’TIS hard, and very hard, to write of the wintry time we went through
after that night of grief and bitter woe. For when the quill has traced
out good words of a kind meaning, it irks it to make them sad and evil.
But sad and evil that time was, and there is no use in gainsaying it.
For many days after the fire, the work on the farm stood still, as it
often will after a death. Gideon’s one thought was to get at Beguildy,
or if not that, to make him suffer the utmost of the law. Missis
Beguildy was forced to give up the Stone House, for the landlord didna
want a man there who burnt ricks, nor his folk so he made the excuse of
the rent being late to turn them out. Everything was sold, and Missis
Beguildy and Jancis went off to Silverton, where Beguildy lay in prison
waiting for the assizes, with only what they stood in. At least, poor
Jancis didna stand, for when she heard the dreadful news of what Gideon
had said, which I told her Mother to break to her as best she could, she
fell down on the floor and stirred neither hand nor foot, nor spoke a
single word. They carried her to the waggon from Plash Farm, which was
to take her and her mother away, and they say she lay there like a
broken flower. Maybe it was as well, for if her strength hadna gone from
her she’d have tried to see Gideon, and I do think he’d have struck her
down in his bitter smouldering rage. It seemed to ease him to hear of
their misfortune, and when the day came for them to go, he went off to a
place in the woods where he could see the waggon pass by, and stood
there looking down upon it, with the sullen farm labourer driving,
misliking having anything to do with folk in such evil case in men’s
sight, and poor Missis Beguildy sitting in the waggon all aged and wild,
and Jancis lying on some straw at the bottom, like a white waxen image.
I know, because Miller’s Tim was in the wood at the time, and he came
running to me, frit out of his life, pretty near, to tell me all about
it.
“Oh, Prue Sarn, I was in the ’ood after a tuthree nuts,” he says, “and I
saw Mister Sarn a-walking by lonesome, very glooming and drodsome, and I
was feared, so I did hide in a tree. And Mister Sarn went under the
boughs of the big beech, where the road through the wood comes by. And
in a while there was a rumbling, and I saw the waggon from Plash, and
Missis Beguildy crying and taking on awful, but I couldna see Jancis. So
I clomb the tree to see if she was in the bottom of the waggon, and
there she was. She did look like a dead maid. Oh, she did look like the
picture in the church of the little maid as was dead in the house when
they fetched the Lord in, and He says ‘Rise you up!’ He says. Only He
hadna said it to Jancis. And I was feared, and I came down quiet from
the tree, and I saw Mister Sarn staring down upon the waggon, for you do
know there’s a bit of a bank just there. And his face did frit me so
that I made to run off, only then he stirred, so I kept quiet for fear
he might come my way. He gloomed upon the waggon a long while, till the
rumbling went ever so quiet, and wunna no more than the noise of a
startle-de-buz when it be gone past, and then there was no sound at all,
save the noise of a throstle banging a conker on a stone. And Mister
Sarn did lift up both his fisses and did shake ’em after the waggon, and
oh, Prue! his face was like the face of the Lord Jehovah in Feyther’s
book, when His anger was not turned away. Then he went away, slow,
looking upon the ground, and the throstle went on banging the conker on
the stone, and I runned to you.”
And that was how the properest man in our countryside did see the girl
of his choice go, a girl like a water-lily bud, as loved him right well.