy job if there’s no hurry and you can use a yoke. But
to run stumbling through a roasting heat, which we did for most of the
journey, and to know that if you tarried the oats would go, and maybe if
you didna tarry, was enough to take the spirit out of anybody. The oats
did go. The fire leapt the ditch and all, and there was a new,
tremendous blaze. I lost heart after that, and though I ran, it was with
no hope.
“Oh, I be so tired,” said poor Mother. But I couldna let her rest.
“If we canna save it,” I said, “you’ll never get free of tending swine,
Mother.”
So she bent her poor old back again, standing half in the water, in
spite of the rheumatics. The cry went up to save the barn, for if the
barn was lost, the house was lost. At that, Mother left dipping for
water, so I was forced to get Tivvy to do it, and we had to bring back
our own empty pails. I looked up once, and there was Mother fetching
things out of the house. I looked at them after, and there was her
sewing and the copper fruit pan, and a sampler she did when he was
little, and Father’s picture cut out in black paper, done by parson’s
brother-law, who was part foreign. People thought he must be simple to
play with scissors and paper like a child, though they owned that he did
it very well, and said that being part foreign he knew no better. Though
Mother had been so mortal feared of Father in life, she treasured this
picture in the queerest way. So there it was with the other things and
six pots of damson cheese, and Pussy in a basket.
It was only at dawn, when the wind dropped and a fine, quiet rain began
to fall, that we got the fire under. At least, it had burnt itself out,
and we managed to save barn and house. The red light was gone from the
sky and the burning from the mere. For all night it had seemed that the
water in the mere was turned to fiery spirit, and was burning too.
Everything was there, confused and topsy-turvy, the red and yellow
flames, the smoke, bellying in the wind, the white-hot stacks, hollow
and canting, the farm and the barn and our little black figures like
mommets in the tumult.
Not long after it was over came Missis Sexton, who had suffered
frittening of Bendigo, that came snorting and trampling through the wood
so that she thought it had been the Black Huntsman. There were many
hollow trees about the Sarn woods, they being old forest land, so she
crept into one, and stayed till the light began to come. And then, once
in, she could not get out, for she was more than ornary stout and also
had so many clo’es, and though in the stress of fear she squoze herself
in, it was not easy to get out again in cold blood. But when she did
come, she soon got us all some breakfast, and indeed we were in need of
it, not only for what was past, but to face the day.
“Why, look’s Tivvy and Prue white as ghosses!” she said. “And you,
Missis Sarn, should be abed, and to bed you shall go when you’ve had
bite and sup. And as for you, Sarn! Why, man, man, you fritten me worse
than Bendigo, indeed to goodness! Now then, where’s ours? Draw up now,
draw up, take bite and sup, people!”
She said it just as she said, “Take your places for the game of Costly
Colours.”
“But what I’d lief know,” says Mother, “is how Sexton and Sammy knew our
ricks were afire?”
“I knew,” said Sammy, “because Tivvy and me were coming back latish from
the mill, and we saw Beguildy coming along very quiet and sneaking this
way. So I says to Tivvy as we’d follow, for I’ve been keeping an eye on
Beguildy a goodish while, he being a wicked old man and the power of the
Lord far from him. By their fruits you shall know them. And it seemed a
funny time for him to be coming to Sarn, he being one for early bed
always. So we followed on slow, keeping a long way back. And just as we
came to the end of the wood there was a tremendous blaze from the far
corner of the rickyard, and in a minute Beguildy came running up wood
path, so we only had just time to hide. As soon as he was past, we did
run to the rickyard, and it was the little stack in the corner, and just
by it was this.”
Sammy held up the lid of Beguildy’s tinder box, which everybody knew
well, for he’d put his name on the inside of the lid in red paint, being
proud of his writing.
“What a fool, to drop un!” says Missis Sexton.
“Nay, Mother,” says Sexton, “Beguildy’s no fool. ’Twas the hand of the
Lord took the tinder box lid off’n un and chucked it there for Sam to
see. Ah, so it was.”
“In the hand of the Lord there is a cup, Psalms seventy-five, eight,”
said Sammy.
“Only it wunna a cup,” giggled Tivvy, who was always sillier when she
was excited, “’twas the one-half of an old iron tinder box.”
“’Tis the curse!” moaned Mother. “He did curse my son Sarn by fire and
by water, and this be the first. Dear Lord knows what the second’ll be.
’Tis the sin you did eat, Sarn. There’s bin harm on the place ever since
you did it. Ah, ever since my poor maister died in his boots the place
has been ill to live in, very ill it’s been, what with the pigs and the
rheumatics and the everlasting ploughing, and now all gone, as if it
hadna been.”
“Ah, fire’s a greedy feeder,” said Missis Sexton.
“I will consoom them in a moment, Numbers sixteen. This great fire will
consoom us, Deuteronomy five. Fire consoomed the palaces of Benhadad,
Jeremiah forty-nine,” said Sammy.
“Three texes at a birth! Good lad, good lad!” cried Sexton.
“Only it’s Beguildy did ought to be consoomed,” remarked Missis Sexton.
“And the awful thing about such wickedness,” says Tivvy, “is that it’s
in the blood. It goes on from father to child. You’d never know when it
ud break out. I wonder at you, Mister Sarn, I do, to be thinking of
taking the child of a viper in wedlock. I never did like the Beguildys,
Jancis in especial.”
“Indeed to goodness, the girl’s right!” cried out her Mother, and Sexton
added—
“What’s bred in the bone’ll come out in the flesh.”
Gideon looked around, with a grey lined face, like an old man’s. He was
never the same again after that night. You canna knock an ox on the head
with the mallet and then expect it to be just as it was. He made to
speak, but the words were slow in coming. Just then there was a
trampling and traversing without, and Bendigo trotted past the window.
“Ha!” says Gideon, and makes for the door.
I knew what he was going for, and I rushed after him. By good fortune
the cows were coming back from the wood, making soft mooing plaints that
it was long past milking time. So instead of pleading for Beguildy I
said—“Look’s cows coming, they’ll be stanked if they inna milked.”
“Ah, you mun mind not to let ’em get like that’n,” Missis Sexton
cautioned from the room. “A brother-law’s cousin of mine had the best
herd ever you saw. Cheshire, he come from. Grand cows they were, and
never ailed, and plenty of everything there was in that house, good milk
and butter and cheese, and buckets and buckets of skim for the pigs, and
fine fat pigs they were, and a fine fat man my brother-law’s cousin was,
and a fine fat woman he’d got for wife, and twelve fine fat children.”
I may say that Missis Sexton, being so fat herself, always judged folk
by it, and if they were thin they might as well never have been born, in
her sight.
“Ah,” she went on, “they were all as fat as butter, filled the pew at
church to bursting, until the day he let the cows get stanked. Ah! That
was a bad day for ’em. There was no prosperation after. The cows dwined
and the pigs dwined, and in a bit the family dwined too, and in a little
while, of all that fine fat family there was nought left but fourteen
miserable rails.”
Tivvy was in a fit of giggling, for her Mother’s stories ’most always
made her laugh, though many’s the beating she had for it.
“Milk first, lad,” I says to Gideon, “and go to the Stone House after.”
God forgive me to deceive him so, but I wanted to save him from the sin
of murder. No sooner was he in the shippen, milking, than I took Bendigo
to the door and cried out to Sexton to mount and ride, and take Sammy
too, for Bendigo could carry both as far as Plash, and to take Beguildy
and march him off to the parish constable at Lullingford all in a
courant, and save him from Gideon. For if he was locked up Gideon
couldna get at him, and he’d only suffer what was right according to the
law.
“I see,” says Sammy. “Let me fall into the hand of the Lord, and not
into the hand of man. Two Samuel twenty-four. Ah, we’d best go,
Feyther.”
“Will Jancis and Missis Beguildy go to prison too?” enquired Tivvy.
“Surely to goodness no! They’ve done nought. In fact Jancis be a very
tidy wench, and if she’d had the right spirit in her, and meekened her
soul and gone softly in good sadness, I dunno but I’d have taken her in
wedlock myself,” said Sammy.
They only got off just in time, for Gideon came running from the
shippen, crying upon them to stop.
“They’ll take Beguildy to prison,” I said. “You munna have murder on
your soul, lad, things be bad enough without that.”
“It would have eased me,” he answered with a strange look. “It’s all
dammed up within. Choking, choking me. ’Twould have eased me to kill un.
I’ll never mend of it now.”
“But you couldna kill the father of your wife-to-be,” I said.
“Wife? What wife?”
“Why, Jancis! You’ll be wed to Jancis come a week now.”
“What?” he says, with a wild, fierce look, “Do ye think I’ll wed with
the devil’s daughter? I tell ye, if it was to save my life and all, I’d
never wed with her. Nay, I’ll never see the wench again, not of choice,
not unless she do force herself into my company.”
“Gideon, Gideon! Dunna say it! Oh, Gideon, there be things in life as is
better than money and that’n. Leave be, lad! It inna meant for us to be
rich. Let you settle down and be content, and marry the poor child as
loves you so well, and if so be money comes, all the better. And if so
be it dunna, none the worse. But deny the poor girl marriage after
what’s took place, you canna. Your heart canna be as hard as that.”
“It is. The granite mountain, quartzite, brytes, inna as hard. If you
leave that girl come nigh me, I’ll tromple out her life like I would a
clothes-moth’s. And so I warn ye. Rotten. That’s what they be. Like
father like child. A fause smiling face, but any minute, any minute she
met burn the place to the ground. I shouldna wonder but she fetched the
flint and tinder for un last night Camperdine may take her and welcome.
I make him a present of her.”
“But, Gideon, you’ve bin as good as wed to her this last week. And
suppose there was to be a baby, what then?”
“A baby? What? My child and hers? I tell ye, if any such thing came to
pass, I’d strangle it. Hark ye, their blood’s black. Foul, foxy, vermin.
That’s what they be. They’re not fit to live. Thanks be to God, folks
can swing for arson. I’ll see he swings for it. And you tell the girl to
keep away from me. It’ll be the better for her.”
I durst say no more. What could I say, when the human kindness in my
poor brother had been scorched up in the fire and was not? Only a fool
will dip and dip in a dry well. He looked a deal taller as he stood
there, with his back to the dark driving woods, where the rain was
lashing now, that would have saved all last night, where the autumn
storm was moaning, and the dry leaves churning and boiling in the air as
the weeds will in the mere at the troubling of the waters. His clo’es
yet clung to him, all scorched and darkened with the fire. His face was
grimed, so that the lines that had not showed were very clear to see,
and there were more lines, I was sure, since last night. His eyes, that
were so cold, like water, blazed with hatred when he thought upon
Beguildy or any of hisn, but at other times his face was blank and dim,
like the face of one without hope, spent and foredone, a lost face. I
said should we dig taters, for I thought maybe it would be a bit of
comfort, to think he’d got summat. He came without a word, and worked
hard and well, but every now and again he’d stop, and look about him
strangely at the chill, silent mere, the overcast heavens and the stormy
woods. It seemed to me that the spirit of the man was like a bird with a
broken wing. And at noon, when I went to get our meal, he missed to come
when I banged the tray, and I found him in the rickyard, where the heaps
of ash yet smouldered, lying upon his face, as still and hard of hearing
as a dead man, and indeed I do think his heart was dead from that time.